A Vanished Skyline

This points to an easily overlooked truth: While the robust proliferation of “super-tall” skyscrapers Downtown seems novel, these buildings are merely the reprise of a now-vanished skyline that defined New York a century ago. Many of these buildings were among the world’s first skyscrapers, and served as reputation-burnishing trophies for the industrial giants who erected them, such as the Singer Sewing Machine Company, the Knickerbocker Trust, and the Hanover National Bank. Most of these firms, like the buildings that bore their names, have since disappeared.

On the Skyscraper Center’s list of the 100 tallest buildings that have been razed, Downtown gets a macabre head start because of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001: One, Two, and Seven World Trade Center all rank high on the list (occupying the first second, and fourth places), as does the former Deutsche Bank building at 130 Liberty Street (ranked number seven), which was wrecked on the day of the attacks, and then slowly demolished between 2007 and 2011.

	The Singer Sewing Machine Building, at 149 Broadway, occupied the site of what is now One Liberty Plaza, across the street from Zuccotti Park.

The first legacy structure on the list is the Singer Building at 149 Broadway, which was — for a two-year period starting in 1908 — briefly the tallest tower in the world (at 612 feet), until it was surpassed by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower, at 23rd Street and Madison Avenue.

By the time the Singer building was slated for demolition in 1968, New York had a newly created Landmarks Preservation Commission, which was hastily legislated into existence amid public outrage after Pennsylvania Station fell to the wrecking ball in 1963. But the agency refused to protect the structure, arguing that if the City prevented its destruction, the taxpayers would have to take financial responsibility for the Singer tower.

Designed by architect Ernest Flagg, and widely regarded as a masterpiece, the building remains to this day the tallest structure ever demolished “voluntarily” — a euphemism coined to distinguished between the legally approved leveling of a building, versus the obliteration a structure as part of a criminal act, as in the destruction of the World Trade Center. Today, the site of the Singer Tower (along with the adjacent City Investing Building (number 11 on the Skyscraper Center’s list, which was demolished at the same time) is the location of One Liberty Plaza.

Another lost jewel in Downtown’s crown is the National City Bank Building, at 52 Wall Street, designed by the august firm of McKim, Mead & White. Built in 1928, it was abandoned by its owner after the firm merged in 1955 with the First National Bank to form the First National City Bank, which was the forerunner of today’s Citibank. The building was knocked down in 1986, and the site is today occupied by 60 Wall Street.

The Knickerbocker Trust Building, at 60 Broadway (at the corner of Exchange Place) was the headquarters of a bank that scheme to corner the copper market, but succeeded only in triggering the Panic of 1907, thus destroying itself.

At 60 Broadway stood the ornate, 381-foot-tall headquarters of the Knickerbocker Trust Company, which came to grief in the same year the building was opened. The Panic of 1907 (also known as the Knickerbocker Crisis) was largely triggered by the company’s speculation in copper, as it attempted to corner the market on that commodity and reap windfall profits. The scheme failed, and so did the bank, which threatened to take the entire U.S. financial system with it, until J.P. Morgan (playing a role that the Federal Reserve, which did not yet exist, would later take on) intervened by injecting hundreds of millions of dollars of liquidity into the capital markets. The building was taken down in 1964.

Amid a ghetto of newspaper buildings on Park Row, the New York World building stood supreme at 27 stories tall, topped by a domed cupola in which owner Joseph Pulitzer presided in a round office that looked down (figuratively and literally) on both City Hall, and his competition arrayed along the street also known as Newspaper Row. The World ceased publication in 1931, and the building came down in 1955. Today, it is the site of Pace University.

	The New York World Building, at 99 Park Row, was the fiefdom of Joseph Pulitzer, whose power as a press baron struck fear into the hearts of politicians and plutocrats alike.

Modern passersby who walk across the small, triangular plaza that is Louise Nevelson Park(bounded by William Street, Liberty Street, and Maiden Lane) can scarcely imagine that the parcel was once home to a mighty skyscraper: the German-American Insurance Building, erected in 1907, which soared 21 stories.

The building came down in 1971, when the City decided that traffic drawn by the newly opened World Trade Center required wider thoroughfares nearby, and thus enlarged both Liberty Street and Maiden Lane.

There are but a sampling of the 17 tall buildings now erased from Lower Manhattan’s skyline.

To view the complete list compiled by the Skyscraper Center, please browse:

http://www.skyscrapercenter.com/buildings?list=tallest-demolished