The Little Singer Building: Cast Iron's Final Sentence

The Little Singer Building is at 561 Broadway, between Prince and Spring Streets. Twelve stories, much taller than its cast iron neighbors. The front is delicate in a way no 1860s cast iron front was delicate. Slim painted iron columns. Terra cotta panels between. Large sheets of plate glass behind. There is more glass on this façade than on any earlier building on the same street.

This is the last building the SoHo Cast Iron tour visits, and that is not an accident. Ernest Flagg finished it in 1904, and what he built is the moment cast iron's structural job ended and the grammar it had taught architects began its next life.

Who Flagg was

Ernest Flagg trained in Paris at the École des Beaux-Arts, the school that produced most of the architects who would define the early American skyscraper. He came back to New York in the late 1890s with two career-defining commissions from the Singer Manufacturing Company. The first was the Bourne Building, on a different lot a few blocks south, finished in 1898. The second was this one, the Little Singer, commissioned in 1902. Flagg would later design the much taller Singer Tower at the corner of Liberty Street and Broadway, which when completed in 1908 was briefly the tallest building in the world. (It was demolished in 1968 to make way for One Liberty Plaza, and remains the tallest building ever voluntarily demolished.)

The Little Singer is the middle work in that arc. It is not a tower. It is twelve stories on a relatively narrow Broadway lot. What makes it important is that Flagg used the lot as a laboratory for a façade system that the Singer Tower would later apply at much greater height.

Three materials, one grammar

Stand across Broadway and look up. The Little Singer's front is built out of three materials. Slim wrought iron columns rise vertically through every story. Terra cotta panels (a glazed ceramic, lighter than stone, formed in moulds, fired in a kiln) fill the horizontal bands between floors. And large sheets of plate glass fill almost every remaining square foot.

None of these materials carry the building's vertical load. That work is done by a steel frame inside the building, invisible from the street. What you are looking at is decoration hung off a hidden structure.

This is the definition of a curtain wall. The wall has stopped being structural. The structure has retreated inward. The wall's job is to keep the weather out, let the light in, and signal what the building means. Half a century later, on Park Avenue and Sixth Avenue, the curtain wall would lose the iron and the terra cotta and become almost pure glass. The mature curtain wall of the 1950s is direct descendant of what Flagg is doing in 1904 at 561 Broadway.

But the grammar that organizes the wall is the grammar your eye has been learning all along the SoHo tour. Look at the bays. Slimmer than at the Haughwout, more vertical, but unmistakable. The same metric repeat. Look at the spandrels. The decorated horizontal bands between floors are doing the same job the cast iron spandrels did on the King of Greene Street twenty-eight years earlier. Look at the column orders. The capitals on the iron columns echo a refined classical idiom that goes back through every cast iron building on Broadway to the Haughwout in 1857.

The materials changed. The grammar did not.

Why this building matters more than its size suggests

The Little Singer is not a famous building. It does not appear in many architectural surveys of New York. When skyscraper history is told, the names that come up are Sullivan and Burnham in Chicago, Gilbert with the Woolworth, Van Alen with the Chrysler, and the various architects of the postwar curtain wall boom. Flagg is rarely on those lists, and the Little Singer rarely is either.

But the building is a hinge. It is the moment when the cast iron commercial buildings that taught a generation of American architects how to think about repeating bays, modular spandrels, slim columns, and rhythmic façade composition let go of their structural role and admitted what they had always been pointing toward. The front of a building is a designed system of repeating parts. That was the lesson of cast iron. The Little Singer is the building where that lesson is no longer carrying the load and the lesson keeps working anyway.

The line from here is direct. Flagg's own Singer Tower in 1908. Cass Gilbert's Woolworth in 1913. The setback skyscrapers of the 1916 Zoning Resolution. Mies's Seagram in 1958. Each of those buildings is doing some version of what the Little Singer was doing first: hanging a designed front off a hidden steel frame, with the wall and the structure increasingly separate.

What to look for

The most legible part of the building is the cast iron tracery that frames every window. It is decorative. It carries no load. Run your eye down a single vertical bay from the cornice to the second floor. The iron is doing the work of suggesting a continuous slim structural member, but the actual structural work is happening behind it in the steel frame. The iron is a kind of memory of structure.

Then look at the spandrels between floors. The terra cotta is moulded with a curving foliate pattern. In a stone building the same pattern would have been carved by hand. The terra cotta has the same advantage cast iron had: a mould produces hundreds of identical panels at a fraction of the cost of stone. The visual idea is the same one Daniel Badger introduced at the Haughwout in 1857. The material has shifted, the supply chain has shifted, but the underlying idea (that the front of a building is a manufactured product made of repeating parts) has not.

And then look at the glass. The bays are wider than at any earlier building on the SoHo tour, and the glass fills almost the entire bay. There is more light reaching the upper floors of this building than reached the upper floors of any masonry or cast iron commercial building of a generation earlier. That openness is the consequence of the steel frame doing the structural work that the wall used to do.

The cornice line is set back, the upper floors stepping in slightly. That is Flagg signaling a tower form, a hint of the much taller Singer Tower he would design four years later. The Little Singer is the rehearsal. The Singer Tower was the performance. Both buildings exist because the cast iron blocks south of Houston taught their architect what the front of a tall commercial building could be.

The Singer Tower is gone. The Little Singer is still here, still painted, still standing on a relatively narrow lot near the north end of SoHo. Stand across the street, count the bays, watch the materials, and you are looking at the last sentence in the cast iron grammar.