Flatiron Building

Flatiron Building

From the street, this 21-story architectural landmark actually looks like a steamship rolling right up Broadway--and briefly made architect Daniel Burnham (a giant in the groundbreaking Chicago architectural movements of the turn of the twentieth century) a New York laughingstock. The building takes its peculiar, triangular shape from the plot it sits on, a wedge-shaped block where Broadway and Fifth Avenue meet. (In an unprecedented development, the building has given its name to the neighborhood, now known as the Flatiron District). Built in 1902 of magnificent, Chicago-style limestone and terracotta, the building measures only six feet across at the northern corner: that has become its signature feature. The Flatiron is one of the country's earliest "skyscrapers," and it has the compromised style of those intermediary structures, which try to disguise the height of a building with deceptive ornamentation.