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.
CITY INVESTING COMPANY BUILDING
City Investing Building, N.Y. Post, McCord, c. December 20 1907. Collection of the Skyscraper Museum.
"The new City Investing Building, to be erected at Broadway, Cortlandt, and Church Street, will be in several particulars the foremost of the city's skyscrapers.
In its central portion it will rise to a height of thirty stories, and the roof over this thirtieth story will be 418 feet above the curb.
The caisson foundations which will support it will be carried down to bedrock, about eighty feet below the curb, so that the entire structure, above and below ground will be very nearly 500 feet high. The basements and sub-basements will be excavated to a depth of forty feet below the curb.
The total investment involved in the operation will be about $10,000,000, making it in this respect the largest single building project ever undertaken by private capital in this city, and probably in the world.
The building will contain 15,000 tons of structural steel-almost enough to furnish the framework for three Flatiron Buildings.
The rentable space in the new skyscraper will be 500,000 square feet-of if it were separated out on a single floor, an area equivalent to about six blocks the size of the Madison Square Garden. The building will inclose 11,000,000 cubic feet of space-considerably more than the Broad-Exchange Building.
The Broadway front will be twenty-six stories high and the central portion of the building thirty stories. Yet so skillfully has Architect Francis H. Kimball succeeded in carrying out his ideas that one scarcely realizes the structure's great height.
No less than twenty-one very large plunger elevators will be installed to provide the structure's great transportation system. These will be arranged along the southerly side of the arcade, which will extend clear through the building from Broadway to Church Street.
This arcade will in itself be one of the building's most striking features. The Broadway entrance will cover the whole of the Frontage on that thoroughfare, 37½ feet, and the arcade will maintain width throughout, It will be 315 feet long and 40 feet high, rising through two entire stories.
The primary reason for the undertaking of so large a project, according to President Robert E. Dowling of the City Investing Company, is that there is a steadily growing demand for large office space on one floor. Even in some of the more recently built downtown structures, large corporations are finding it difficult to get accommodations without taking in parts of two or more floors, and it is for such tenants that the City Investing Building has been planned."
"Thirty Story City Investing Building: New Structure at Broadway and Cortlandt Street Will Involve Outlay of $10,000,000-- Its Many Unique Features." New York Times, 1906.
