The entrance to the lobby of the Woolworth Building faces Broadway, in New York's trendy Tribeca neighborhood.
F.W. Woolworth earned millions from his chain of five-and-dime stores between the years 1879 and 1913. He used his newfound wealth to pay for the building and all of its flourishes.
Woolworth aimed to create the best building ever constructed, and since he had the money to do so, he hired the famous architect Cass Gilbert.
Construction workers were nervous about working on the building because skyscrapers were still a relatively new concept at the time, and there was lots of pressure to execute perfectly.
The architect and construction team knew they wanted to make a gorgeous building, but it was difficult for them to choose a style for their skyscraper.
At the time, buildings tended to have odd shapes — like the famous Flatiron Building, for example — as there hadn't yet been a consensus about what a skyscraper should look like.
Stylistically, the Woolworth Building is very interesting. Though it was supposed to be built in the Gothic style, it's technically a steel frame with Gothic ornamentation.
To ensure that it was fire-safe, almost no wood was used in the building. The little bit that was used was fire-tested and encased in metal.
When you look up to the ceiling, you'll see various countries listed within the outer edge of the center tiled panel. The list honors the countries that were considered the world's economic powers when the building was completed in 1913, though it's not known what criteria was used.
There are four posters that depict old scenery of New York — but, oddly, someone stole the labels off of all of them.
On that same level is an old safe that was used by a bank branch until 1931. These days, there's no real practical use for a giant safe, so it's been left empty.
When the bank branch went out of business, the state of New York disabled all the locks so that you couldn’t accidentally lock yourself inside.
If you ever find yourself designing a building, it's probably best to avoid following this same method. The incredibly crammed setup often means that in order to fix anything, you have to take out 12 or so pipes that are in the way of the one you need to fix.
Originally, the builders thought the pipes would never be faulty, and for the first 75 years they were right.
While here, our tour guide reminded us that the building was designed to be self-contained. Building engineers made their own electricity, heat, and hot water, which required having six giant boilers.
The building had everything but their own water. Original construction plans had workers digging down around 1,500 feet to find water before they finally gave up. Still, digging for water proved that the bedrock in Manhattan went down at least 1,538 feet.
The rest of the building has mainly been used as offices, but the top 30 floors are currently being renovated to be condos.
Nikola Tesla was even an office tenant for a year before they threw him out for failing to pay his rent.
History comes with a price — the penthouse will cost you $110 million. A one-bedroom apartment is priced at about $4.5 million.
Source: Bloomberg News