A graphic in the recent Tom Scott video on the Cooper Union Foundation Building caught my eye. It showed an apparently historical Manhattan dotted with churches and steeples clearly taller than anything else around. Tracing that graphic back (i.e.googling his reference), it's this drawing, the 1951 Birds-eye view of New York by Heine and Kummer.
Clearly it's not the case anymore that churches are the tallest structures in Manhattan, which made me interested to learn more about that transition and more specifically, the date of that switchover.
At just over 350 feet tall, the New York World Building, financed by Joseph Pulitzer and completed in 1890, was the first building in New York to surpass Trinity Church's 284 foot spire, which had topped out in 1846. For 5 years, Pulitzer's newspaper headquarters was the tallest building in the city, until the completion of the Manhattan Life Insurance building in 1895.
However, the World Building was actually the second non-church structure to assert itself as tallest in New York. The Latting Observatory, built in 1853 for the year's World Fair, was a wooden platform constructed on what is now Bryant Park. It towered over New York for two years before being partially dismantled in 1855, at which point Trinity Church would reclaim its top spot for another 35 years.
