From the right angle on Fifth Avenue, the Flatiron Building appears impossibly thin—a blade of limestone slicing north through Madison Square, its acute apex barely wider than a doorway. When it rose in 1902, New Yorkers called it 'Burnham's Folly' and placed bets on how far the rubble would scatter when the wind brought it down. The wind never did. Instead, the building became perhaps the most photographed structure in America: a symbol of the city's audacious belief that geometry, steel, and sheer vertical ambition could reshape the laws of architecture.
The site itself forced the innovation. Where Broadway slashes diagonally across Fifth Avenue at 23rd Street, it creates an impossibly acute triangular lot—just 6.5 feet wide at its northern apex, widening to 87 feet at its southern base. George Fuller, whose construction company had pioneered steel-frame building in Chicago, acquired the land in 1901 and hired Daniel Burnham, the architect who had masterminded the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. Burnham saw what others dismissed: not a problem lot, but an opportunity to build the most distinctive office tower in New York.
Burnham designed the Flatiron as a vertical Renaissance palazzo, its facade divided like a classical column into base, shaft, and capital. The limestone and terra-cotta skin, ornamented with Greek faces, seashells, and floral patterns, hangs from the steel skeleton beneath—an early curtain wall that would define skyscraper construction for the next century. At street level, the building's prow creates fierce wind currents; in the early 1900s, police stationed officers at 23rd Street to disperse men who gathered to watch the gusts lift women's skirts, giving rise to the phrase 'twenty-three skiddoo.'
Photographers discovered the Flatiron immediately. Edward Steichen's 1904 image, shot through bare winter branches in Madison Square Park, remains one of the most reproduced photographs in history. Alfred Stieglitz, his contemporary, returned again and again to capture the building in rain, snow, and twilight. Something about its shape—triangular, sculptural, alien to the grid—made it irresistible to artists seeking to define modern New York. A century later, tourists still crowd the same angles, phones raised where Steichen steadied his tripod.
"The Flatiron Building is to the United States what the Parthenon was to Greece."
— Architectural Record, 1902
After decades as office space, the Flatiron was converted to luxury condominiums in 2024, its interiors reimagined while the ornate facade remains protected as a New York City landmark. The building no longer offers public access, but its exterior rewards lingering attention. Walk the full perimeter from 22nd to 23rd Street, watching the prow sharpen and flatten with each step. Stand in Madison Square Park at dusk as the windows catch the last light. Consider that this 'folly'—too thin to survive, too strange to succeed—has outlasted nearly every building that surrounded it in 1902. Some gambles, it turns out, pay off for centuries.