Destined to Become a Modern Classic

” src=”https://palipost.com/story_photos/kreitler.jpg” width=”199″ /> Palisades resident Peter Kreitler spent 15 years collecting photographs of the Flatiron Building, recenty republished in “Flatiron.”
Photo by Rich Schmitt, Staff Photographer

As Broadway crosses Fifth Avenue in New York, it forms a small triangular patch between 23rd and 22nd streets that has become known around the world as the location of the appropriately shaped Flatiron Building. Commanding this small triangle of land, the 285-ft. Flatiron lunges forward like a ship plowing through the heart of downtown, its six-foot-wide apex expanding into a richly detailed limestone wedge.
The iconic edifice is the subject of Palisadian Peter Kreitler’s coffee-table book “Flatiron” (Leonardo International, $134), which has been reprinted in Italian and English by the building’s owners, the Sorgente Group.
The Flatiron is both an architectural and cultural landmark in Manhattan, a permanent stop on the city tour route. Not only has the 21-story skyscraper been featured in the “Spider-Man” movies (as the Daily Bugle building) its juxtaposition with Madison Square Park across Broadway spawned the once-popular slang expression “23 skidoo.” Lore has it that the wind-tunnel effect that caused women’s dresses to flare, exposing their ankles, attracted men to watch the show on 23rd Street. Police barked “23 skidoo” to disperse the voyeurs.
Built in 1901-1902, the Flatiron is the work of Chicago-based architect Daniel H. Burnham, who combined elements of French and Italian Renaissance architecture in the façade—meant to evoke a classical column with a protruding and ornamented base and top.
There were so few tall buildings in turn-of-the-century New York that you could see the Flatiron Building from Central Park. In fact, its extreme shape and height aroused concern among New Yorkers, who feared it might fall down, and dubbed it “Burnham‘s Folly.” And yet, the building, one of the first skyscrapers in New York City, achieved its height by employing a steel skeleton frame, heralding a look to the future more than the past.
Burnham is mostly remembered for his huge influence on the skyline of Chicago, designing over 200 buildings in the city, including the Monadnock and Rookery buildings, the Marshall Field department store, and the Art Institute of Chicago.
If Burnham hadn’t detoured to New York for the Fuller Construction Company’s new headquarters, photographers through the 20th century would have been robbed of this subject of great fascination.
In fact, the history of the Flatiron as captured through the photographer’s lens parallels the history of photography itself.
“I have concluded that this blunt-nosed, funny-looking building is the most photographed structure in the world,” Kreitler says. The author notes that the building has offered endless possibilities for interpretation by the greats of American photography, from Berenice Abbott and Alfred Stieglitz to modern masters such as Lee Freidlander, and even to the casual amateur. “Its size and shape and romantic façade achieve a human scale so that you could almost hug it,” says Kreitler, an Episcopal minister and environmental talk-show host.
“Flatiron,” originally printed 20 years ago, is the result of a 15-year search that began with Kreitler’s acquisition in the 1970s of Berenice Abbott’s image, which he purchased for $125.
“I started collecting photography in 1974,” Kreitler says. “I had always liked to take photos, but I didn’t see the value in the medium, where you could pull 1,000 prints from one negative.”
His attitude changed as he began to visit galleries and fell in love with the work of Imogen Cunningham and Berenice Abbott.
“I bought photography books and learned to appreciate photos,” Kreitler says. “I saw Steiglitz’s and Abbott’s Flatiron images and realized that if the greats have photographed this building 30 years apart, there must be something about the building.”
He started looking at catalogues and calling dealers, which led to a cross-country chase for Flatiron images, using honoraria from performing weddings and memorials to build his collection.
An inveterate stamp collector as a child, Kreitler sees the value of collections not only as historical records but also as a way to preserve a part of American culture.
The 200 images in this book are arranged chronologically, accompanied by quotations from historical and literary sources.
“Peter Kreitler’s collection tells us a great deal about the evolution of photography in the 20th century,” says Palisadian Weston Naef, curator of photographs at The Getty Museum, who contributed one of several illuminating essays in the book.
The history of photography can be traced in images, from platinum and silver prints, to photogravure, hand-colored, Polaroid and digital reproductions, Kreitler says. Naef adds “Steichen and Stieglitz, and other photographers––attracted perhaps by the way the building’s design cleverly reconciled tradition and innovation—used the Flatiron as an armature on which to form their experimental treatments.”
Although now dwarfed by many taller and more grandiose Manhattan skyscrapers, the Flatiron was unique for its time, and yet, as photographer Thomas Hines says, “Its ‘time’ seems just as much now as then.”