Songwriters tickled piano keys for sheet-music publishers. Dentists buzzed their drills. At one company, milliners made fezzes for the Masons.
Things began to change after 1959, when St. Martin’s Press moved in and started to expand, snagging offices when other tenants departed. By 2004, its parent company, Macmillan Publishers, had taken over all 21 office floors of the building.
But now, 117 years after the Flatiron opened, those floors are vacant. Lured by lower rents downtown and the chance to consolidate staff in a modern workplace, Macmillan moved to renovated floors in the Equitable Building on Lower Broadway this month.
For many in book publishing, the departure marks the end of an era, when authors having meetings at the Flatiron was a rite of passage.
“My publishing life was born and raised in the Flatiron,” said Louise Penny, a bestselling crime writer who even has a Flatiron charm on her keychain. “Behind the breathtaking and famous facade was a rabbit warren, some might say rat’s nest. Books and files were piled everywhere.”
Literary agent Christopher Schelling is equally nostalgic. “Symbolically it means something,” he said of Macmillan’s move, recalling how he often warned his writers that the conference rooms inside the Flatiron were definitely not as stylish as the building’s exterior. But that this was part of the fascination of the place.
“Everyone loves coming to the building,” said Sally Richardson, chairman of St. Martin’s Press, who worked in the Flatiron for five decades. Richardson helped to organize a goodbye party that drew hundreds of former employees, including some who flew in from other cities.
Although the MAC Cosmetics and Argo Tea stores on the ground level are still bustling, the floors above have been silent since June 14, awaiting crews that will rip out dropped ceilings and drywall partitions, among other tasks.
“Right now the building is looking terribly shabby,” said Richardson, who also spoke of the idiosyncrasies of the heating system — built around cast-iron radiators — that meant she might start her work day wearing a winter jacket and end it in a sleeveless T-shirt. “It’s a quirky place.”
The Flatiron is not the only classic New York skyscraper that is reinventing itself. The Empire State Building recently underwent a major renovation that made it more energy efficient. The Chrysler Building was just sold, and the new owner considered turning it into a hotel. The top floors of the Woolworth Building, once called “the cathedral of commerce,” are now luxury condos.
Although it is unclear who the future occupants of the Flatiron will be, it will remain an office building, said one of its owners, Veronica Mainetti, president of the Sorgente Group of America, which specializes in sustainable renovations of historic buildings. “The building was born as a commercial property, and we want to keep it as such,” she said.
Harry Black of the Fuller Co., which built the Plaza Hotel, the Macy’s building and the original Pennsylvania Station, also erected the Flatiron Building, which was the first skyscraper north of Union Square. He commissioned Chicago architect Daniel Burnham to design it.
Burnham’s skinny building — a clever architectural solution to an unusual lot — shot straight up from the ground, with no setbacks, its three sides covered with classically inspired terra-cotta ornamentation.
Critics hated it; The New York Tribune called it “a stingy piece of pie.” But the public “was mesmerized,” said Alice Sparberg Alexiou, author of “The Flatiron: The New York Landmark and the Incomparable City that Arose With It.”
There was no other large-scale development surrounding the Flatiron at the time, so the building’s odd shape would cause the wind to whip around it. Skeptics predicted it would blow over, but its sturdy steel-skeleton construction held up.
The Flatiron’s interior would not fare so well. The water-powered elevators were famously slow and leaky. Miriam Berman, who worked as a graphic designer in the building in the 1970s and ’80s and now gives tours of Madison Square, recalled that the elevator cabs “bobbed around when you arrived at your floor,” before settling.
When John Sargent, who was appointed chief executive of St. Martin’s Press in 1996, arrived to meet with the staff for the first time, it took him several minutes to ascend from the lobby. “Someone asked me what my plans for the company were,” he recalled. His response: “I’m going to get the elevators fixed.”
Sargent, an outdoorsy New York native who grew up in Wyoming and eventually occupied the top office of the building’s prow, became frustrated at the slowness of the process, so he came up with a publicity stunt: He would rappel down the side of the building in the presence of a newspaper reporter and photographer.
“Editor desperate to reach the ground floor,” he intoned in a recent interview, envisioning the newspaper headline. He never pursued the plan, instead appealing to the owners, who installed modern elevators in 1999.
The building also had drafty copper-clad wood-framed windows, which resulted in manuscripts flying around offices and snow drifts forming on the window sills, said Sargent, who is now chief executive of Macmillan. Most of the windows were eventually replaced, but since there was no central air-conditioning in the Flatiron, individual air conditioners continued to poke out of them.
These units will be eliminated in the coming months, as central air and heating will finally be installed. A new sprinkler system and a second staircase will also be added, bringing the building up to code. Once again, the elevators will be upgraded. And the lobby — the original was lost years ago — will be redone.
Once the interior offices — quirkily configured because of the shape of the building — are demolished, open floors, albeit triangular, will be left behind.
The work could cost $60 million to $80 million and take about a year, according to GFP Real Estate, a family-owned business that owns dozens of buildings in the city.
The owners have hired a high-profile broker, Mary Ann Tighe, of CBRE, a commercial real estate firm, to market the property.
“Our goal is a single tenant,” she said. “We like the idea of the Flatiron being associated with a single brand,” like Macmillan, which even launched an imprint named Flatiron Books during its tenure there.
By Labor Day, Tighe hopes to be able to start showing a few of the opened-up floors to potential tenants. Some coworking firms have already made offers, according to the Flatiron’s owners. A restaurateur recently checked out the top floor. A major tech company has also toured the space, the owners said.
The neighborhood has become a popular spot for the tech industry. Overall asking rents for offices in Madison Square and Union Square surpassed those of midtown in 2018, according to Cushman & Wakefield, a commercial real estate company. Today, rents in the area average over $80 per square foot.
Mosette Broderick, a professor and the director of urban design and architecture studies at New York University, said that a landmark building like the Flatiron might also appeal to a European firm that wants a foothold in New York, finding the “vintage quality” of the building more appealing than a brand-new glass tower.
At this point, the owners said that they are more focused on finding the right tenant for the Flatiron than securing a top-dollar rent.
“People want it, but who’s going to be the best?” said Jane Gural-Senders, the executive director and a principal at GFP Real Estate. She is also the firm’s asset manager for the Flatiron. “You want something that’s going to bring greatness.”