I took the picture above on my way home yesterday. The cruise ship Norwegian Pearl was heading out to sea from the terminal in Hell’s Kitchen. From this angle, the ship looks to be about the same size as the high-rises in the background, in Jersey City. Actually, the ship is bigger: the Pearl is 965 feet long, while the tallest extant building in Jersey City (30 Hudson Street, on the far left) is 781 feet tall and the tallest to be (99 Hudson Street, under construction and two building to the right of 30 Hudson) will be around 900 feet tall.
That picture of the Woolworth is badly inaccurate, similar to a bad postcard I discussed a while back. On the other hand, the ad is from 1911, and the building was not yet out of the ground. If we go back to 1898, Scientific America ran the comparison the other way around, using the Kaiser Wilhelm Der Grosse, one of the biggest and newest ships of the time, to show off how big the Park Row Building was:
I’ve included the whole page because it’s so wonderfully over the top. The bottom picture is simply the view from the grounds of St. Paul’s Chapel, with Park Row on the left and the St. Paul Building in the middle. But above that we’ve got Park Row lying on its side next to Kaiser Wilhelm and a bunch of tall buildings looking short next to the Great Pyramid.
It was a visually melodramatic and reasonably effective way to make comparisons that serve not much purpose. I love these drawings,
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