On January 9, 1912, the New York building of the Equitable Life Assurance Society, at 120 Broadway, was badly damaged by fire. The picture above shows the damage visible from the west as well as giving a sense of how awful fighting that kind of fire in freezing weather can be. Here’s the building in happier times:
Equitable is a hard building to pin down. It was constructed in 1870 and was one of the taller buildings in the city at the time, if we measure by roof height rather than ornamental towers or spires, but it’s pretty clearly not a skyscraper. It was technologically advanced for its day, with fireproof floors (before the Chicago fire got everyone obsessed with fire) and iron columns rather than masonry piers throughout its interior, but it was very old-fashioned before it was thirty years old. Its name is famous but more for its successor (see below) than for itself; most of the extant pictures are similar to the one immediately above, which show it as it was expanded rather than as it was built. The most accurate description I’ve seen of it is that it was a “proto-skyscraper” helping to show the direction the new technology would take.
As the first picture shows, there were significant collapses of the interior floors during the fire. Here’s a plan giving a sense of the damage:
Note that the building fills the full block, bounded by streets on all sides. It’s a big site. Given the extent of the fire and fire-fighting, even the areas not shaded on the plan had substantial smoke, fire, and water damage to the interior. Repair would have been the equivalent of reconstruction, which is why Equitable opted for demolition and replacement with a modern building. The plan also shows the complexity of the interior layout, which was driven in part by the need for courtyards and lightwells in the days before electric light and in part by the fact that the original building – the lower left (northwest) portion of the plan – was expanded. The complexity can also be seen in the multiple types of floor structure used in a single building that only ever had one owner:
And in three generations of beam-to-column connection:
The use of wrought-iron columns was a step forward but that is an old-fashioned connection that uses the material as an analogue for cast iron rather than taking advantage of its properties.
By 1912, the skyscraper age had, of course, fully taken hold in lower Manhattan, so Equitable built a skyscraper with a lot of rental space. The new (1915) building has the same site, has an elongated H plan with narrow light courts on the Broadway and Nassau Street sides, and is 40 stories tall. The most important statistic about it is one that most people are less familiar with: floor-area-ratio (FAR). That’s the total floor area in a building divided by the area of its lot, and it gives a good sense of how big (not tall, big) a building is. To give a sense of the number, the maximum current as-of-right zoning in Manhattan has FARs in the mid-teens. The Empire State Building, constructed under the 1916 zoning law, has an FAR of 25. The new Equitable Building has an FAR of 30 and it is, frankly, monstrous when you’re on Pine Street. It used to be simply monstrous, but changes to neighboring lots have created some open space that, on the north and west sides, ease the overwhelming sensation it gives. Here’s the new building, with American Surety immediately to the south, the Gillender-replacing Bankers Trust off to the right, and the spire of Trinity Church looking a bit short:
The new building didn’t inspire the 1916 zoning law, which is in the works before it was built. But it is the best example one could ask for to illustrate why zoning was necessary.
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