(nyc-architecture.com)

When the sun comes out in New York, the city has an immediate face-lift.  Restaurants open the outside seating, ice-cream trucks start pulling up on street corners and New Yorkers flock to the city’s parks.  On April 4^th, when New York’s temperature tipped into the 60s, Madison Square Park was hub of activity.

“This makes me love living in New York,” said 26-year-old Helen Shaw from Maryland who works at a PR firm.  “I can come to Madison Square Park on my lunch break with the Empire State Building in front of me and the Flatiron behind me.  It’s perfect.”

The Flatiron building, which sits at the intersection of Broadway and Fifth Avenue at the foot of Madison Square Park, has become an iconic building in the city’s infrastructure. It features in the credits for Late Night With David Letterman, transition shots in Friends and it is the office building of Peter Parker in Spiderman.  According to architecture website glasssteelandstone.com, many consider the Flatiron to be the city’s first skyscraper

The building, which was completed in 1902, is surrounded by restaurants and retail stores, but it was originally designed as part of an (unsuccessful) attempt to create and new business center north of Wall Street.

Amos Eno bought the triangular plot of land in 1857 for $30,000, according to the National Register of Historic Places.  On the back half of the lot he built a seven-story hotel called the Cumberland and at the front he built a four-story office building, which he rented to the New York Times. 

Eno began using the three-story backdrop of the hotel wall to project advertisements.  The New York Times liked this idea and started using it as a space to broadcast news bulletins.  On election nights, thousands of people would gather in Madison Square and watch the results projected against the wall of the hotel.

When Eno died in 1899 the site was put up for auction.  His son William bought it for $690,000 and three weeks later sold it on for $801,000.  They had plans to develop the property, but decided to sell it two weeks after buying it for $2million to Cumberland Realty Company, headed by a man named Harry Black.

Black commissioned New York architect Daniel H. Burnham to design a space that could be leased to commercial and financial enterprises, according to nyc-architecture.com.  Burnham designed the 22-story triangular structure, stretching 285 feet into the air.  The building was named the Fuller building after George A. Fuller, the “founder of the skyscraper” and was announced in a New York Times article on August 9^th 1902.

Today, the Flatiron is used as offices for Macmillan Publishing Group as well as retail stores on the ground floor.   It has been a New York City landmark since 1966, part of the Nation Register of History Places since 1979 and a National Historic Landmark in 1989. 

“It’s a awesome place to work,” said George Nicholas, a store clerk on the buildings ground floor.  “It’s been apart of the city for so long.  It links generations of New Yorkers.  I’m sure there are lots of photographs of it on tourists refrigerators around the world, so its nice that I come in and I get to be so close to all this history.”