page_title: Early skyscrapers
section_title: Skyscraper mania and social commentary
hierarchical_section_title: Early skyscrapers / Inter-war period, boom and depression: 1920–1939 / Skyscraper mania and social commentary
caption_attribution_description: English: Construction old and new, from Washington Street #37, Manhattan Image ID: 1219147. Cunard Building (25 Broadway) in background right.
context_page_description: The early skyscrapers were a range of tall commercial buildings built between 1884 and 1945, predominantly in the American cities of New York City and Chicago. Cities in the United States were traditionally made up of low-rise buildings, but significant economic growth after the Civil War and increasingly intensive use of urban land encouraged the development of taller buildings beginning in the 1870s. Technological improvements enabled the construction of fireproofed iron-framed structures with deep foundations, equipped with new inventions such as the elevator and electric lighting. These made it both technically and commercially viable to build a new class of taller buildings, the first of which, Chicago's 138-foot tall Home Insurance Building, opened in 1885. Their numbers grew rapidly, and by 1888 they were being labelled skyscrapers.
  Chicago initially led the way in skyscraper design, with many constructed in the center of the financial district during the late 1880s and early 1890s.
context_section_description: Public interest in skyscrapers increased during the 1920s, particularly after the Tribune competition. The competition drawings were circulated on display, with 25,000 people coming to see them in Chicago in just one month. In the aftermath, images of skyscrapers flourished across American culture, commencing what historian Merrill Schleier dubbed a "skyscraper mania". The "Titan City" exhibition in 1925 celebrated existing skyscraper and featured futuristic murals by Harvey Corbett and Hugh Ferriss, depicting the skyscraper at the heart of the "City of the Future". Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand's 1921 short film Manhatta explored the form, ending with a sunset shot from the top of a skyscraper. Authors such as Janet Flanner, John Dos Passos and Mary Borden wrote novels with skyscrapers as important motifs or settings. John Carpenter produced a ballet on the theme. Paul Frankl designed a range of popular "skyscraper furniture".
  Much of this commentary was positive, reflecting an optimism about technology and the direction of urban life in general. Skyscrapers were seen as an expression of rational engineering, the perfect buildings for mankind to live in, as celebrated in artist Louis Lozowick's lithographs. Some other proponents of skyscrapers likened them to medieval cathedrals, symbols of the modern age. Poems depicted skyscrapers as objects of sublime, rational beauty, Ferris describing them as "buildings like crystals, walls of translucent glass, sheer glass blocks sheathing a steel grill". At Chicago's Century of Progress exposition in 1933, skyscrapers and technology were portrayed as a solution for America's current and future problems. The French-Swiss architect Le Corbusier acclaimed New York in 1935 as being "overwhelming, amazing, exciting, violently alive", but went on to complain that there were still too few skyscrapers, and those that had been built were not yet tall enough. Lewis Hine, employed to record the building of the Empire State Building, portrayed the skyscraper construction teams as courageous heroes, creating a genre of photography that continued up until 1941.
  Their critics expressed concerns about the effect of modern technology and urban living on the human condition, arguing that skyscrapers generated pollution and noise, and imposed a regimented and dehumanising lifestyle on the people that worked in them. Social commentator Lewis Mumford reflected the concerns of many in his critiques entitled Is the Skyscraper Tolerable? and The Intolerable City. Political theorist Stefan Hirsch condemned the buildings as "bandages covering the sky, stifling our breath". Inventor Thomas Edison expressed fears that an uncontrolled expansion of skyscrapers would result in overcrowding and disaster. Artist Howard Cook's engravings critiqued the oppressive character of the new skyscrapers as they loomed over the traditional city. Berenice Abbott's photographic studies of New York in the 1930s explored the complex theme of urban change and the effect of skyscrapers on the older ways of life in the city, echoing Steigler's work in the first decade of the century.
  Hollywood used skyscrapers extensively in popular films. The Skyscrapers of New York in 1906 became the first of many, and in the 1920s Harold Lloyd produced his five "skyscraper films", most prominently Safety Last!, in which the hero dangles from a clock on the side of a Los Angeles building. In these early silent movies, skyscrapers were closely associated with masculine identity; Lloyd's climbing of skyscrapers closely associated with his characters' transformation from young men into mature adults, and the winning of the heroine. The 1933 film King Kong included another iconic use of the early skyscraper in its final scenes, as the giant ape scaled the Empire State Building shortly before his death; the scene can be interpreted as contrasting natural instinct with the insensitive rationality of the modern building and wider New York.
caption: Berenice Abbott's depiction of changing Manhattan, 1936; Cunard Building (right)
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