Park Row Building - History

History

One of the first structures to be called a skyscraper, the building was completed in 1899 after two years and nine months of construction, one of several new office buildings located on what was known at the time as "Newspaper Row", the center of the newspaper industry in New York City for 80 years beginning in the 1840s. The builder was the Park Row Construction Company, a syndicate whose legal counsel, William Mills Ivins – a prominent lawyer and former judge advocate general for New York State – purchased the necessary property in his own name before transferring it to the syndicate. For this reason the building was sometimes known as the Ivins Syndicate Building.

At 391 feet (119 m), it was the tallest office building in the world from 1899 until 1908, when it was surpassed by the Singer Building. In 1901 a building project announced by Aetna, to be located at 33rd Street and Broadway, would have overtaken Park Row as the tallest office building at 455 feet (139 m) high, but it was never built.

The building is 29 stories tall, with 26 full floors and two, three-story cupolas. It has a frontage of 103 ft (31 m) on Park Row, 23 on Ann Street and 48 feet (15 m) on Theater Alley. The base of the building covers a land area of approximately 15,000 square feet (1,400 m2). The building contains about 8,000 tons of steel and 12,000 tons of other material, chiefly brick and terra cotta. The foundation of the Park Row Building was made of 3,900 Georgia spruce piles driven into wet sand and topped by granite blocks. The total cost to build this early skyscraper was $2,400,000.

The building offered 950 separate offices, each with a capacity of about 4 people. A rough estimate of 25,000 people were thought to have passed through the building each workday. Upon completion, approximately 4,000 people a day worked there. By mid-1899, the building was owned by the investment banker and subway sponsor August Belmont, Jr. under the name Park Row Realty Company. The first headquarters of the Interborough Rapid Transit (IRT) subway were located in the building, as was the first office of the newly minted Associated Press.

On May 3, 1920 the defenestration of Andrea Salsedo occurred from the fourteenth floor of 15 Park Row at 4:20 am. He was being held with Roberto Elia by the Justice Department in connection with a series of bombings that had occurred in New York, Boston, Washington, Philadelphia, Paterson, Cleveland and Pittsburgh. A leaflet entitled "Plain Words," signed by the "Anarchist Fighters," was found at the sites, and because of an aberrant "S" in the printing, the authorities tracked down the print shop where both Salsedo and Elia worked. They were held at 15 Park Row for 8 weeks with limited external communication. The night of May 3, Salsedo fell from the 14th floor: the anarchists claim he was thrown, the police claim he jumped.