The Flatiron Building and the Wind That Named a Slang Phrase

Ahead on your right, the narrow triangular tower at the fork of Fifth Avenue and Broadway is the Flatiron Building, and for years after it opened, crowds of men gathered on the sidewalk below just to watch the wind.

The building's odd wedge shape, designed by the architect Daniel Burnham, channels air around its narrow point and sends it swirling down to street level in sudden gusts. In the early nineteen hundreds, when long skirts were still standard for women, those gusts would occasionally catch a hem and lift it, and loitering men would linger on the corner hoping to see it happen again. According to the most popular explanation, police officers grew tired of running the men off and took to telling them to get moving by shouting twenty three skidoo, borrowing the building's own address on Twenty Third Street. The phrase caught on as slang for leaving in a hurry and spread far beyond New York.

Historians note this origin story is disputed, since both twenty three and skidoo were already circulating as separate slang terms before the building was even finished in nineteen oh two, so the two may have simply found each other rather than being invented together here. A nineteen oh one film called What Happened on Twenty Third Street shows that same kind of gust lifting a woman's skirt over a sidewalk grate elsewhere in the city, a reminder the wind effect itself was common long before this building stood here, whatever the truth about the phrase.

When it opened, at roughly two hundred eighty five feet, the Flatiron was one of the tallest buildings in the city, and its triangular footprint made it feel more like a ship's hull than an office tower. It remains one of the most photographed buildings in New York, mostly for that same wedge shaped silhouette that first sent the wind, and the rumors, swirling around its base.