Six feet wide at the point, twenty-two storeys tall, and built on a triangle nobody else could use. You cannot go inside, and you do not need to.
A leftover triangle
Broadway runs diagonally across Manhattan because it follows a road that predates the grid, and where it crosses Fifth Avenue at 23rd Street it leaves a sharp triangular lot that nobody had been able to build on profitably. Daniel Burnham took the shape as the plan and put a twenty-two-storey steel-framed tower on it in 1902, tapering to a point six feet across.
New Yorkers were convinced it would fall down. They called it Burnham’s Folly and bet on how far the debris would reach. It is still standing, and the steel frame that made them nervous is exactly why it is — the walls carry no load, which is what let the building go so tall on so little ground.
Its actual name was the Fuller Building. Nobody used it. The site had been known as the flat iron for decades because of its shape, and the nickname won so completely that the whole neighbourhood is now called Flatiron.
The wind
The tower’s shape funnels wind down 23rd Street and it was notorious in the 1900s for lifting women’s skirts, which drew crowds of men to loiter on the corner. The story that police shouted “23 skidoo” to move them along is the popular explanation for the phrase and is probably not true, but it is repeated so often that it might as well be part of the building.
The wind is still there. Cross 23rd Street on a blustery February day and you will find out.
Photographing it
The classic view is from the north, from the Fifth Avenue traffic island around 23rd or 24th Street, looking south so the point of the building faces you and both façades run away at an angle. Steichen and Stieglitz both photographed it from roughly there. In winter with bare trees you get the full shape; in summer the trees on Madison Square soften it.
The other good angle is from inside Madison Square Park, looking west, where the park gives you foreground.
What is happening to it
The building has sat empty since its last tenant left in 2019, and has been through a period of ownership disputes, a botched auction and a fresh set of plans to convert it to apartments. Scaffolding and netting have come and gone. Check what state the façade is in before building a photograph around it.
You cannot go inside. There is no lobby to visit, no deck, and no tour. It is a building to look at from the street, and it is one of the very few that fully rewards that.
While you are there
Madison Square Park is directly opposite, with rotating public sculpture and the original Shake Shack. Eataly is on the north-west corner. Union Square is a ten-minute walk south, and the Empire State Building is eleven blocks north on Fifth.
More Skyscrapers & Views
Empire State Building
Built in 410 days during the Depression and empty for years afterwards. The 86th-floor deck is open air, which is what the newer decks in Midtown are not.
Chrysler Building
The best Art Deco tower in the world, and you cannot go up it. The lobby is open, the crown is not, and it is still worth the detour.
Top of the Rock
The deck to pick if you are only doing one, for the simple reason that the Empire State Building is in the photograph rather than under your feet.