nyt0930 A 100-Year View of a Landmark

The most subversive of all the fun facts about the Flatiron Building, which marks its centennial tomorrow, is that it does not truly
 replicate the shape of a turn-of-the-century household flatiron ・which would have been curved at the sides like the prow of a ship.

Instead, the legendary three-sided building at the intersection of Broadway, Fifth Avenue and 23rd Street ・one of New York's oldest 
surviving skyscrapers ・forms a geometrically perfect, straight-edged right triangle. "Pythagoras was right on the money," said Dr. 
Roberta J. M. Olson, co-curator of a recent Flatiron exhibition at the New-York Historical Society. "The Flatiron has been magnetic
 because of its unique configuration." 

Still commanding the streetscape with its presence at the locus of two of the greatest thoroughfares in the world, it devolved into
 a sad outlier of a scruffy, sinking neighborhood. 

But now, thanks to a decade of gentrification, a recent refurbishment under new owners and last year's $5 million reconstruction
 of the six-acre oasis of Madison Square Park, the building is the flagship of the reborn Flatiron district of upscale fashion 
merchandising and starred kitchens.

"It has regained its heyday," said Miriam Berman, a graphic designer who has gathered information on the building for 20 years, 
and who spent 10 years writing "Madison Square" (Gibbs Smith, 2001). "The Flatiron had the flexibility to hang in there and go
 through all these changes, and come up strong."

And although its 307-foot height is puny in comparison to the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building, she said that
 "its popularity was never eclipsed, because it is the only famous Manhattan skyscraper that enables tourists to take a picture
 of the entire building from the ground up."

Early in the last century, tour buses brought visitors to the Flatiron, so they could ascend to the Flatiron Restaurant and 
observation deck on the 21st floor. "This was Windows on the World back in 1905," said Edward O'Grady, who manages the building. 

No, the Flatiron was never the tallest building in New York and when the 700-foot Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower 
went up in 1909, it wasn't even the tallest in the neighborhood. "But thanks to its unusual shape and its location in the middle 
of those avenues," Ms. Berman said, "it held its own." 

For decades the landmark building commanded images on postcards, mugs, plates and tchotchkes. The building inspired unforgettable
 photographs by Edward Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz. 

The palazzo-ish wedge by architect Daniel H. Burnham & Company has won ecstatic praise through the years for its rusticated 
limestone and ornamented terra cotta.

Sometimes, though, it was hardly a utopia for tenants. In the early days, women were unamused to learn that the Burnham firm 
had not thought it necessary to design any ladies' rooms; management had to designate bathrooms on alternate floors for men
 and women.

Then there was the infamous bank of original water-powered elevators, a relic of Manhattan's early hydraulic-lift era. Beyond the
 fact that pipes could burst and drizzle water into the cabs, the elevators' slowness and unreliability were notorious.

The bouncy ride was so intimidating that even Joan Collins chose to walk down 15 flights from St. Martin's Press. "I lived directly 
across the street," said John J. Murphy, a vice president at St. Martin's, the trade publisher that moved there in 1959, now 
occupies 12 floors and is celebrating its 50th anniversary. "But I had a 20-minute commute to my office."

Now that the elevators are electrified and efficient, "a lot of people aren't in the shape they were then," Mr. Murphy said.

Thanks to the building's landmark status, "the windows are a single pane of glass, and offices can be very warm in summer or 
freezing on a windy day," said Ruediger Gebauer, president and chief executive of Springer-Verlag, a publisher of medical and
 scientific books that has six floors in the Flatiron.

According to Faith Hope Consolo, vice chairman of Garrick-Aug, the Manhattan retail brokerage firm, the Flatiron is the real 
estate anchor for the whole neighborhood. For a time, though, it was a troubled anchorage. "I started here in 1980, and there
 wasn't a thing in this neighborhood," Mr. Murphy said.

The current transformation was fueled in part by fashion-forward shoppers and insatiable eaters bent on high-end cuisine. 
It even overcame the slide of Silicon Alley.

Even in the bad years, the building always lent its tenants cachet, and it still does. "We use the building in our promotion 
and marketing," said Mr. Gebauer of Springer-Verlag.

The building of the Flatiron was such a prolonged affair that historians still debate exactly when it opened. For doubters, 
Ms. Berman has a picture of the Flatiron sporting two signs announcing the building ready for occupancy Oct. 1, 1902. 

There is also all that lore about the phrase "23 skiddoo," attributed to the fierce Flatiron winds that raised skirts and 
attracted the interest of passing gentlemen. Police officers there kept the gawkers moving along by saying "23 skiddoo
," the equivalent of "scram."

Evidence to support this windy legend includes Library of Congress film footage from 1903 that shows Flatiron gusts, 
billowing skirts, male sidewalk superintendents and a flatfoot on the Flatiron beat. 

Among the building's peculiarities is the cowcatcher, the protruding street-level glass gazebo added shortly after it was built. 
Towering above the cowcatcher is the north face of the Flatiron, called "the Point" by inhabitants. Often tenants in the Point
 have been quite challenged to utilize the oddball space; even in 1902, Architectural Digest termed decoration in the Point
 "a wanton aggravation of the inherent awkwardness of the situation." 

On some floors, however, this anomaly has been embraced by top executives. For example, John Sargent, United States chief
 executive of Holtzbrinck Publishers, the parent of St. Martin's, has his desk at the curved windows of the Point in his 18th-floor
 office. Mr. Gebauer is similarly situated on the 19th floor, and has the only balcony on the Point, with a view of the Empire State
 Building so close "that you can touch it," said his secretary, Heike Gaines. 

James D. Kuhn, Barry Gosin and Jeffrey R. Gural, who acquired 52 percent ownership of the Flatiron in 1997, have made
 improvements.

This does not mean that they have pleased all the tenants all the time. "After they fixed the elevators, the major complaint
 was the high rents," said Stephen Kurman, who ran a wholesale costume-jewelry business in the Flatiron for 25 years before 
retiring two years ago. Major long-lease tenants ・whose leases are up in 2004 ・have office-space bargains in the 
$20-per-square-foot range, but before the economic downturn, new tenants were asked to pay twice that, and more. 
"The large publishing companies swallowed up the little guys," who moved out. (St. Martin's and Springer-Verlag, which is
 owned by Bertelsmann, now occupy 90 percent of the Flatiron.)

Some of the little guys remember the days when the shoeshine man came to every floor and the postman rang three times 
a day. "It was always a good building, and I have so many memories," said Anthony Nizzardini, 89, the Flatiron's senior tenant 
(since 1950). He is owner of the Masonic Supply Company, which purveys rhinestone fezzes and other ceremonial paraphernalia 
to members of the Ancient Arabic Order of Nobles of the Mystic Shrine. 

But some of the other little guys could not afford to remain. "They wanted to charge me nine times my rent," said John Malizia, 
co-owner of F&G Opticians, which occupied the corner location at 22nd Street and Fifth Avenue from 1947 to 1999. Mr. Malizia
 moved less than a block away, to 60 West 22nd Street, near the Avenue of the Americas.

But in the end, such complaints have yielded to the vision of the rounded, venerable Flatiron.

"I love this building, because it reminds me of growing up in Paris," Karine Bakhoum, owner of KB Network News, a public-relations 
firm on the seventh floor, said. "But I could get the same amount of space for half the price," she added. "You are paying for the 
architecture and the history."