The first Modern Architecture?

Harlem Fire Watchtower (1857), Marcus Garvey Park, New York. Photo by Sebastian Sinisterra.

Harlem Fire Watchtower in 1857.

All along the watchtower,

Princes kept the view

While all the women came and went,

Barefoot servants too.

Outside, in the distance,

A wildcat did growl.

Two riders were approaching.

The wind began to howl.

— Bob Dylan, John Wesley Harding, 1967

Princely vigilance over the neighborhood and sounding the alarm to summon the fire horses and riders about the wildfires common in mid-19th-century New York required a fireproof building technology and material that enabled a watchtower to be erected quickly, safely, and relatively inexpensively, which the conventional brick, brownstone, stone, and wood that had built the city up till then couldn't quite do.

Harlem Fire Watchtower. Photo by Jim Henderson.

I'm always on the lookout for older buildings that were ahead of their time, breaking with building conventions to invent a new vocabulary that reflected new materials of their eras and influenced the future of architecture. The most foresighted building I can think of is the Harlem Fire Watchtower, aka the Mount Morris Fire Watchtower, in Marcus Garvey Park. 

Erected c.1856 by Julius H. Kroehl as one of 11 cast-iron watchtowers from a simple octagonal design by cast-iron trailblazer James Bogardus, this 47-foot tower was perched on what was then called Mount Morris, giving volunteer round-the-clock watchmen a lookout to watch for the first signs of fires in the city. These bird's-eye-view fire towers were much in demand as part of the fire prevention movement in New York that resulted from its Great Fire of 1835 and the subsequent burning down of its wooden watchtowers. This fire prevention initiative also included the construction and engineering of the city's Croton Aqueduct and reservoir network to transport an ample supply of water throughout the city to put out fires. 

The technological simplicity of the towers made them adaptable to electric telegraphs to further improve and automate the fire alarm system. But the advent of fire-alarm pull-boxes, advanced firehouse alarm systems, and taller buildings in general (especially in a skyscraper-driven place like New York!) obsoleted the watchtowers. Community activism preserved Harlem's watchtower as a colossal monument to early fire vigilance in the city and a recognizable, lovable icon of Harlem.

The original King's Chapel and the beacon on Sentry Hill in 17th-century Boston.

Of course, the hilltop watchtower concept was not as new as Bogardus' patented cast-iron construction method. It dated back as early as 17th-century Boston, when the 150-foot-high Sentry Hill, the tallest of the three Trimount peaks of the Shawmut Peninsula, was crowned with a tall beacon pole supported by triangular braces and holding a pot of flammable pitch at its top. The watchman mounted the pole's rungs to light up the pot to warn the townsfolk about approaching pirate ships or other undesirable sea-intruders, by decree of the General Court in 1635: 

“…  there shall be forthwith a beacon sett on the centry hill at Boston, to give notice to the country of any danger.”  Though there was no record of the beacon ever being lit before it deteriorated or blew down in a high wind, it gave the hill its present name, Beacon Hill.

Edward Laing Stores Building (1848-49, James Bogardus), Murray & Greenwich streets, 1971, shortly before dismantling.

Edward Laing Stores Building (1848-49, James Bogardus), 1851 print.

When hired to design the new network of 11 New York fire watchtowers, James Bogardus was already a pioneer in cast-iron construction as a speedier way to erect buildings in half the time of a conventional masonry structure, owing to mass-production of cast-iron parts in factories. He demonstrated this in his Edward Laing Stores Building, the first cast-iron building and first self-supporting iron-walled structure in the U.S., in 1848-49.

Photo by Stefano Spolverini.

This, combined with the patent Bogardus had taken out on cast-iron construction, qualified him best to design the new fire watchtowers. This time emphasizing cast-iron as a core structural element rather than the combined structural and decorative one of his cast-iron buildings, he made it a prototype for the steel-frame construction of whole buildings that was a staple of Modernism in architecture and continues to be a standard today.

The tower's cast-iron members had to be stacked and joined together in a post-and-lintel structure within an octagonal footprint for a stronger in-the-round durability and a 360-degree lookout view of the city, in an era when the skyscraper was yet to be invented in Chicago after its 1871 Great Fire. Bracing, ties, and a spiral staircase reinforced the watchtower structure, in addition to providing the watchman's egress to the top balcony perch to allow him a clear view of the first signs of a fire in the distance. 

