1913 | Architecture, Real Estate
Architecture, Real Estate
New York's 60-story Woolworth building opens April 24 near City Hall. The 792-foot "Cathedral of Commerce" designed by Cass Gilbert will be the world's tallest habitable structure until 1930.
New York's Equitable building goes up on lower Broadway. The world's largest office building has been financed by a syndicate that includes T. Coleman du Pont, now 52, of E. I. du Pont de Nemours, who has put up $30 million and purchased a controlling interest in Equitable Life Insurance Co. from J. P. Morgan & Co. and will later dispose of its stock to policy holders (see 1915).
New York's General Post Office building opens on Eighth Avenue between 31st and 33rd streets across from the 3-year-old Pennsylvania Station. Designed by McKim, Mead, and White with two blocks of Corinthian columns, the building's front is inscribed with lines written by the Greek historian Herodotus about the 5th-century B.C. couriers of Xerxes: "Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds."
New York's Grand Central Terminal has a mammoth concourse—470 feet long, 160 wide, 125 high—designed by Warren and Wetmore with a Beaux Arts façade.
A marble Fifth Avenue mansion for steel magnate Henry Clay Frick is completed between 70th and 71st streets to designs by Carrère and Hastings.
Cincinnati's Union Central Insurance building is completed on the site formerly occupied by the Chamber of Commerce building at Fourth and Vine Streets. The $2.5 million 34-story skyscraper is second in height only to New York's new Woolworth building.
Miami Beach, Florida, begins its career as a winter resort. Carl G. Fisher, now 41, has just made $5 million by selling the Prest-O-Lite acetylene automobile lamp company that he acquired for almost nothing. He acquires 200 acres January 13 from avocado grower John S. Collins, 76, who has begun a wooden bridge across Biscayne Bay to link the sandbar to the mainland, and he loans Collins $50,000 to complete the "Venetian Way"; the two go into business together in February, selling lots at auction while building concrete bulkheads along the shore, and the bridge opens June 12. Fisher and Collins will build 27 miles of bulkheads and add 2,800 acres to Miami Beach's present 1,600 acres in the next 10 years by dredging, pumping, and filling in land over mangrove roots. By 1923 they will have built five hotels to augment the Royal Palm put up by H. M. Flagler in 1896 (see 1924).
The Mall (east front) of Buckingham Palace at London is redesigned by architect Sir Aston Webb to serve as a backdrop for the Queen Victoria Memorial Statue, which celebrates the first reigning monarch actually to live in the palace. When the sovereign is in residence there is a daily changing of the guard and the royal standard is flown.