A famous iron
What millionaire hasn’t dreamed of treating themselves to a pied-à-terre in the Flatiron Building, the legendary New York landmark? The opportunity could soon present itself. The consortium that owns the building filed a document with the city council at the end of August to obtain permission to transform this former office skyscraper into luxury apartments. The Flatiron owes its fame to its triangular shape, designed to optimise the space of the plot where it is located, between the Vmy Avenue and Broadway on one side and 22ndmy and 23my Street to the other. New Yorkers saw him as an iron and the nickname stuck. A monument of popular culture, he appeared especially in the trilogy. spiderman, by director Sam Raimi, where he welcomed the facilities of the daily bugle, the tabloid where Peter Parker works.
Ultra-fast construction
The twenty-two-story building, designed by architect Daniel Burnham, rises to 87 meters in height and its facades with rounded corners are decorated with Beaux-Arts style ornaments. The first three floors are made of limestone, the rest clad in glazed terracotta. It was built in just over a year to house the headquarters of the Fuller Company, a Chicago construction firm, which gave it its first name, the Fuller Building. When it opened in 1902, it was one of the tallest in the Big Apple and one of the first to benefit from a steel structure that offered better resistance to the wind. Although it was the object of ridicule, it quickly became an essential figure in the economic and cultural capital of the United States, and the Flatiron gave its name to the neighborhood that hosted it, one of the most expensive in Manhattan.
A fiasco at the auction
Covered in scaffolding for years, much to the dismay of tourists who came to immortalise it (it is one of the most photographed buildings in New York), the building has been virtually empty since the departure in 2019 of the publishing house Macmillan, which occupied most of the floors. The inability of the former owners to agree on a renovation project leads them to a court, which orders it to be auctioned in 2023. The matter comes to an end: Jacob Garlick, the unknown who won the bid for 190 million dollars (175 million euros), cannot pay the requested deposit. A second auction was won by a group led by Jeff Gural, former majority shareholder of Flatiron and New York real estate magnate, for 161.5 million dollars.
You have 24.48% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.
