Flatiron Building

When construction started, New Yorkers placed bets on how far the debris would spread when the wind knocked it down. They called it Burnham's Folly.

The Flatiron Building was designed by Chicago architect Daniel Burnham and completed in nineteen oh two. It fills a triangular plot at the intersection of Fifth Avenue and Broadway — a wedge-shaped site that produces a building just six and a half feet wide at its narrowest point. At twenty-two stories and two hundred and eighty-five feet, it was one of the tallest buildings in New York when it opened on October first, nineteen oh two.

The building was developed as the headquarters of the Fuller Construction Company, and its official name is the Fuller Building. Nobody has ever called it that. The shape reminded people of a cast-iron clothes iron, and the name Flatiron stuck despite every effort to make "Fuller" happen.

The triangular geometry creates powerful downdrafts at street level — the "Flatiron breeze" — that was famous enough to attract men who would loiter on Twenty-Third Street hoping to catch a glimpse of women's skirts being blown upward. Police officers were stationed at the corner to shoo them away. The phrase "twenty-three skidoo" — meaning to scram — may have originated from officers telling these men to move along from Twenty-Third Street.