The Haughwout Building: Where the Skyscraper Started

The Haughwout Building stands at 488 to 492 Broadway, at the northeast corner of Broome Street. Five stories tall, an off-yellow cast iron front, two long elevations facing two of the busiest commercial streets in 1850s New York. From the outside it is well preserved but not obviously historic. People walk past it every day without noticing it.

What happened inside this building in 1857 made every tall building in Manhattan possible.

The building's job

Eder V. Haughwout ran a high-end retail business that sold imported china, cut glass, silver, and chandeliers. His clients included the White House. He commissioned the building from John P. Gaynor, an architect new to commercial work, and Gaynor specified that the entire front of the building would be cast iron, ordered from Daniel Badger's Architectural Iron Works just a few blocks south.

This was not a cost decision in the way later cast iron buildings would be. In 1857 cast iron was still a premium material for commercial use. What Haughwout was buying was not cheapness but glamour. A cast iron façade could imitate the Venetian Renaissance palaces that wealthy nineteenth-century clients understood as the language of luxury. The Sansovino Library in Venice, completed in 1591, was the explicit visual reference. Look at Haughwout's tall arched windows framed by Corinthian columns, and you are looking at a sixteenth-century Italian palace, manufactured in a Lower Manhattan foundry.

The trick was that cast iron could do the imitation more accurately than carved stone. Iron casts in a mould. The same Corinthian capital, the same arch keystone, the same column shaft could be cast hundreds of times from one master pattern. Stone, by contrast, had to be carved by hand, with the inevitable variation that human chisels introduce. The cast iron building was visually more regular than its stone model.

That regularity is what made it modular. And modularity is what made the rest of SoHo possible. By the late 1860s, Badger was selling cast iron façades out of a catalogue with hundreds of options. A merchant could order the front of his store the way later merchants would order the layout of a kitchen. The Haughwout was the proof of concept.

What happened inside

In the same year the façade went up, Elisha Otis installed the world's first successful passenger elevator in the building. There had been industrial freight elevators before. There had even been elevators with safety brakes (Otis himself had demonstrated his at the 1854 World's Fair in the Crystal Palace, on a wooden platform, in front of a crowd, by cutting the rope while standing on it). The Haughwout was where the passenger elevator entered commercial use.

The mechanism was a steam-driven hoist with Otis's safety brake, which clamped the carriage to its rails the instant the hoist cable lost tension. Without the safety brake, no one would ride. With it, people would. That is the small fact that makes a tall commercial building thinkable.

Before the elevator, the upper floors of a building were the cheapest floors. People could only climb so many stairs comfortably. Top-floor walk-ups were rented to those who could afford nothing better. After the elevator, the upper floors are the most desirable. The view is better, the air is cleaner, and you can ride. The whole economics of a tall building inverts.

The Haughwout is the building where that inversion is first tested in a real commercial setting. Five stories, retail at street level, manufacturing and offices above. Otis's elevator opens the upper floors as legitimate commercial space. Once you can do that with five stories, you can do it with ten, then twenty. The technology that would later produce the Equitable Building, the Woolworth, the Empire State, the Seagram, and every glass curtain wall on Park Avenue all trace back, in part, to a steam-driven hoist installed in this storefront in 1857.

Why the elevator works only because the building works

Cast iron and the passenger elevator are usually told as two separate stories. They are the same story. A building tall enough to need an elevator has to be light enough to be tall. Loadbearing masonry walls of the kind New York was still building in the 1850s required so much wall thickness that the building's own structure ate the floor plate. A six-story masonry building had walls thick enough at the base to make the ground floor a kind of fortress. A twelve-story masonry building was impractical: the walls at the base would be five feet thick.

Cast iron solved that constraint by replacing wall thickness with column thinness. The Haughwout's front carries vertical load through eight slim columns on the Broadway side and many more along Broome. The columns can be thin because iron is much stronger in compression than brick. The wall between the columns no longer has to carry load. So the wall can be open. So the building can have wide windows, and so the upper floors can be bright and rentable.

A bright, rentable, lightweight upper floor with an elevator to reach it is the floor plate of every later office building. The Haughwout was the building where all three components first appeared together.

What to look for

Stand back across Broadway, on the Broome Street curb, and look at the Broadway elevation. Count five bays. Each bay is a tall arched window between two slim Corinthian columns, with an ornamented spandrel below the next floor's window. The pattern repeats five times across, four times up. Twenty bays in total on that elevation. They are, almost literally, twenty copies of the same casting.

Now look at where Broadway meets Broome. The corner is a single thin column. In a masonry building, the corner would be a thick pier. In Haughwout, it is one cast iron member, no thicker than the columns in the middle of the elevation. That single corner column is one of the clearest expressions of what cast iron made possible.

Then look at the second floor windows. They are taller than the windows above. In commercial buildings of this era, the second floor was the most prestigious. Wealthy clients did not want to climb to the third or fourth floor, even with an elevator, in 1857. The tall second-floor windows announce that this floor matters. That hierarchy will reverse within a generation, once elevators are standard. The Haughwout is at the hinge moment.

The building today is a National Historic Landmark. It has been a department store, a textile manufactory, a warehouse, an office building, and lofts. Through every one of those uses, the façade has not changed. That is the gift of cast iron. Painted, repainted, bolted back together where it has cracked, the front of this building looks essentially the way it looked the year Otis's elevator opened upstairs.