This may be the most photographed building in New York, and your camera will want proof. The Flatiron Building was completed in 1902 on the narrow triangular lot where Broadway crosses Fifth Avenue at 23rd Street, and its steel-frame construction allowed Daniel Burnham's firm to build a 22-story tower on a footprint barely wide enough for a doorstep at its southern point. The terra-cotta facade is modeled on Italian Renaissance palazzi, richly carved and detailed.
When it was new, the triangular shape created powerful wind tunnels that blew women's skirts upward, and police were detailed to shoo loitering men from the corner. The slang term 23-skidoo is said to come from the officer's instruction. The building is called the Flatiron because it resembles the cast-iron clothes-pressing tool of the era.
From the south, it looks impossibly thin, the prow of a ship moving uptown through the grid. Stand at the corner where 23rd, Broadway, and Fifth meet and look straight at the tapering point of it; it narrows to about six feet at its tip.