Woolworth Building

“ “But you’re out of another world old kid.... You ought to live on top of the Woolworth Building in an apartment made of cutglass and cherry blossoms.” ”

“ With crushing and destructive force that mighty volume plunges downward into a great stone bowl which it has carved out for itself, so deep that if the Woolworth Building were set down in it not more than half of it would show above the top of the Falls. ”

“ The work underground often costs a quarter-million dollars. The superstructure rises, usually, from 16 to 22 stories or 300 to 400 feet. The Woolworth Building, on Broadway between Park Place and Barclay Street, set a new standard, with its 55 stories rising 790 feet in the air. Eiffel Tower, with its 984 feet, is the only work of man on earth that is higher, and there are said to be no mechanical difficulties to prevent the erection of buildings of 100 stories. The Singer Building is as noteworthy for beauty as for height. ”

“ I said, “and you owe that to New York. The air, the very same air which forbids completion, is charged with aspiration. We all feel it. The city itself aspires. Since the great days when men set out to build a tower the top of which should reach unto heaven, there has never been such aspiration anywhere in the world. Look at the Woolworth Building.”
I was maundering and I knew it. Mrs. Ascher’s statuette was very nice and graceful ”

“ In modern times the art of building has had such an upward trend that edifices looming far into the air, hotels, stores, apartment houses, office buildings, etc., have come into use, one notable specimen, the Woolworth building in New York, towering upwards to fifty-four stories in height. This upward tendency has rendered the elevator, or lifting apparatus, an indispensable necessity, alike for passengers and freight, and it has been installed abundantly in all our large cities. ”

“ If any one follows we will drop him off!" threatened the first man.
So the cab pulled up by the side entrance to the Woolworth building, and the two men hustled George on an elevator inside, and made the man send the elevator to the top where the room was that visitors had to pass through to reach the tower. Here they found the man asleep, as no visitors were expected that night.
They bundled George on the tiny elevator that ran to the very tip-top of the tower, and one of the rascals ran it up. Then they went out on the narrow balcony that circled the tower. ”

“ The profession of the naval architect is one that is not widely recognized or understood. When Cass Gilbert designs a Woolworth Building we recognize him as a great architect, and realize, to some extent, the great task he has so successfully completed. When the building is built we view it with interest, perhaps with awe, and comment on the brilliance of the architect and the ability of the constructor. ”

“ Banks and insurance companies, and enterprises of a similar kind, to whom a prosperous façade was an advertising asset, were the first to use special structures, but the giant progress of modern business has made the building of great edifices like the Equitable and Woolworth buildings of New York a necessity. ”

“ But how often have you ever heard mention made of the architects from whose brains were evolved the Mauretania and the Leviathan, the Belgenland and the Majestic? True, [Pg 258] it is commonplace to marvel at their size. But who thinks of the titanic task that faced their designers?
And now imagine a Woolworth Building being built on a sloping runway, and, when completed, slid bodily into the water, across thousands of miles of which mighty engines placed inside could drive her at express-train speed. ”

“ I The McGurk Building. A sheer wall, thirty blank stories of glass and limestone, down in the pinched triangle whence New York rules a quarter of the world.
Martin was not overwhelmed by his first hint of New York; after a year in the Chicago Loop, Manhattan seemed leisurely. But when from the elevated railroad he beheld the Woolworth Tower, he was exalted. To him architecture had never existed; buildings were larger or smaller bulks containing more or less interesting objects. His most impassioned architectural comment had been, "There's a cute bungalow; be nice place to live." ”

“ But the pitch-pine fire was there, all the same; it had been made on the ground behind a small out-building. This out-building had preserved three of its sides and the framework of its roof; the roof had been completed by a thatch of palmetto, the vanished façade had been gayly replaced by a couple of red calico counterpanes suspended from the thatch. Here lived a family of "poor whites"—father, mother, and six children; their drawing-room was the green space before the kitchen; their bedchambers were behind the calico façade ”

“ Old and new, quiet repose and the bustling conduct of business, mingle strangely here, for within sight of Wool railway station, and within hearing of the clashing of the heavy consignments of milk-churns, driven up to it, to be placed on the rail and sent to qualify the tea of London’s great populations, stands the great, mellowed, Elizabethan, red brick grange or mansion known as Woolbridge House, romantically placed on the borders of the rushy river Frome. ”

“ The venerable little out-building was now firmly roofed with new, green boards; its square windows, destitute of sash or glass, possessed new wooden shutters hung by strips of deer's hide; new steps led up to its two rooms, elevated four feet above the ground. But for a door it had only a red cotton curtain, now drawn forward and thrown carelessly over a peg on the outside wall, a spot of vivid color on its white. Underneath the windows hung flimsy strips of bark covered with brightly-hued flowers.
"They won't live," said Mark Deal. ”

“ Woolwich faces the expanse of originally flooded soil between the Lea and the Roding, with the most of which even the economic forces making for the expansion of London have been able to do nothing, and of which so unpleasant a relic of its original condition is left in Plaistow Marshes to-day; while opposite Greenwich and Deptford lay that perfectly impossible morass, which, though turned into water meadows by a river wall many centuries ago, is still perhaps the worst building ground within the London area. ”

“ The main building was low and rather dilapidated, but the front was felt to be impressive, it elevated itself with candid majesty three stories above the roof, quite undisturbed by a thinness of aspect in profile; the first story bore upon its face an old clock and sun-dial, the second, which was narrower, was punctured by three arches, each containing a bell, and the third under the apex had also an aperture, through which the small bell hanging there should have swung itself picturesquely to and fro, far out against the blue ”

