On the evening of April 24, 1913, President Woodrow Wilson pressed a telegraph key in Washington, and eighty thousand light bulbs blazed to life on Broadway. The Woolworth Building—sixty stories of Gothic limestone and terra-cotta soaring 792 feet above City Hall Park—had arrived as the tallest building in the world. Reverend S. Parkes Cadman, addressing the nine hundred guests at the opening banquet, christened it the 'Cathedral of Commerce,' a name that captured both the building's medieval silhouette and its thoroughly modern purpose: to announce that American retail had become a force as mighty as any European monarchy.
Frank Winfield Woolworth understood spectacle. The son of a New York farm family, he had revolutionized retail with his five-and-dime stores, where every item was priced at a nickel or a dime and displayed openly for customers to handle. By 1910, when he merged his empire with four competitors to create F.W. Woolworth Company, he controlled 611 stores and dreamed of a headquarters that would dwarf his rivals. He hired Cass Gilbert, a Minnesota-born architect who had trained at MIT and apprenticed at McKim, Mead & White. Gilbert proposed a Gothic tower—not the classical columns favored by banks, but the vertical thrust of medieval cathedrals. Woolworth, who saw himself as heir to the great merchant princes of Renaissance Venice, approved immediately.
The lobby is a reliquary of commerce. Step through the bronze doors into a cruciform space vaulted like a Byzantine chapel, its ceiling covered in glass mosaics of blue, green, and gold, with phoenixes rising from swirling florals. Veined marble from the Greek island of Skyros lines the walls. Where the arcade meets the mezzanine, twelve plaster brackets carry grotesque caricatures of the building's creators: Woolworth counting his nickels and dimes, Gilbert cradling a miniature of his tower, structural engineer Gunvald Aus measuring a steel girder. Above the mezzanine, C. Paul Jennewein's allegorical murals depict Commerce and Labor in the amber tones of a medieval manuscript. The message is unsubtle but effective: this is a temple, and money is its sacrament.
For sixteen years the Woolworth Building held the title of world's tallest, yielding only to 40 Wall Street in 1929. But height was never the point. Gilbert's genius lay in reconciling medieval ornament with modern engineering: the terra-cotta cladding that sheathes the steel frame, the graduated setbacks that carry the eye upward, the crown of Gothic pinnacles that dissolves the roofline into sky. At night, illuminated from within, the tower glows like a lantern above Lower Manhattan—a beacon visible to ships entering New York Harbor, just as the cathedrals of Europe once guided pilgrims across dark landscapes.
"The Woolworth Building is a battle between American engineering and the art of the Old World. The result is a building both romantic and rational, a skyscraper dressed as a cathedral."
— Paul Goldberger
Today the Woolworth Building operates as luxury residences above and office space below, its lobby closed to casual visitors since September 2001. But guided tours—led in partnership with Cass Gilbert's great-granddaughter—now offer access to the mosaic-covered vestibules and the ornate banking hall on the mezzanine level. Stand on Broadway at dusk and watch the terra-cotta pinnacles catch the last light. Consider that Woolworth paid the entire $13.5 million construction cost in cash, refusing to carry debt. Then understand why this building endures: it represents not just wealth, but the particular American belief that commerce, conducted with sufficient ambition, can produce monuments as lasting as any church.