I first learned about the growth of the Tribune Buiding on Park Row reading Thomas A. P. van Leeuwen’s book The Skyward Trend of Thought. The fact that the book’s subtitle is “The Metaphysics of the American Skyscraper” tells you that it’s a polemic rather than a more straightforward history, which is fine. A lot of architectural history consists of polemics, which seems to be how the field advances. Tribune is a critical building in skyscraper history, whether or not you believe it was the first skyscraper as has been stated by some histories, and the changes to it over time are not well known but informative.
The picture above was taken after Tribune’s completion in late 1874/early 1875. The New York Times building to the right was built in 1857 and effectively demolished in 1888 as the new New York Times building was built around and through it, so this picture was taken in that roughly 13-year period. It shows the extreme height of Tribune compared to ordinary mid-1800s commercial buildings in the city. Things changed. Here’s Tribune shortly before it was demolished in 1966:
The new New York Times Building is on the far right, except that the Times itself had moved north to midtown 42 years earlier. The building behind Times is the 150 Nassau Street. And Tribune is bigger. Vertical expansions are reasonably common in New York – we’ve designed quite a few – but doubling a building’s height is rare and doubling the height of a skyscraper (or a proto-skyscraper) is even rarer. The original building had thick brick bearing walls, while the addition was mostly steel-framed, so the weight was not doubled even though the size was. In any case, it was an impressive piece of engineering.
The story architecturally is more complicated. Richard Morris Hunt seems to have been a bit ambivalent about the height of the building: the central tower emphasizes the vertical while the many ornamental bands of stone emphasize the horizontal. Despite that, it was, in the context of 1870s architecture, a reasonably coherent design. After the expansion, not so much. Looking from the bottom to the top, you start to wonder when it’s going to end. The mansard roof and tower were not just retained, the mansard increased in height to maintain about the same percentage of the overall height. The new wing off to the left was designed to match, too. There was no particular reason to do this: when the Times decided to expand from 5 to 13 stories, they built the new building around the old one, keeping only portions of the old and completely changing the appearance. It seems that the new version of Tribune was, at least in part, using the memorable design of the original building as a symbol of the newspaper. The new building visually represented the old, despite being taller and wider. It’s a difficult trick to pull off, and I’d argue this attempt failed.
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