One of the most centrally located and prominent buildings in New York is just about invisible and has, for the past few decades, stood almost entirely empty. It was 1902, the Tennessee native Adolph Ochs had just succeeded in buying The New York Times and bringing it back to life, and he was ready to put down a marker: a new tower, in a new part of town, on top of a knot of new subway lines. It was to be the tallest building in New York. It was to resemble Giotto’s Campanile in Florence. Ochs hoped that it would “wake up the nation.” The architects, C.L.W. Eidlitz and Andrew C. MacKenzie, took his lot, a Broadway triangle, and gave him a narrow wedge of wedding cake 363 feet tall: three stories of Indiana limestone supporting sixteen stories of white brick trimmed in gothic terracotta, supporting a six-story office tower, all topped by an observatory deck, lantern, and flagpole.
It was wildly expensive, its budget jumping from $1.1 to $1.7 million ($58 million today) as Ochs insisted on finishing those last six stories, lest it be dismissed as “little flatiron.” For…