Everyone knows that Chicago is the birthplace of the skyscraper.
And it is true—depending on how you define the building type. As Carol Willis points out in Form Follows Finance: Skyscrapers and Skylines in New York and Chicago, if you go by the technological innovations of the elevator and the metal frame, then Chicago was first, but if height matters most, it was New York. Chicago produced the first metal-frame structure, crucial to the development of the tall tower: the Home Insurance Building, designed by William LeBaron Jenney in 1884. Its cast-iron columns with wrought-iron beams, plus newly developed rolled-steel beams, made history. Then the first all-steel-frame skyscraper—Burnham and Root’s second Rand McNally Building—debuted in 1890, called by many the first true skyscraper because of that all-steel frame. These “skyscraping” structures with their “skyscraperly” tactics—as The Chicago Daily Tribune characterized them in 1884, essentially coining the term—were made possible by such frames, along with the invention of the elevator.
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