New York City's Flatiron building has had many lives: as a structure seen as a deathtrap; as a nuisance which created a deadly, petticoat-lifting, wind current and, mainly, as a commercial space.
Now, the triangular building, a favorite of tourists and locals alike, is entering a new era: as a residential building, where apartments cost up to $58.5m.
Completed in 1902, the Flatiron was once derided as a folly, but the Beaux-Arts building is now one of New York's most admired buildings. Named Flatiron for its resemblance, from above, to a clothes iron, the building's ornamental brick and terracotta exterior has been hidden behind scaffolding for the best part of seven years.
Now, the reimagined Flatiron will open to very wealthy residents later this fall. There are 36 apartments in the building, including some which span entire floors: there's a double-height lobby, too, a pool, and a games room which will apparently have a billiards table.
But for all the shared amenities, the real allure will be the apartments themselves. They have been styled by a venerated New York design firm, which stripped back the interior, exposing some of the Flatiron's interior “steel skeletonâ€, the building's interior steel frame which was cutting edge technology at the time.
Images shared with the Guardian show one of the four bedroom, four bathroom apartments in the Flatiron, which features a curved sofa in what the press materials describe as the building's “prow†– the sharpest angle of the structure. Photos show that there has been a generous application of marble in the bathroom, and equally liberal use of brushed steel in the kitchen.
According to the realtor Corcoran's website, 14 of the apartments in the Flatiron are already in contract. The cheapest, on the third floor, appears to have been bought for $10,950,000: the buyer will get a three bedroom, three bathroom apartment with a not-large open plan kitchen and “great roomâ€. There are also two dressing rooms.
The flagship apartment, however, is the one which occupies the entirety of the top floor. In contract for $58.5m, the floorplan of the five bedroom, five bathroom apartment depicts a sauna, two dressing rooms, a dining room and a breakfast room, and a 72ft “great roomâ€. It is unclear who has bid on the apartment.
“There's always hesitation taking on a landmark building like this. But there's also an advantage. It has an incredibly special character that makes it worth the pain,†Daniel Brodsky, the managing partner of the Brodsky Organization, which owns the building, told the Financial Times in an interview.
Brodsky told the Times that Jeff Bezos, the billionaire Amazon founder, had spent more than $100m buying several properties three blocks north of the Flatiron.
“There's a group of wealthy people who want to be in a convenient place; good transportation, the best restaurants in the city, the park … it's a very easy place to live. You're surrounded by coolness,†Brodsky said, in what was possibly the first time Bezos' name has been associated with the term “coolnessâ€.
The Flatiron was designed by Daniel Burnham, arguably the hottest architect of its age, and was initially called the Fuller Building. That failed to take off, and ‘Flatiron' stuck, although pedants might point out that the floorplan of the building is actually a scalene triangle, whereas an actual flatiron would typically be an isosceles.
One of New York's tallest buildings when it was completed, the Flatiron's terra-cotta and limestone façade, featuring lion heads and eagles, has been renovated for the reopening, with a specialist employed, the BBC reported, to replicate and restore “thousands of terra-cotta pieces from the facade, reinstalling each by handâ€.
While the Flatiron might be fondly regarded now, it wasn't universally popular on its completion, amid fears that the building was so narrow it could fall over. It also didn't help people warm to the building when it emerged that the design had inadvertently created a “Flatiron breeze†– a powerful, localised wind caused by the building's shape. According to the author Alice Alexiou, the breeze “blew total strangers into each other's arms, causing much embarrassmentâ€, and in a tragic incident, blew a 14-year-old messenger boy called John McTaggert into middle of Fifth Avenue, where he was run over by a car and later died.
“It was long common knowledge that if you walked by the Flatiron on a windy day, at the very least your skirts were going to end up over your head, and your legs exposed. It was now all the rage for groups of men of a certain character to loiter at the foot of the Flatiron, expressly to catch a glimpse of feminine flesh,†Alexiou wrote in The Flatiron: The New York Landmark and the Incomparable City That Arose with It.
Despite the chaos it was causing at street level, the Flatiron defied predictions that it would topple over. “During a 60-mile-an-hour windstorm that battered the city one morning soon after the first tenants moved in, you couldn't feel the slightest vibration in the building,†Alexiou wrote.
It was built to last, in other words, and this latest iteration will continue its legacy – even if its price means it is far beyond the reach of the majority of New Yorkers.
