Looking After the Singer Tower: The Death and Life of Block 62

Abstract

In early 1968, two development sites lay virtually side by side in Lower Downtown Manhattan. West of Broadway, the clearing of thirty blocks spectacularly announced the Port Authority's intention to build a World Trade Center (WTC) complex. Along Broadway itself, a more modest, two-block site awaited the U.S. Steel Building, later renamed 1 Liberty Plaza. The northern half of this site, bounded by Cortland and Liberty Streets, block 62, had most recently been the address of the Singer Tower, an Ernest Flagg-designed building that, in the eighteen months after its completion in 1908, had been the tallest building in the world. In 1967, it once again attained record status, which it, in fact, retains: the tallest building in the world to be intentionally demolished by its owners.This essay resides in the cultural moment represented by these two sites, these two locations of erasures and reinscription. Instead of looking at what would be built — the intensely analyzed WTC site — let us examine what had been erased next door: a particular aesthetic, an earlier form of corporate capitalism massed in the outline of a grand cityscape. Produced by the burgeoning, international sewing-machine trade in the early 20th century and brought down by the pressures of the international, industrial competition of the 1960s, the life of the Singer Tower takes New York City from the exuberance of the first decade of the century to the decline of city fortunes at the end of American industrial dominance. Its demise is also the result of cultural triage performed by historic preservationists in the years immediately after the passage of New York City's Landmark legislation in 1965.