Once the world’s tallest skyscraper, the Woolworth Building is noted for its striking but incongruous synthesis of Beaux-Arts architecture, fanciful Gothic ornamentation, and audacious steel-framed engineering. Here, in the first history of this great urban landmark, Gail Fenske argues that its design serves as a compelling lens through which to view the distinctive urban culture of Progressive-era New York.
             Fenske shows here that the building’s multiplicity of meanings reflected the cultural contradictions that defined New York City’s modernity. For Frank Woolworth—founder of the famous five-and-dime store chain—the building served as a towering trademark, for advocates of the City Beautiful movement it suggested a majestic hotel de ville, for technological enthusiasts it represented the boldest of experiments in vertical construction, and for tenants it provided an evocative setting for high-style consumption. Tourists, meanwhile, experienced a spectacular sightseeing destination and avant-garde artists discovered a twentieth-century future. In emphasizing this faceted significance, Fenske illuminates the process of conceiving, financing, and constructing skyscrapers as well as the mass phenomena of consumerism, marketing, news media, and urban spectatorship that surround them.
            As the representative example of the skyscraper as a “cathedral of commerce,” the Woolworth Building remains a commanding presence in the skyline of lower Manhattan, and the generously illustrated Skyscraper and the City is a worthy testament to its importance in American culture.

Gail Fenske is professor of architecture at Roger Williams University.

“Fenske’s impressively comprehensive, contextual, and deeply researched account of the making of the Woolworth Building weaves together the histories of the client, the architect, and the building itself, including design, construction, technology, and representation. It is also about the city, and no other architectural history reveals so well what it means to build a major commercial building in New York City.”

"Fenske's prose is academic but clear, enlivened by her interest in the cultural moment: Newspapers and magazines, she notes, started producing views of lower Manhattan's cluster of skyscrapers -- the Woolworth most prominent among them -- as the city became known by 'the world's first signature skyline.' This is a definitive take on a 20th-century classic."

"The Skyscraper and the City . . . offers a new examination of the building and its significance in New York’s history. . . .  

"This is a wonderful book: it is scholarly, well-written, beautifully illustrated . . . and utterly absorbing. . . . [The book] will delight anyone interested in real architecture, consumer culture and the urban landscape. In Fenske, the Woolworth Building has found a sympathetic and thorough chronicler, and her work is a monument in itself to the urban culture and admiration for things European . . . that existed before the catastrophe of 1914-18."

"Perhaps the best book ever devoted to a particular New York City building is Gail Fenske's meticulously researched and exquisitely illustrated history of the Woolworth Building. . . . Fenske's magnificent study is fully worthy of its subject. May both long endure."

"In the seven chapters of his exceptionally thorough biography of the building, Gail Fenske examines the roots of Mr. Woolworth's company, from his first five-and-ten-cent store in Utica, New York, to its developments as the quintessential chain store it became. ... Throughout, the writing is clear, direct, and articulate. Handsome in all of its aspects, the book features wide margins, high-quality coated stock, a suitable serif type, and numerous full-page illustrations. In addition to two appendices that list each of the Woolworth stores in 1910 and 1912, thereby illustrating the phenomenal growth of the company in two years, there are fifty-two pages of notes, an impressive bibliography, and a detailed index."