Note 171 — CHAPTER 7 BUILDING WITH IRON AND GLASS: 1790-1855

Bogardus’s priority in this matter is by no means absolute. Certainly earlier in America was the Miners’ Bank, built by Haviland in Pottsville, Penna., in 1829-30; but here cast iron was used only to provide a decorative sheathing of the brick walls in the absence of available stone. Also earlier was a steam flour-mill three storeys high prefabricated by Sir William Fairbairn in London in 1839 and sent to Turkey, where it was erected in Istanbul in 1840. This was more like Bogardus’s building, and he had probably actually seen it when it was exhibited in London in Fairbairn’s shops at Millwall before being disassembled and shipped away. Daniel D. Badger (1806-?) also claimed priority because of the many one-storey shops he had built of iron, one of which was just across Center Street in New York from Bogardus’s factory. But Bogardus deserved the publicity he received at home and abroad; undoubtedly it was his activity which really started the general vogue of cast-iron 448fronts in the United States. See Bogardus, J., Cast Iron Buildings: their Construction and Advantages, New York, 1856 (written for Bogardus by a friendly ‘ghost’, John W. Thomson), and Bannister, T. C., ‘Bogardus Revisited, Part One: The Iron Fronts’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, XV (1956), 12-22.