The picture above is labelled “Broadway and Hotel Victoria, New York, N.Y.” at the Library of Congress, and is dated as 1900 to 1910. Since we’re looking at the completed Flatiron Building in the background, it’s obviously no earlier than 1902. In any case, we’re looking south on Broadway from about 28th Street or so, a part of the avenue best known, perhaps, for its appearance in Escape From New York.
The Hotel Victoria was a commercial hotel built in 1877 and demolished in 1914. It was replaced by a larger loft building, but a 40-year-old hotel at that time was almost certainly functionally obsolete as well as being of flammable construction. Honestly, it’s not the most compelling building around. Except for one thing, up on its roof:
Why? WHY? I understand advertising with a sign, particularly in that era, but why this? The inboard edge of the sign aligns with the ridge of the mansard roof, so effectively the entire sign is hanging over the mansard and sidewalk; the inboard edge appears to be attached with some very light metal framework, and I count at least five guy wires to hold it in position. There are three guys to the top, because the hard connection at the inboard edge is obviously not strong enough for this to work as a cantilever, and a pair of guys at the outboard edge to provide some measure of stability against swinging horizontally around the inboard edge. The three gravity-load guys are attached to a tiny mast that seems to be anchored at the same point as the inboard-edge frame.
This thing is a disaster waiting to happen. It’s likely that if it fell in a wind storm – and I have no idea if it was ever actually a problem or not – one or more of the guys would act as a keeper, preventing it from falling to the street, but the would leave it swinging around and probably knocking pieces of shingle off the mansard. The formal description of why this is a bad design is that it has multiple single points of failure. A single point of failure is a component of a structure that is so critical that if it fails the whole structure fails. That’s a bad design. Each of the guy wires is a single point of failure, as is the mast, as is, probably, each of the pieces in the inboard-edge frame.
A good design would have had a beam or two cantilevered from the roof structure and running uninterrupted through the sign, inboard edge to outboard edge. It would have been stronger and safer, but it would have been visible. The one thing that the design in the photo has going for it is that most of the structure is nearly invisible from a distance, so the sign appears to be magically floating in mid-air. My guess is that is the explanation for this Rube Goldberg assembly.
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