#22ndstreet

On my Way to Work, Part Three

I’ll do a short series of posts now showing what I saw every day on my way to work back in 1991 or 1992. Picking up from my previous post at the Empire State Building, I’ll continue down Fifth Avenue to my destination on 22nd Street.

I’m not certain of the use of, or need for, the netting we see strung up over the sidewalk at the ESB—perhaps the facade of the great edifice was being worked on. A bit further downtown of that icon is yet another—the Flatiron Building, located on 23rd Street and Broadway, adjacent to Madison Square Park.

[I have no picture, here, but there is yet another iconic structure off Madison Square Park—the Metropolitan Life Insurance Building, built a few years after the Flatiron, in 1909.]

While the Flatiron, originally called the Fuller Building, was completed in 1902, it cannot be said to be one of the earliest skyscrapers, much to my surprise. This term came to be used in the 19th century (in Chicago) for buildings that used steel for a sturdy skeleton as well as elevators (invented by some guy named Otis) to get people up and down without the need to take to the stairs. The Flatiron, however, could be called one of the most distinctive of skyscrapers. The second and third images presented here provide that distinctive shape one might think of for the Flatiron. And the final picture shows that I could actually gaze upon the Fifth Avenue and 22nd Street sides of the famous building while in the studio where I worked—as long as I opened the window and leaned a fair bit outward!