Woolworth Building Research Articles

The Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information by Craig Robertson

Reviewed by: The Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information by Craig Robertson Eva Hemmungs Wirtén (bio) The Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information By Craig Robertson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021. Pp. 328. "Storage is not neutral." Craig Robertson's red thread in The Filing Cabinet has general applicability but also a very concrete embodiment: this is a book about the filing cabinet. Although the author never uses the term microhistory, his ambition to "see how the cabinet as an object shapes people's interaction with information" (p. x) reminds me of how microhistories zoom in on something—an event or an object—in order to tell a much bigger story, in many cases of something "too insignificant" to notice. Like a filing cabinet—once ubiquitous in offices, today just one among many metaphorical or more concrete "machines" that have become the stuff of media-archeological excavation. As Robertson argues that the filing cabinet both belongs to "the genealogy of information's ascendancy" and "exemplifies the material history of efficiency" (p. 4), he situates The Filing Cabinet in a broad and dynamic scholarly field that considers paperwork practices in the history of information and knowledge. The book is divided into two major parts, the first of which turns to the object itself (the filing cabinet) and the second of which turns to the associated practices of the object (filing in action). The first part consists of three chapters. Chapter 1 considers the concept of verticality of information, looking at how the cabinet was marketed and associated with the skyscraper skylines and famous New York landmarks such as the Woolworth building; the second chapter turns to the cabinet in relation to its capacity for storage integrity; and the third zooms in even deeper to the cabinet's structure, to consider how tabs, indexes, and compressors worked in order to make office work more effective and faster. These three chapters enable the author to approach theoretically the concepts of storage, information, classification, and indexing. The four chapters that make up the second part of the book are quite different and less "object focused," moving from considering particularity, what is referred to as "granular certainty," in chapter 4, to the questions of how and why the filing cabinet may be considered a "machine" in chapter 5; the consequences of the gendered labor of filing in chapter 6; and in the last chapter, moving from the office to the home, showing how office storage translated into "scientific housekeeping." Richly and pedagogically illustrated, the images and advertising posters add to the narrative and analysis. Although The Filing Cabinet is deftly written, highly readable, and contains a wealth of interesting and sometimes eye-opening examples and ideas, my main problem with the book as a monograph is precisely its structure. As the narrative stands, it sometimes feels as if the division of object and practices into two separate sections is counterproductive to the very argument that the author is trying to make, which is that these two are profoundly [End Page 222] integrated. The separation occasionally forces the author to reference what is to come later, and the reader to try and recall where and when something was said in the first part, which would have worked much better integrated with the second part, precisely because the object and practices are so closely related. Some of these problems of unfulfilled integration could have been offset by a stronger introduction and conclusion, but the author does not take the opportunity to bring out the overlaps between the various individual chapters, and the conclusion feels somewhat rushed and unrelated to the previous chapters. So, while I remain somewhat frustrated by the narrative structure of the book, believing that a stronger integration between the object and its practices would have resulted in an even more convincing study, Robertson's book defends its place in the context of studies focused on the office or bureaucratic culture, especially in its close material relationship with paper. Scholars such as Delphine Gardey, Cornelia Visman, JoAnne Yates, and many others have shown just how much we did not know about the office as space, bureaucracy, and the materiality of files...

Testing of Energy Efficient Fisonic Devices at the Woolworth Building in New York City

The Fisonic Devices (FD)s are supersonic, condensing heat pumps with a patented internal geometry that causes steam and water to mix and accelerate, converting a minute fraction of fluid’s thermal energy to physical trust (pump head) with the outlet pressure higher than the pressure of the working medium at the inlet of the FD. The FD replaces the tube and shell heat exchanger and heats the water by direct contact with steam. The use of the FD allows reducing the terminal temperature difference between steam and water, the required steam consumption, and the amount of cold potable water required to quench the condensate. The operation of the Fisonic system results in reduction of building steam, cold water and sewer costs. The purpose of the described project was to manufacture, install, test, and demonstrate the performance and energy efficiency of the FD’s for the space heating system of the major City of New York steam consumer - Woolworth building. The test of FD’s resulted in reduction of the annual steam supply in comparison with the existing system by 20%, elimination of cold quench water consumption, and reduction of steam, water, and sewer costs.

