Building the Metropolis: Architecture, Construction, and Labor in New York City, 1880–1935 by Alexander Wood. University of Chicago Press, 496 pp., $35.
When it was completed in 1897, the Gillender Building was one of the tallest in New York, soaring to 273 feet with its three-story baroque cupola. Thirteen years later it was on the ground, razed to make room for the Bankers Trust Company skyscraper, which nearly doubled the height of its predecessor at 14 Wall Street. The Gillender Building had taken one year to construct and just forty-five days to tear down—“the most rapid house-wrecking feat ever performed” the eminent demolitionist Jacob Volk boasted to The New York Times. Roughly 140 workers in Volk’s employ labored day and night on the edifice’s demise, stripping it down to its once-novel steel frame. Eighty-five men were injured in the process, and a steady flow of ambulances arrived at the site day after day, with one writer observing that it was “like a real battle.” One of Volk’s crew was killed, victim to a falling girder.
Such…