Western Union Building ca. 1885
At 230 feet tall, the Western Union Building, completed in 1875, became the city’s second-tallest office building after the Tribune, and its spired silhouette dominated the vista of Broadway. It was the first “skyscraper” – although that term was not used in print until the 1880s – of George B. Post, who in the following decades would become one of New York’s most prolific architects of tall buildings, designing twelve of the structures featured in our survey, including Joseph Pulitzer’s World Building, which in 1890, at 309 ft., took the title of the tallest office building in the city and in the world. Like its contemporaries, the Tribune Building and the Evening Post Building, Western Union was a masonry bearing-wall structure that also employed some cast-iron columns and wrought iron girders and beams. Architecturally, it was a horizontally striped Victorian pile of red brick and gray stone, crowned with a high mansard roof built over a metal frame. The ornate roof capped an arcaded eighth story where the company’s telegraph operators sent and received messages from a net of wires that crisscrossed rooftops.
From the mid-19th century, telegraphs were the major method of long-distance communication. Using code developed by Samuel Morse to covey “written messages by electricity,” competing companies connected cities, the continent, and opposite sides of oceans with wires and cables that, for considerable charges, carried vital messages. By the 1870s, through inventions and business mergers, Western Union had become the dominant telegraph company. As an article on the new building in the journal The Aldine described: “No single enterprise, in the whole world, has grown so rapidly within a few years, as the telegraph interest of America, of which the Western Union Telegraph Company is the principal exponent; and perhaps it is quite correct that the Company should be the builder and owner of one of the most remarkable structures on the continent, if not in the world…. That the Telegraph Building is to be, architecturally and practically, an immense success, there can be no question; its great height making the amount of disposable space within, simply enormous; and its location, so near the Post Office and the great business centres, rendering its availability quite as marked as its size”.… Called by The Daily Graphic the city’s new “business palaces,” the Western Union Building, like the Tribune, advertised the success of their companies, but they also offered offices for rent on their middle floors.
