This is the memory palace. I'm Nate the Mao.

Bradford Gilbert had spent his career close to the ground. At 23 he took a job as

the architect for the New York Lake Erie in Western Railroad. It was 1878.

The Western was basically just Western New York and just left of Lake Erie.

Were Gilbert walked ridges and delts, mapped its contours and calculated its slopes and

sizes, built bridges and trestles and new ways to go over the river and through the woods,

new routes for coming around mountains. As an older man he would redesign Grand Central Station,

but his early 20s saw him designing less grand buildings in less central locations,

in Avon, in Hornelsville, in Oyster Bay and Tom's River in Essex Falls.

The places you waited to get places where things actually happened.

But buy a ticket there for Manhattan or St. Louis and you can see other architects building

more impressive things. You could disembark and marvel at six in eight and ten story structures.

Mammoth buildings of stone and brick in Rot Iron, holding court on whole city blocks,

like medieval fortresses made for the kings of the modern American insurance industry.

The emperors of imports and exports.

One of these was looking to expand his empire.

John Noble Sterns had made a lot of money in Porting Silk and he was looking to make a lot

more in real estate. He bought some land in a prime location at 50 Broadway.

It was the perfect place for a new office building, right downtown near the ports,

in the heart of the growing financial industry. But there was a problem.

The lot was less than 22 feet wide.

There are rules that dictate what you can build and how.

...