Constructing Containment: Thompson-Starrett, the Çeşme Beach Houses, and the Geopolitics of American Engineering in Cold War Turkey

For the first half of the twentieth century, Thompson-Starrett and Co., a New York-based American engineering, construction, and contracting firm, dominated the building scene. In operation between 1899 and 1968, it was a leader in skyscraper construction and large-scale projects, and literally built the New York skyline. It designed and constructed the tallest skyscraper of the era, the Woolworth Building, as well as other iconic Manhattan structures such as the Equitable Building, the American Stock Exchange, the New York Municipal Building, and the Claridge, Algonquin, Roosevelt, St. Regis, and Waldorf-Astoria Hotels. A formidable pioneering force in structural engineering a hundred years ago, Thompson-Starrett is, by and large, forgotten today, especially its post-World War II ventures in Turkey, such as the Sarıyar Dam and the Çeşme Beach Houses, a luxury beachfront cooperative located in Ilıca, Izmir. However, what would prompt the engineering firm responsible for the Woolworth Building to take on the road and utility construction and project management of a Turkish summer resort? The answer lies in Cold War geopolitics and booming private enterprise, both of which, in the 1950s, converged in Turkey, relied on American engineering, and involved a complex process of Americanization.

The Routledge Handbook of the History of Women’s Economic Thought

Deep within the lobby of the Woolworth Building—one of New York’s oldest skyscrapers and a living monument to American capitalism—is a golden mosaic. At its heart is the goddess of commerce, flanked on each side by two men on bended knee, presenting the transport innovations that first enabled globalisation: the ship and the railway. However, in the real world—as opposed to the world of the gods—economics is bereft of women. There has only ever been one female Nobel Prize winner in the subject, Elinor Ostrom, while, at the other end of the pipeline, there are two-to-three times as many young men in the USA and UK studying economics as there are young women. Histories of economic thought are filled with great and bearded men—well known figures such as Smith, Ricardo, Marx, Mill, Marshall, Keynes, and Friedman. One of these figures, Alfred Marshall, despite being married to Mary Paley, the first woman economics lecturer in Cambridge, did not hold back on why he thought there were few female economists, writing in 1894 that ‘[e]conomics is a subject generally unsuited for advance by women’. Mark Blaug’s book ‘Great Economists’ (1986), includes 100 economists, only three of which are women. On the one hand, one could argue that this dominance of male figures in the history of economic thought simply reflects fact: that, historically speaking, there have been very few female economists. On the other, we should instead acknowledge that women have long been writing about the economy—but that their work has been overlooked and under appreciated. Indeed, Kirsten Madden et al.’s herculean ‘Bibliography of Female Economic Thought to 1940’ (Routledge, 2004) lists the work of more than 1,700 female economic thinkers.

The Most Dangerous German Agent in America: The Many Lives of Louis N. Hammerling by M. B. B. Biskupski

