JF Ptak Science Books Post 2580
For many years the steeple of Trinity Church was the tallest object in Manhattan, but by 1907 when the city was entrenched or engulfed in a skyscraper building adventure the future of massiveness and of height knew no bounds, especially when the limits of those boundaries were attainable. And so this enormous structure grew around the church, with room-enough-for-steeple, built among the clouds. It turns out that the 284' spire was the tallest thing in Manhattan until 1890, when the World Building was completed (17 years before the publication of this engraving) raising the new highest heights ceiling to 348'. If you iterated the scale of Trinity (below) to the rest of the imaginary building, the new structure would be about 750' tall--the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower would come close to that in another two years (and be the tallest building in the world until 1913), so the building shown below would have been probably the world's largest in 1907, and easily the most massive.
[Source: Puck magazine, March 6, 1907, wood engraving by Albert Levering]
This reminds me somewhat of an earlier vision of an engulfed Trinity--Thomas Nast's future Manhattan skyline of 1881 for Harpers Weekly, where the church is visible still but crowded out almost entirely by enormous structures which were still/only decades away:
[Source: an earlier post on this blog http://longstreet.typepad.com/thesciencebookstore/2009/12/the-history-of-the-future-of-skyscrapers-thomas-nast-1881.html]
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