New York City Made the Office

And the office, in turn, made modern New York.

- By Justin Davidson

Morning rush, 1896. The Third Avenue elevated train clatters into 23rd Street. A young woman trudges down the iron stairs, plucks her skirts just clear of the sidewalk, and joins the torrent of men in dark suits and women in white blouses converging on Madison Square. It’s taken a lot of convincing to get to this first day of work. Her parents know the neighborhood as a den of the disreputable rich, where bright new mansions are interspersed with the concert saloons that the Reverend Parkhurst is so bent on expunging. A few blocks up is Madison Square Garden, with its boxers and opera singers. (“Tonight and Friday evening will be Wagner nights,” the Times warned. “Every night there will be beer.”) And an office is no place for a girl either. Her father should know, having spent decades hunched over an oak desk in a shipping company’s lightless front room along with a dozen other sallow men.

But everything is different now. A few years ago, the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company built itself an 11-story palazzo at the corner of Madison Avenue and East 23rd Street, and it’s practically a billboard for respectability. Men—clerks, accountants, executives, cashiers—enter through one portal. An even larger group of typists, stenographers, and switchboard operators flows through another: “Metropolitan Belles,” the company calls its young unmarried female employees, with their brisk step and pinned-up hair. There’s no risk of their bumping into a man, the young woman has assured her mother, because elevators, hallways, and lunchrooms are segregated with monastic strictness. She won’t mention the roof terrace, where the sexes mingle during breaks.