Reviewed by: The Most Dangerous German Agent in America: The Many Lives of Louis N. Hammerling by M. B. B. Biskupski William Hal Gorby (bio) The Most Dangerous German Agent in America: The Many Lives of Louis N. Hammerling. By M. B. B. Biskupski. (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2015. Pp. xi, 175. $29.00 paper) Readers will have an exhilarating time with M. B. B. Biskupski’s vivid biography of Louis N. Hammerling (1870–1935), an enigma to many as “a pathological liar, crook, swindler, ruthless entrepreneur, and a patriot—of which nation he could never decide” (p. 3). In this short volume, Biskupski has done what many social historians dream of writing—reconstructing the life of someone who left a small paper trail. A leading expert of Polish and Polish-American history, Biskupski located shreds of evidence in seventy-four archival collections in America, Great Britain, Poland, Canada, and Austria to painstakingly tell the story of the most significant Polish-immigrant voice at the turn of the twentieth century. Biskupski’s work serves three major functions. First, he tells an amazing yarn about an infamous but, at times, sad historical character. Hammerling emerges as a person able to work in the shadows of political, labor, and business deals. He was the confidant of many important people, but as Biskupski notes, “Memory loss of awkward or potentially incriminating events seems to have plagued poor Hammerling” [End Page 268] (p. 27). He was involved in many nefarious business schemes such as incorporating a business in New Jersey at $200,000 to exhibit coal at the St. Louis Exposition, smuggling diamonds from Austria, and smuggling money into Poland. But he was also a champion of immigrants, speaking out often against immigration-restriction policies and using his newspapers to criticize the notorious Dillingham Commission of 1911. Second, the author fills a gap in the literature on immigrant assimilation and the role of middle- and upper-class immigrant brokers in assisting new arrivals in their host countries. Finally, Biskupski produces a truly transnational history through one man’s complex life. His thorough research abroad highlights the many transnational connections in World War I counterintelligence and immigrant politics between the host and former countries. The book is divided into eight chapters highlighting key roles Hammerling played in his convoluted career. A Polish-Jewish immigrant who converted to Catholicism, Hammerling hailed from Drohojów, a Galician village of mixed Polish, Ukrainian, and Jewish populations. In the late nineteenth century, Hammerling wandered across Europe, to Pennsylvania anthracite country, and even to Hawaii’s sugar fields. The entrepreneurial Hammerling served as a key broker for John Mitchell during the 1902 coal strike, helped Republicans as their agent in “actively buying immigrant votes” (p. 31), was friends with Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, and was the “advertising broker to the immigrant press” (p. 11). His control of the American Association of Foreign Language Newspapers (AAFLN) made him a wealthy man by his thirties. Biskupski’s coverage of the AAFLN is fascinating and sheds new light on the role of pro-business immigrant propaganda that discouraged socialism and “suggested” at which “established American business firms” to seek employment (p. 31). His successes were also his undoing. He engaged in several “get-rich-quick” schemes, and his AAFLN business engaged in sketchy business practices. There were no directors, no meetings, and no meeting minutes kept; Hammerling paid dividends only to those [End Page 269] who expected them, fixed the books giving himself an extra cut of profits, and had several employees every year take company records to the boiler room and burn them. His AAFLN office in Manhattan’s Woolworth Building was a center of duplicitous financial dealings, hair-brained schemes, and political espionage. Bribes were exchanged, like Hammerling’s role with Percy Andrea, the brewing industry’s agent. Hammerling made $83,000 from 1913 to 1915, carrying liquor advertising in his newspaper without registering it as such, a violation of an act of Congress. This came while hiding that the brewers paid him to publish their articles under his name and give paid speeches nationwide against prohibition. His Manhattan office was even the site of a supposed...

1913: in search of the world before the Great War

Today, 1913 is inevitably viewed through the lens of 1914: as the last year before a that would shatter the global economic order and tear Europe apart, undermining its global pre-eminence. Our perspectives narrowed by hindsight, the world of that year is reduced to its most frivolous features--last summers in grand aristocratic residences--or its most destructive ones: the unresolved rivalries of the great European powers, the fear of revolution, violence in the Balkans. In this illuminating history, Charles Emmerson liberates the world of 1913 from this prelude to war narrative, and explores it as it was, in all its richness and complexity. Traveling from Europe's capitals, then at the height of their global reach, to the emerging metropolises of Canada and the United States, the imperial cities of Asia and Africa, and the boomtowns of Australia and South America, he provides a panoramic view of a world crackling with possibilities, its future still undecided, its outlook still open. The world in 1913 was more modern than we remember, more similar to our own times than we expect, more globalized than ever before. The Gold Standard underpinned global flows of goods and money, while mass migration reshaped the world's human geography. Steamships and sub-sea cables encircled the earth, along with new technologies and new ideas. Ford's first assembly line cranked to life in 1913 in Detroit. The Woolworth Building went up in New York. While Mexico was in the midst of bloody revolution, Winnipeg and Buenos Aires boomed. An era of petro-geopolitics opened in Iran. China appeared to be awaking from its imperial slumber. Paris celebrated itself as the city of light--Berlin as the city of electricity. Full of fascinating characters, stories, and insights, 1913: In Search of the World before the Great War brings a lost world vividly back to life, with provocative implications for how we understand our past and how we think about our future.

