Only eleven stories tall and 22 feet wide on Broadway, but stretching 159 feet to New St., the Tower Building employed the first metal-cage construction in New York, before the building code allowed it. Designed by architect Bradford Gilbert, it was demolished in 1914.[1]
At 11 stories, it was not the tallest in the city, but with a frontage on Broadway of a mere 21.5 feet, it was extremely slender for its height. The novelty of its metal-cage construction was the subject of considerable attention in the popular press, as pundits predicted its collapse.
The NYC Building Code did not explicitly allow for skeleton-frame construction until 1892, but the Department of Buildings approved Gilbert's individual application. As author and engineer Donald Friedman explains, the Tower Building had a hybrid structural system: "the side walls were bearing at the top four levels of steel framing, but were carried below that point on a frame consisting of wrought-iron beams and cast-iron columns. In other words, the Tower Building was, structurally, a four-story bearing-wall building sitting on top of a seven-story skeleton frame. The overall building was noticeably slender and the weight of the bearing-wall structure at the top probably helped the frame below perform: cast-iron columns cannot handle tension well, and the weight of the upper-floor masonry served as a pre-stressing compression load in the columns below."
