Flatiron Building United States

Legendary

This steel framed building shaped like an iron was the tallest in New York city in 1902.

Photo by Jeffrey Zeldman

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At its narrowest point, the Flatiron Building is just 6.5 feet wide. That's about the height of a tall adult, turned sideways and stretched up 22 stories.

The shape wasn't a design choice. The plot of land where Fifth Avenue crosses Broadway is a narrow triangle, and the architect simply built to fill it.

That architect was Daniel Burnham, from Chicago. Construction started in 1901, and the building opened in 1902 at 285 feet tall, one of the tallest in New York at the time.

Its original name was the Fuller Building, after the construction company that built it. Almost nobody called it that.

New Yorkers looked at the shape and thought of a clothes iron, the heavy flat kind people once heated on a stove. The nickname "Flatiron" stuck so firmly that the whole neighborhood is now called the Flatiron District.

Not everyone was impressed. Critics nicknamed it "Burnham's Folly" and predicted the wind would knock it straight over.

They were wrong. A strong steel frame holds the whole thing up, a technique architects in Chicago had pioneered.

On the outside, the building looks nothing like modern steel towers. Its limestone and terracotta front is decorated in the Beaux-Arts style, designed to look like a tall Italian Renaissance palace standing on end.

Artists loved it immediately. In 1903, photographer Alfred Stieglitz captured it during a snowstorm and said it looked like the bow of a huge ocean ship coming toward him.

Other artists followed. Edward Steichen photographed it in 1904, and painters kept returning to it for decades.

It became a New York City landmark in 1966 and a National Historic Landmark in 1989. It's still an office building today.

Stand at the northern tip on 23rd Street to see just how thin the building really is. Walk into Madison Square Park across the street for the classic full view. Come back at sunset, when the west-facing side lights up in gold.