The Skyscraper and the City: The Woolworth Building and the Making of Modern New York (review)

The Skyscraper and the City: The Woolworth Building and the Making of Modern New York (review)

Review: The Skyscraper and the City: The Woolworth Building and the Making of Modern New York, by Gail Fenske

Review: <i>The Skyscraper and the City: The Woolworth Building and the Making of Modern New York</i>, by Gail Fenske

Family Hair Looms

heirloom-2. something having special monetary or sentimental value or significance that is handed on either by or apart from formal inheritance from one generation to another.-Webster's Third International Dictionary In the last years of his life, my father's rent-controlled apartment on the Upper West Side became the repository of what had been his lawyer's office in the glamorous Woolworth Building in Lower Manhattan. The office itself was small and chaotic, though my father claimed that he knew where everything was. My father's attachment to his office and the papers that filled it was intense, but at some point in the 1980s, the combination of his worsening Parkinson's disease and the economic demands of the law firm from whom he rented his space forced him to give up his name on the door. The Redwelds, the distinctive rust-colored containers of legal files, moved uptown. When I inherited my father's possessions after his death, I found, tucked away in his dresser drawers and in the Redwelds that I thought contained the history of his legal career, the unsorted memorabilia of our family: random items from past and forgotten lives-cemetery receipts for the upkeep of graves, report cards, loose photographs of unidentified subjects, magazines, newspaper articles, telegrams, letters in Yiddish, and the mysterious locks of hair that I allude to in my title. What was the point of my keeping what, on the face of it, was precious neither to me nor to anyone else-unless, through another kind of editorial decision, I could figure out whether there was something I could learn from what, as an academic, I called my archive, my material. Material for what? For a narrative I would some day construct about a family that had vanished without a trace. Or maybe just the opposite. This family, over generations, had left traces-in objects, in documents, and finally in me. What was missing was a story that would make sense of the silence that surrounded the scraps of information I had gathered, a story that would bear witness in the place of the absent voices. If I haven't already done so in a gesture of efficiency, at my death someone will toss this entire legacy into a black trash bag and it will all vanish down the garbage chute of history, completing the disappearance already in progress. But perhaps if I convert these objects into words, I can counter the vanishing act. I can share my objects and reinsert them into the wider history to which they belong. This is because my story branches into a network of narratives both characterized by their incompleteness and their interrelatedness. The story I'm trying to tell is both individual and collective. For example, if you click onto the web site jewishgen.org you can see, through criss-crossing tracks of virtual connection, the attempts of many other third-generation descendants of an Eastern European world, shattered at the end of the nineteenth century into the shards and scraps of diaspora, to make sense of a fractured past. The objects-in particular, the locks of hair-photographs, and documents in my personal safekeeping for which I am seeking an interpretive framework take on meaning in relation to a world to which I have no direct access beyond their limited material dimensions. My objects bear witness, as it were, to the existence of a community to which I belong only remotely, but that I can invoke when I insert them into this historical context. The hair was stored in a once-elegant cardboard box. I believe that after my grandmother's death in 1954, my father kept the locks previously saved by my grandmother, without necessarily knowing their origin. While I can safely guess that this hair belongs to my father's side of the family (on my mother's side everyone had bonestraight black hair), what does it mean to inherit something when you don't know for sure to whom it belonged? In this case, since the hair is unassigned-and, we might say, unlike a letter, unsigned-what is the status of possession of hair? …

A Historian's Brief Guide to New Museum Studies

A Historian's Brief Guide to New Museum Studies

Marcel Duchamp: The Woolworth Building as Readymade, January 1916 (An Approximation)

Marcel Duchamp: The Woolworth Building as Readymade, January 1916 (An Approximation)

