page_title: Early skyscrapers
section_title: The first skyscraper
hierarchical_section_title: Early skyscrapers / Emergence of the skyscraper: 1880–1899 / The first skyscraper
caption_attribution_description: "City Hall stands in front of Newspaper Row - the former publishing headquarters of The World (left), The Tribune (center) and The Times (right) in downtown Manhattan, circa 1906. Behind the New York Times building is the American Tract Society."
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: There is academic disagreement over which building should be considered the first skyscraper. The term was first used in the 1780s to describe a particularly tall horse, before later being applied to the sail at the top of a ship's mast, tall hats and bonnets, tall men, and a ball that was hit high into the air. In the 1880s it began to be applied to buildings, first in 1883 to describe large public monuments and then in 1889 as a label for tall office blocks, coming into widespread use over the next decade. Identifying the first "true skyscraper" is not straightforward, and various candidates exist depending on the criteria applied. George Post's New York Equitable Life Building of 1870, for example, was the first tall office building to use the elevator, while his Produce Exchange building of 1884 made substantial structural advances in metal frame design. The Home Insurance Building in Chicago, opened in 1885, is, however, most often labelled the first skyscraper because of its innovative use of structural steel in a metal frame design.
  The Home Insurance Building was a 138-foot (42 m) tall, 10-story skyscraper designed by William Le Baron Jenney, who had been trained as an engineer in France and was a leading architect in Chicago. Jenney's design was unusual in that it incorporated structural steel into the building's internal metal frame alongside the traditional wrought iron. This frame took the weight of the floors of the building and helped to support the weight of the external walls as well, proving an important step towards creating the genuine non-structural curtain walls that became a feature of later skyscrapers. The design was not perfect – some of the weight was still carried by masonry walls, and the metal frame was bolted, rather than riveted, together – but it was clearly a significant advance in tall building construction.
  The approach quickly caught on in Chicago. In 1889 the Tacoma Building replaced the bolted metal design with a stronger riveted approach, and Chicago's Chamber of Commerce Building introduced interior light courts to the structural design of skyscrapers. The 1890 Rand McNally Building became the first entirely self-supporting, steel-framed skyscraper. Some buildings, such as The Rookery and the Monadnock Building, combined elements of both the newer and older styles, but generally Chicago rapidly adopted steel structures as a flexible and effective way to produce a range of tall buildings. Structural engineers specializing in the steel frame design began to establish practices in Chicago.
  There was a boom in skyscraper construction in Chicago from 1888 onwards. By 1893, Chicago had built 12 skyscrapers between 16 and 20 stories tall, tightly clustered in the center of the financial district. Chicago's skyscrapers, however, were constrained by the contemporary limits of steel-frame design and the muddy sub-soil in the city, which together limited most of their skyscrapers to around 16 or 17 stories. Chicago's skyscrapers rapidly became tourist destinations for the views of the wider city they provided from their upper floors and as attractive sites in their own right. Tourists were advised to hire cabs for street tours of the skyscrapers – by lying back in the cab, they would be able to safely take in the tops of the tall buildings.
  The Masonic Temple was the most prominent of these skyscrapers. Built by the Freemasons of Chicago in 1892, at a time when the Masons was a fast-growing social community, the lavish 302-foot (92 m) tall skyscraper had 19 stories, the bottom ten holding shops and the higher levels containing the Masons' private suites and meeting halls, some able to hold up to 1,300 people. At the top was a roof garden and observation gallery. The Freemasons were competing with their local rivals the Odd Fellows, who intended to build a much higher skyscraper, 556 feet (169 m) tall, that they announced would be the tallest building in the world. Newspapers picked up the story, circulating facts about the size of the Temple and making comparison to historical buildings such 
caption: Park Row in New York had several early skyscrapers built for newspaper companies clustered around the City Hall
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