Note sull'episodio
In 1910 Frank W. Woolworth, rich from his five and ten cent stores, planned an ordinary 12 to 16 story headquarters in lower Manhattan. Then on a trip to Europe, people kept asking him about the Singer Building instead of his stores, and his plans exploded to 30, then 45 stories, with a minimum height of 750 feet. His architect Cass Gilbert pushed it to 792 feet and 60 stories so the tower would not look stubby on its wide base. Woolworth wanted something like the Palace of Westminster clad in granite; Gilbert won with lighter, fireproof glazed terracotta and a U-shaped base that put every office within 10 feet of a window. Contractor Louis J. Horowitz saw ego behind every decision.
Woolworth's 24th floor office was done in French Empire style, with green marble walls, a desk with hidden buttons to summon staff, and portraits of Napoleon, one of which he replaced with a portrait of himself. On April 24, 1913, President Woodrow Wilson pressed a telegraph button in Washington that lit the tower for 900 guests on the 27th floor. By 1914 Woolworth owned it outright, and the bank paid him $100,000 a year to lease its offices. After his death in 1920, his heirs took a $3 million mortgage to pay inheritance taxes and had sold out by 1924. By the 1970s rusting steel was pushing terracotta blocks off the facade, and today the top 30 floors are luxury condominiums.
- Woolworth asking the construction firm to manage the project for free, and being charged its $300,000 fee anyway
- Window counts that range from 2,843 to 5,000 depending on the source
- Darker glaze on the upper terracotta panels to cancel out the fading effect of distance
- The relay that let a button in the White House switch on roughly 80,000 bulbs in New York
- Rust jacking, freeze cycles, and the metal netting hung to protect pedestrians from falling terracotta