The Woolworth Building is a 792-foot-tall (241 m) residential building and early skyscraper at 233 Broadway in the Tribeca neighborhood of Lower Manhattan in New York City. Designed by Cass Gilbert, it was the tallest building in the world from 1913 to 1930, and remains one of the 100 tallest buildings in the United States as of 2024.
Woolworth Building in April 2022
The building's crown
Part of the lobby
Detail of elevators
The earliest stage of skyscraper design encompasses buildings built between 1884 and 1945, predominantly in the American cities of New York and Chicago. Cities in the United States were traditionally made up of low-rise buildings, but significant economic growth after the American Civil War and increasingly intensive use of urban land encouraged the development of taller buildings beginning in the 1870s. Technological improvements enabled the construction of fireproofed iron-framed structures with deep foundations, equipped with new inventions such as the elevator and electric lighting. These made it both technically and commercially viable to build a new class of taller buildings, the first of which, Chicago's 138-foot (42 m) tall Home Insurance Building, opened in 1885. Their numbers grew rapidly, and by 1888 they were being labelled "skyscrapers".
The Flatiron Building, New York City, shortly after its construction in 1903
The Produce Exchange of 1884 made structural advances in metal frame design.
Early skyscraper caisson foundations, 1898
Chicago's Home Insurance Building, often considered the world's first skyscraper, was completed in 1885