Picture the building that made the modern skyscraper possible, the one now facing you. The E. V. Haughwout Building was completed in 1857 as a store for fine china and glassware, and it looks like a Venetian palazzo pressed flat onto the corner of Broadway and Broome. What makes it revolutionary is invisible from the outside: it was the first building in the world to install a passenger elevator with a safety device.
Elisha Otis had invented the safety brake four years earlier and demonstrated it dramatically at the 1854 World's Fair in New York by having his cables cut above him, proving the brake would catch the car. But Haughwout's store put one in for paying customers, and suddenly buildings could go up as high as they liked. Without this building's willingness to test the technology commercially, the skyscraper era could not have begun.
The cast-iron facade rises in 92 identical arched windows stacked five stories high, and you are facing the great-grandparent of every tall building in the world.