The Skyscraper Museum is devoted to the study of high-rise building, past, present, and future. The Museum explores tall buildings as objects of design, products of technology, sites of construction, investments in real estate, and places of work and residence. This site will look better in a browser that supports web standards, but it is accessible to any browser or Internet device.
PANORAMA FROM THE WORLD BUILDING, 1892
This panoramic view from the dome of the World Building was assembled by The Skyscraper Museum from ten photographs originally printed in the 1892 King's Handbook of New York City.
Completed in 1890, the World Building, also known as the Pulitzer Building, became the tallest in the world. The tip of its dome soared to 309 feet, and the lantern afforded an observation deck that was open to tourists. For an admission fee of five cents, tourists were able to ascend to a public observatory. Visitors rode an express elevator that shot from the lobby to the twenty-second floor, where they could access the cupola of the dome by staircase. As one viewer expounded in 1897:
"The long drawn-out mighty city was dipped in sunshine, a dark blue sky was above me, and in a picturesque manner the white buildings appeared to be embossed upon the scene--so different from the red brick. It was not only roofs that one was looking at; one could see the entire buildings in their grandeur, as they border upon wide streets--and then again the difference in lights; here a three-story, there a five, another a twelve, and even eighteen and twenty-story houses."
Quoted from Josephine Luschk, "Enchanted by View from World Dome," The World, November 23, 1897.