AIA Guide to the Architecture of Atlanta

60 ARRIS Volume 6 1995 AIA Guide to the Architecture of Atlanta. Text by Isabelle Gournay, photographs by Paul G. Beswick, foreword by Dana F. White, edited by Gerald W. Sams. Athens, Ga., and London: The University of Georgia Press, 1993, xxxi + 365 pp. The AIA Guide to the ArchitectureofAtlanta joins those for Chicago and Syracuse (both published in 1993) and Washington, D.C. (1994) to form a valuable series of guides to the architecture ofAmerica's major cities. These guides have been developed under the direction of local chapters of the American Institute ofArchitects. While an unusually talented and perceptive team was formed to complete this project, the choice of Isabelle Gournay as primary author of the book's building descriptions is surprising.1 She has been a frequent visitor to Atlanta, butshe does not reside there (she teaches at the University of Maryland), and nothing in her previous work would suggest as catholic an interest in or understanding of the architectural developments of the last 150 years as she reveals in this work. Her previous writings have focused almost entirely on French architecture in France, Quebec, and the United States. In his preface, Gerald Sams describes her writingas "lively, readable, and insightful," and Ifind his descriptionapt. Gournaycombineshistorical fact and architectural description with critical analysis 1. Gournay is a Yale-trained architecture historian whose writings include Le Nouveau Trocadera (Liege, 1985) as well as translations of various French works on architecture. White is the author of TheMaking of Modern Atlanta (Atlanta, 1991), The Urbanists, 1865-1915 (New York, Richard Meier, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, 1983. Peachtree Street facade, view from northeast (courtesy of Paul G. Beswick). and judgment. She not only tells us what to look at, she tells us how to interpret what we see. Her description of the Atlanta City Hall is typical: The Atlanta City Hall, a fourteen-story tower surmounted by a shallow pyramidal roof, was erected on the site of the Neal Residence, which served as General Sherman's headquarters during the Civil War. Unlike the Art Deco setback skyscrapers of New York City which inspired its easily recognizable silhouette, the new municipal building featured relatively obsolete neo-gothic decorative elements, each setback being enhanced with pinnacles and pointed arches (this type of ornamentation had known its heyday with the completion of the Woolworth Building in New York City in 1913). All exterior and interior materials were extracted or manufactured in Georgia. On top of a granite base, the reinforced concrete structure is covered with cream-colored tiles and olive green spandrels in terra-cotta (notice the Phoenix motif on the second-story spandrels, symbolizing the quick recovery of Atlanta after the Civil War). No money was spared on the main lobby, with its floors and walls in polished marble and ornate gilded-wood ceiling, entrance and elevator doors in heavy bronze, and brass fixtures. The exterior and all public spaces have recently been restored to their original grandeur concurrently with the addition on the south side.2 1989), and other articles about Atlanta and urbanism. Beswick is a distinguished architect who heads Beswick International. Sams has been active in AlA affairs in both Atlanta and Savannah. 2. AlA Guide to the Architecture of Atlanta, 10-11. Gournay combines architectural description, stylistic identification, contextual analysis, and critical commentary in a succinct but delightful manner. She is not afraid to take a stand for or against a building, so the text is consistently interesting. But her judgments are sometimes at odds with the editor's selection of photographs. For example, the passage quoted above goes on to describe Walter T. Downing's Trinity United Methodist Church in glowing terms as a powerfulbrick structure given strength and ornamentation by massive brick buttresses and translucent stained-glass windows illustrating the history ofthe church, butno photograph ofthebuilding isincluded. Too many omissions of this type occur; it is frustrating to read about a structure that the author describes enthusiastically but not be able to see it. A second irritant is that building descriptions are separated from their listing by map reference, name, address, date, and architect; it would seem preferable to discuss each building immediately after its listing...

The Architecture of New York City: Histories and Views of Important Structures, Sites, and Symbols

Seventeenth Century: Dutch Beginnings. Eighteenth Century: Georgian Architecture and a Revolution. The Federal Style. Nineteenth Century: Greek Revival. Temples of Commerce and Houses of Industry. Churches: From Temple Fronts to Statue Columns. Cast-Iron Buildings, Their Legacy, and the Palazzo Style. The Tallest Building in the World, 1913-30: The Woolworth Building. Fashionable Dwellings. Theaters. The New York Port Comes of Age. Art Deco Skyscrapers. Rockefeller Center: Innovation in Urban Planning. Graves, Gardens, and Parks. The Picturesque Point of View: Fonthill Castle, Firehouses, and the Seventh Regiment Armory. O Harp and Altar: The Brooklyn Bridge. Glossary. Bibliography. Index.

Woolworth Building Renovation Precast Concrete Used for Terra Cotta Facade

T he decision to use precast concrete for the renovation of the 53-story terra cotta facade of the Woolworth Building was based on the results of extensive accelerated weathering tests. Alternate materials were studied because of the high cost and limited availability of terra cotta replacement units. In the early 1900's, when the Woolworth Building was constructed in New York City, terra cotta was the in vogue material for building facades. The hand-molded clay units easily reproduced the rich ornamentation being demanded by the architects of the day, and the ceramic glazed surfaces on the units could be produced to simulate natural stones or to create whole new ranges of color never before available. Architectural tastes changed, however, and as elaborate ornamentation began to be forsaken in favor of the smoother cleaner look of modern architecture, most of the terra cotta manufacturers either went out of business or turned their attention to the production of bricks or other clay items. In 1981, when a large number of replacement units were needed for the renovation of the Woolworth Building, only one manufacturer could be located. The 792 ft (241 m) high Woolworth

The Woolworth Building

The Woolworth Building