Architect Angel Ayón, AIA, of AYON Studio in New York, described the watchtower structure best: "“It is an open cast iron structure composed of three tiers of fluted columns superimposed on each other. A smaller eight-sided open lantern at the top served as an observation booth to protect the volunteer watchmen from adverse weather. A large bronze bell hangs from the crossed trusses at the second floor level. A spiral cast iron stairway sweeps upward, adding a graceful curve to the otherwise linear, octagonal composition. … the slender, fluted columns have bases and Doric capitals…”

The fluted Doric columns show a lack of readiness to renounce the Classical cosmetics of the times for the next century's bare-bones Modernism. The bell, cast by Jones & Hitchcock of Troy, N.Y., but replaced in 1865 by a 5-ton bell cast by E.A. & G.R. Meneeley of West Troy, was hung centrally for ease of ringing and clearer sound travel to more fire stations through a specially coded sequence of peals.

"Sous la Tour Eiffel." Photo by Jebulon.

Many see the Eiffel Tower in Paris as the first example of Modern Architecture, owing to its iconic familiarity, its innovation in exposed structural engineering by Gustave Eiffel (three years after he engineered the structure of France's gift to New York, the Statue of Liberty), its brief status as the world's tallest building, and its nonstop celebration of tensile wrought-iron structure, bracing and cross-bracing as tourists rise in its elevators, promenade along its skywalks, and gawk at its monumental power on the Parisian skyline. 

Erected as the cynosure of the Exposition Universelle de 1889 celebrating the centennial of La Révolution Française, the Eiffel Tower was intended as a living symbol of "[n]ot only the art of the modern engineer, but also the century of Industry and Science in which we are living, and for which the way was prepared by the great scientific movement of the eighteenth century and by the Revolution of 1789, to which this monument will be built as an expression of France's gratitude," in Gustave Eiffel's words. Since then it has been known as la dame de fer ("Iron Lady") for its lithe, lacy gracefulness of structural expression.

But James Bogardus was ahead of Gustave Eiffel by three decades in the use of metal as the underlying structure of architecture, enabling it to be built faster, stronger, cheaper, and in a way that was more celebratory of its structure and function. Which makes his Harlem Fire Watchtower truly the first Modern Architecture.

Thank you for visiting. I welcome your comments!

Sources:

Drueding, Meghan, "All Along the Watchtower: Saving a Harlem Landmark," Preservation Magazine, Winter 2020, https://savingplaces.org/stories/all-along-the-watchtower-saving-a-harlem-landmark

Dylan, Bob, "All Along the Watchtower," Bob Dylan Newsletter, copyright © 1968 by Dwarf Music; renewed 1996 by Dwarf Music, from the album John Wesley Harding, https://www.bobdylan.com/songs/all-along-watchtower/

"Edward Laing Stores," Wikipedia,  last edited on 16 March 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Laing_Stores

"Harlem Fire Watchtower," Wikipedia, last edited on 26 August 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlem_Fire_Watchtower

"Harlem Fire Watchtower: Community Engagement and Preservation," CyArk, https://www.cyark.org/projects/harlem-fire-watchtower/in-depth

"Harlem Fire Watchtower Restored," The New York Landmarks Conservancy, https://nylandmarks.org/news/harlem-fire-watchtower-restored/

"James Bogardus," Wikipedia, last edited on 29 August 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Bogardus#cite_note-Winters2012-1

"James Bogardus Factory," cultureNOW: museum without walls, https://culturenow.org/site/james-bogardus-factory

Kaplan, Aline, "Beacon Hill and Ashburton Park – 1," The Next Phase Blog: Social Commentary and Informed Opinions, May 28, 2024, https://aknextphase.com/beacon-hill-ashburton-park/

Kornfeld, Robert, "Project: Harlem Fire Watchtower," Thornton Tomasetti, 2019, https://www.thorntontomasetti.com/project/harlem-fire-watchtower

"Marcus Garvey Park: Mount Morris Fire Watchtower," NYC Parks, Official Website of the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation, https://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/marcus-garvey-park/highlights/6497

"Mount Morris Fire Watchtower," The New York Landmarks Conservancy, https://nylandmarks.org/explore-ny/mount-morris-fire-watchtower/