“ The main entrance of the White Tower opened out on the first floor of the Keep, whence a turnpike staircase led up to the second floor, and downwards to the basement with its dungeons. The mural corridors or passages in the thickness of the walls which encircle the State rooms, are so narrow that only one person could pass along them at a time, which would have been of great advantage in case of an attack on the building, for a small number of men could have defended the White Tower against a host of besiegers. The Normans showed a rare skill in the strategic construction of their strongholds. ”

“ In the space between the bridge over the moat to the east of the Cradle Tower and the Well Tower, stood a modern building used as a storehouse by the Ordnance Department, and this being pulled down, excavations in its foundations, made by the Board of Works, have disclosed a brick paving and some loopholes in the outer Ballium wall, which has helped to identify this space as the site of the garden belonging to the Queen’s apartments, when the royal palace stood within the Tower walls. ”

“ This is Woolbridge House. The bridge by which one crosses the Frome to it is much more ancient than the house itself, and is a fine, stone-built Gothic structure, with pointed arches and cut-waters up and down stream. The mansion, now a farmhouse belonging to the Erle-Drax family, was once the property of the Turbervilles, who became possessed of some of the lands of Bindon Abbey ”

“ Old London Bridge escaped the fire, and indeed remained until 1834, although the houses clustering over it had been removed at the close of the reign of George II., and the only prominent building in the panorama which Shakespeare or Raleigh would now be able to recognise, could they look across the rivers Styx and Thames, would be the great White Tower with its surrounding lesser towers and battlements. All the rest, like “the baseless fabric of a vision,” has passed away for ever. ”

“ Woolworth’s tower, a strange attempt on the part of man to seem more than he is; and a thousand other evidences of hopes and dreams, all too frail perhaps against the endless drag toward nothingness, but still lovely and comforting. And yet here also is Vaclav Melka, who wants to be a bath-rubber again! John Spitovesky, who doesn’t care; Jacob Feilchenfeld, who never heard; and millions of others like them, and I—I think and grow confused, and earn nineteen-twenty a week or less—never more, apparently. ”

“ Woolstaston Hall, now a large farmhouse, stands near the church. It must have been a fine place in its time, if we may judge from a noble panelled parlour, with a polished oak floor fit to make young people's feet itch for a dance, and a massive stone portal, fronting upon the garden to the rear, evidently the main entrance to the mansion in its original state. ”

“ It was not a thoroughfare, not even a convenient connecting link; it skirted the back of the Pantheon, the old buildings on either side rising so high against the blue that the sun never came down lower than the fifth line of windows, and looking up from the pavement was like looking up from the bottom of a well. There was no foot-walk, of course; even if there had been one no one would have used it, owing to the easy custom of throwing from the windows a few ashes and other light trifles for the city refuse-carts, instead of carrying them down the long stairs to the door below. ”

“ The artistic merits of the real vault are evident. It is logical, capable of much structural decoration, and it determines and explains the whole plan of the bays both inside and out. The merits of the barrel roof are also evident. It also is logical, though in a less degree than the vault. It does not determine or explain the plan of the building below it, but it is easily adaptable, and it has a simplicity and a marked grandeur of its own. The roof at York has none of this simplicity. ”

“ If it ever fulfils its owners’ conception and becomes a great depository of current articles of commerce, it will stand out to the world as such a depository. The man in the street will easily recognise it as such. There is rightly more than a touch of the warehouse character in it. The architect seems to me, therefore, to have solved that side of the problem better even in London than he has in New York. The New York building is a more obvious advertisement. Its tower is simply a beckoning finger. No one would expect a graceful Gothic tower to be a storehouse of samples. ”

“ If the substructure be amenable to the criticism that it is not commercial architecture, the superstructure is amenable to the more radical criticism that it is not architecture at all.
The Owings Building is another conspicuous commercial structure that invites the same criticism of not being strictly commercial, but in a very different way. There is here no prodigality of ornament, and no irrelevant preciousness of material. ”

“ Its great entrance on the Aldwych front must be judged in connection with the great plain wings yet to be built on either side and the tower to crown the group. This front is, of course, designed as a terminal feature to Kingsway, and a magnificent one it will make when complete. The building will have, I imagine, a very great effect on all subsequent office blocks. In such matters it introduces, not only American efficiency with its well-lit and easily divisible floor space, but American economy of expression. We have, in reality, always taken business seriously in this country. ”

“ To me the name of Walworth indicates the proximity of the high causeway running through its midst. The consideration of the site—the marshy, wet, and unwholesome site—is quite sufficient for me. At no time, not even in the time of the Lake dwellers, have marshes been selected by choice for the building of cities. Before the Embankment and the Causeway, the South of London was impossible for the residence of man.
The transference of sites is a theory often called in to account for, and make possible, other theories. ”

“ He had ever a warm heart for Woolwich, where he had been born and brought up. He often returned to it, sometimes to carry his mother a share of his week's wages while she lived, and afterwards to refresh himself with a sight of the neighbourhood with which he had been so familiar when a boy. He liked its green common, with the soldiers about it; Shooter's Hill, with its out-look over Kent and down the valley of the Thames; the river busy with shipping, and the royal craft loading and unloading their armaments at the dockyard wharves. ”

“ The War Office have determined to build stores on the Queen’s gardens, and consequently the loopholes in the old Ballium wall will be blocked up. The site will thus be lost for further investigation, and as the Office of Works has no power to prevent these works being carried out, all that has been exposed of one of the most interesting portions of the older part of the Tower will be lost. ”