Talk:Woolworth Building

WikiProject class rating
This article was automatically assessed because at least one WikiProject had rated the article as start, and the rating on other projects was brought up to start class. BetacommandBot 03:27, 9 November 2007 (UTC)

Minor formatting cleanup
The PDFlink template won't work right inside a citation template. But there's another way: add "format=PDF" to the citation template. See Template talk:PDFlink. Fixed. --John Nagle (talk) 02:58, 24 January 2008 (UTC)

Removed advertising
Removed "Popular culture" section which promoted a recent movie. That's inappropriate, per WP:TRIVIA. Especially when there's a "viral marketing" campaign underway for the movie. --John Nagle (talk) 03:17, 28 January 2008 (UTC)

The other building?
In the last image, of the building under construction, shows another large building under construction nearby. I can't seem to find this on google maps. Any idea what this building is? Maury (talk) 00:45, 25 April 2008 (UTC)
 * Looks like the Manhattan Municipal Building. The construction dates match up, and if this photo was taken from the south (looking north-east along Broadway) then the positions match too.  The Manhattan Municipal Building is located to the east of the Woolworth Building, across City Hall.  Booglamay ( talk ) - 17:35, 1 October 2008 (UTC)


 * Thanks! Maury (talk) 19:22, 1 October 2008 (UTC)

Info to add for the IN POPULAR CULTURE section:
Hello, I'm not sure who handles the updates on the Woolworth Building article. I didn't want to make changes cause I didn't want to step on anyone's toes, but there was a bit of information I would like to ask to have added to the "In Popular Culture" section: In the 1957 film "Twelve Angry Men", Juror 12 looks out of the window with Juror 8 at the beginning of the movie and points out, "Is that the Woolworth Building?" and comments that through all his life living in New York City that he's never been inside of it. -TC (7/2/2013)


 * Unfortunately, these are all unsourced/unimportant, so these cannot be added. Here is a list of other entries without either significance or sources: epicgenius (talk) 00:07, 28 January 2019 (UTC)


 * The film Five and Ten (1931) is loosely based on Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton and has many references to "the tower" that is being built. The main characters, played by Marion Davies and Leslie Howard, get stranded overnight atop the skyscraper.
 * In Winner Take All (1932), Jimmy (James Cagney) sends Peggy (Marian Nixon) a post card with the picture of the Woolworth Building.
 * In On the Town (1949), one of the sailors on leave in Manhattan (Frank Sinatra) uses an out-of-date guidebook which states that the Woolworth is the tallest building in the world.
 * In Singin' in the Rain (1952), set in 1927, Don Lockwood (Gene Kelly) laments the colossal failure of his latest film, "The Dueling Cavalier" saying after its release, nobody would come to see him jump off the Woolworth Building into a damp rag.
 * In Spider-Man 2 (2004), Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) delivers a number of pizzas to a receptionist (Emily Deschanel) at the building.
 * In the opening scenes of Cloverfield (2008), the building is seen collapsing after Clover critically damages it, causing a dust cloud to flood through nearby streets.
 * In Baz Luhrmann's film adaptation of The Great Gatsby (2013), Nick Carraway works in the building as a stock broker for Chase. An early scene shows a spectacular tilt down from the top of the building.
 * The "Woodworld Building" in the video game Grand Theft Auto IV (2008) mimics the Woolworth Building in its name, architectural style, and street address number. The building also appears in Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars, but only its bottom floors are rendered due to the game's top-down angle.
 * Exterior shots of the building were used to establish the headquarters of fictional cable television channel "The Explorer's Channel" which employed Paul Buchman (Paul Reiser) in season four of the 1990s sitcom Mad About You.
 * The sheet music for the song "Woolworth Rag" by Henri Klickmann shows an artwork of the Woolworth Building in the cover.

Woolworth Building Construction
The article is written very much from a property dealer's / financier's point of view. It gives only limited material on the architectural effort and philosophy, and even less about the structural approach and principles. The greatest disappointment to me is that the CONSTRUCTION of this early masterpiece is not even mentioned. Who were the principal CONTRACTORS? Which firm detailed and supplied the steelwork for the frame of this 100-year old skyscraper? What form of cranes were used to erect the structure? How many tons of steel (Was Milliken Brothers involved?), cubic yards of concrete, tons of marble and cladding, square feet of glass? How many workers on site at the peak of construction? How many deaths? The names of the construction managers would be far more interesting (and deserved) than the identities of all the post-achievement parasites who profited from the end product. Could some construction historian expand on the creation of this ground-breaking masterpiece? This article compares very poorly with e.g., the Wiki entry on the Golden Gate Bridge. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Questor74 (talk • contribs) 09:25, 3 June 2014 (UTC)
 * Very few of the specific questions you asked about the construction are particularly encyclopedic in nature. You would expect to find them in a book about the building, but not in an encyclopedia article. Mentioning the contractor would be fine, but the source for the steel is trivial. The stats on steel, marble etc. would make a passable single sentence, but that's about it. The architectural philosophy, on the other hand, is quite relevant, as it goes to the way the building looks.  If you have information on that, you should add it to the article. BMK (talk) 10:12, 3 June 2014 (UTC)

I beg to disagree about what constitutes triviality. Tenants come and go, and references in popular culture are hardly what one would find in encyclopedia entries. A single sentence about its construction highlights would not do the achievement credit, but neither would one need a book. The creation of a lasting monument of Woolworth's significance certainly justifies a few paragraphs about its essence (structure) and its physical creation.Questor74 (talk) 19:41, 7 June 2014 (UTC)

deaths during construction
For other large projects like the Golden Gate bridge and empire state building, one can find information on how many workers died during construction But I was unable to find such info for the WW building in a quick google anyone have any info ? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 64.130.228.122 (talk) 22:49, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

External links modified
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just added archive links to 1 one external link on Woolworth Building. Please take a moment to review my edit. If necessary, add after the link to keep me from modifying it. Alternatively, you can add to keep me off the page altogether. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/20050601102914/http://www.recordonline.com:80/1998/06/23/woolwort.htm to http://www.recordonline.com/1998/06/23/woolwort.htm

When you have finished reviewing my changes, please set the checked parameter below to true to let others know.

Cheers. —cyberbot II  Talk to my owner :Online 20:26, 17 October 2015 (UTC)

I added a link to a recent online publication with research on the Woolworth Building, in part drawn from a collection of architectural plans and drawings acquired by Vanderbilt University in 2015. Reklaw9 (talk) 14:37, 20 June 2018 (UTC)