E. V. Haughwout Building
building in New York City
The E. V. Haughwout Building is a five-story, 79-foot-tall (24 m) commercial loft building in the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City, at the corner of Broome Street and Broadway. Built in 1857 to a design by John P. Gaynor, with cast-iron facades for two street-fronts provided by Daniel D. Badger's Architectural Iron Works, it originally housed Eder V. Haughwout's fashionable emporium, which sold imported cut glass and silverware as well as its own handpainted china and fine chandeliers, and which attracted many wealthy clients – including Mary Todd Lincoln, who had new official White House china painted here. It was also the location of the world's first successful passenger elevator.
Description
Architecturally, the building is fairly typical of the period, with cast-iron facings in an arcaded system with two orders of columns that was derived from the Sansovino Library in Venice. In one respect, though, the building was different from other cast-iron buildings of the time: because it fronted on two streets, it would need two cast-iron facades, the weight of which might bring down the structure. To avoid this, rather than hanging the facades off the brickwork, as was usually done, Gaynor and Badger convinced Haughwout to allow them to use the strength of the cast-iron itself to support the building. This use of a structural metal frame was a precursor to the steel-framed skyscrapers that would start to be built in the early 20th century; in fact, some consider it to be the first skyscraper and "the most important cast-iron structure ever built".
World's first elevator
The building installed the world's first successful passenger elevator on March 23, 1857, a hydraulic lift designed for the building by Elisha Graves Otis. It cost $300, had a speed of .67 feet per second (0.20 m/s), and was powered by a steam-engine installed in the basement. Although the five-story structure was no taller than other buildings of the time, and did not actually require an elevator, Haughwout knew that people would come to see the new novelty, and stay to buy merchandise.
“E. V. Haughwout Building” enters the record as building in New York City. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Haughwout, Building and building can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“E. V. Haughwout Building” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Haughwout, Building and building provides the most credible route into that argument.
The strongest evidence will usually combine a dated visual record with documents produced by the authority responsible for the place. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1589264. The Library of Congress control number is sh2018001825. Authority coordinates are 40.722, -73.999. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1857.
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This entry incorporates text from “E. V. Haughwout Building” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.