Park Row Building

After the New York World Building, the next highest building in the world was in, of all places, Milwaukee Wisconsin. However, their city hall was the tallest building only for a few years until this building, built in 1899 and photographed in 1912, the Park Row Building. Right up the road from the World Building, it was 390 feet high, and stood as the tallest building in the world until 1901, and the tallest office building in the world until 1908.

This photo, taken from New York Harbor between 1899 and 1901, shows the Park Row Building (center) towering over the previous tallest skyscraper in the world, the New York World Building (the dome-topped building to the left).

Today, the Park Row Building still exists, although it has been extensively renovated to turn most of the building into apartments. At over 100 years old, it is one of the oldest skyscrapers in the city, and it is the oldest one to have once held the title of the world's tallest building.

Equitable Life Assurance Building

This photo, taken around 1906, shows Equitable Life Assurance Building, which was built in 1870 and is sometimes considered to be the world's first skyscraper. Topping out at 130 feet and seven stories, it is tiny by modern standards, but when it was first built, it was the tallest non-church building in the world, and the first office building to include passenger elevators. It remained the tallest non-church building in the world until 1884, when it was surpassed by the Home Insurance Building in Chicago. Today, the world's tallest building, Burj Khalifa, is about 21 times the height of the Equitable Building. Today, there is another Equitable Building on the same site as this first one, at 120 Broadway. But, what happened to this majestic edifice, once promoted as a "fire-proof building"?


Naturally, the "fire-proof building" was gutted by a fire on January 9, 1912. The firefighting efforts were ineffective because of the cold temperatures, and the water ended up just freezing to the building, clinging to the hollow remains. The site, as mentioned above, was rebuilt in 1915, and that building still stands on Broadway today.