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Gillender Building, New York City. Photochrom print, 1880-1890.

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Gillender Building, New York City. Photochrom print, 1880-1890.

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Summary

Historic Sites

The Gillender Building was a skyscraper located in Lower Manhattan, New York City. It was completed in 1896 and was one of the first steel-framed high-rise buildings in the city. The building was located at the corner of Nassau and Pine Streets and was notable for its elaborate Victorian architecture, including a distinctive mansard roof and ornate cornices. The Gillender Building was eventually demolished in the mid-20th century as part of a wave of redevelopment in Lower Manhattan.

Photochrome is a process for producing colorized images from black-and-white photographic negatives via the direct photographic transfer of a negative onto lithographic printing plates. The process was invented in the 1880s and was most popular in the 1890s.

In 1857 Elisha Otis introduced the safety elevator, allowing easy passenger access to upper floors. A crucial development was also the use of a steel frame instead of stone or brick. An early development in this area was five floors high Oriel Chambers in Liverpool, England. While its height is not considered very impressive today, the world's first skyscraper was the ten-story Home Insurance Building in Chicago, built in 1884–1885. Most early skyscrapers emerged in the land-strapped areas of Chicago and New York City toward the end of the 19th century. In a building like these, a steel frame supported the entire weight of the walls, instead of walls carrying the weight called "Chicago skeleton" construction. 1889 marks the first all-steel framed skyscraper in Chicago, while Louis Sullivan's Wainwright Building in St. Louis, Missouri, 1891, was the first steel-framed building with vertical bands to emphasize the height of the building and is therefore considered by some to be the first true skyscraper. After an early competition between Chicago and New York City for the world's tallest building, New York took the lead by 1895 with the completion of the American Surety Building, leaving New York with the title of the world's tallest building for many years. New York City developers competed among themselves, with successively taller buildings claiming the title of "world's tallest" in the 1920s and early 1930s, culminating with the completion of the Chrysler Building in 1930 and the Empire State Building in 1931, the world's tallest building for forty years.

Photographic views of New York City, 1860's-2010's,

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Date

01/01/1900
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Contributors

Detroit Publishing Co., publisher
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Location

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Source

Library of Congress
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No known restrictions on publication.

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gillender building new york ny
gillender building new york ny