After four empty years, the auction of the tower that occupies the intersection of Broadway and Fifth Avenue ends in a fiasco that threatens its future
There is a book in English about the Flatiron building, The Flatiron: The New York landmark and the incomparable city that arose with itby Alice Sparberg Alexiou, who recounts that, in the 1930s, the tower that occupies the intersection between Fifth Avenue and Broadway in Manhattan it was sold for two million dollars, barely change, because its tenants were medium-sized businesses that paid low rents and the businesses that occupied its ground floor were neighborhood stores: drugstores, haberdashery, pharmacies… Things like that.
Incredible as it may seem, the reality of the Flatiron is even worse in 2023: it takes four years unemployed because its owners were not able to agree what to do with their treasure. Last month, the building was finally put on the market via auction, with the highest bid being placed by an unknown investor named Jacob Garlick: 190 million dollars, 175 million euros, was his offer. In his purchase contract, Garlick promised to invest another 30 million in the restoration and maintenance of the building (today between scaffolding) and to make a first payment of another 30 million in early April. The winner of the auction has not complied with this last condition and has not requested a postponement, so has forfeited its right to the Flatiron. The next bidder, Jeffrey Gural, has said that he no longer has an interest in keeping the property. In his opinion, the investment that the Flatiron needs is 100 million dollars, not 30. Nobody wants the prettiest building in Manhattan.
The Flatiron story also began with a dubious businessman like Garlick. Amos Eno, the developer and first owner of the building, was a businessman active in the second half of the 19th century and known for his extravagant investments. He built a hippodrome destined to reproduce the Roman chariot races on Fifth Avenue and it lasted two years. For decades, Eno was a clumsy, grandiose nouveau riche mocked by New Yorkers. But sometimes he was right. In the 1860s he opened the Fifth Avenue Hotel, at 23rd Street, and managed to make his environment, the area around Madison Square, become a new hub for Manhattan, a friendlier, less class-oriented alternative to the core of Washington Squareone kilometer to the south (the neighborhood of Eddith Wharton and Henry James, to understand each other).
In 1880, Eno bought the Flamiron site, then occupied by another four-story hotel, the Saint Germain, which gave way to an eight-story apartment building, the Cumberland. The first illuminated advertisements of the time were projected on its dividing wall. Eno was the first person to refer to the place as Flatiron, because of its resemblance to an iron.
The history of the site changed again for a rule. In 1892, New York changed its building regulations, put more lax conditions for the use of iron and steel structures and that led to the city experiencing its second real estate boom, after that of 1860. The first with elevators. The lawsuit attracted businessmen such as George A. Fuller, an architect who had become rich in Louis Sullivan’s Chicago and who took ownership of the Cumberland after some missteps.
Fuller, educated at MIT, was indifferent to the composition of facades but was obsessed with structures. The Flatiron was the great challenge of his life, although he never dealt with his skin: it corresponded to Daniel Burnham, another American architect, this educated in Paris, in a taste for eclecticism beaux arts. For this reason, Burnham appears as the main author of the building and, for this reason, its façade is full of Greco-Latinisms. At first, his neighbors were ironic with his retorting aspect. Today’s New Yorkers mourn his abandonment and his uncertain future.
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