Just as the stock market soared to new heights in the 1920s, so too did the height of the skyscraper. The race to construct the tallest building in the world that began in the second half of the decade, was not the first in New York City history. In 1908, the Metropolitan Life Insurance tower on Madison Square outdistanced the Singer Building, completed only eighteen months earlier. The 1913 Woolworth Building eclipsed both, rising 692 feet into the sky.
The 1916 New York Zoning ordinance, World War I, and a post-war recession halted further competition for nearly a decade. By the 1920s, amidst rising prosperity, and in an age that extolled record-breaking builders sought to surpass the “Cathedral of Commerce.”
The headline on the front page of The New York Times on June 25, 1925, signaled resumption of the race for the tallest structure: “42-Story Office Building… To Go Up In West 42nd St.” The story added that real estate speculator John Larkin declared his building would be the tallest structure in New York north of the Metropolitan tower, “and the largest building operation ever undertaken near the Times Square section.”
Just three months later, on September 1, 1925, the Times front page announced another super-tall building: “65-Story Hotel Here to be Part Church.” The tower, planned as part church and part hotel, would rise in upper Manhattan, on Broadway, between 122nd and 123rd Streets. Clearly designed to best the Woolworth Building it would exceed the lower Broadway structure by only 8 feet. The building developer, Oscar E. Konkle, President of Realty-Sureties, Inc. planned the unusual church-hotel combination to express his gratitude for the life of his son, who had miraculously recovered from a nearly fatal disease. Konkle announced that ten percent of the profits would be devoted to missionary work and that none of the occupants of the hotel would be permitted “to smoke or use tobacco, or drink intoxicants on the premises, from which it [was] also announced, Sunday newspapers may be eliminated.”
