As our map shows, the number of tall lofts on Broadway far exceeded the number of new office buildings: 21 lofts from Canal Street to 23rd Street, as opposed to 12 office buildings.Īs the orange bands on our timeline chart make clear, there was an extraordinary boom in loft construction from 1896 through 1900. Lofts generally housed multiple tenants who leased part or all of one or more floors they had small lobbies and minimal elevators, services, or amenities. Many contained businesses related to the garment industry, New York’s largest manufacturing sector. Lofts were erected as purely speculative real estate, rented for any use, including light manufacturing. In the last years of the century, tall loft buildings crowded onto Broadway or very close to it, especially near Washington and Union squares, and on both the cross streets and Fifth Avenue from 16th to 22nd Streets. While such arguments can easily be debunked by examining the variety of foundation technologies in New York’s early skyscrapers, the fallacy of “bedrock beliefs” is not the point here: it’s the fallacy of the “valley” that needs to be reexamined. Some even explain the alleged valley as the result of the greater depth of solid bedrock in the area that would make skyscrapers’ foundations less stable or more costly. This is important to note, because the area between the later twentieth-century skyscraper clusters has often been referred to as a “valley” of lower-rise buildings. The spine of broadway, showing ten-story and taller buildings in 18.īroadway acted, in effect, as an elevated causeway between the areas that eventually grew into New York’s two distinctive central business districts (CBDs), Downtown and Midtown. And as the slide bar also demonstrates when the yearly loading is animated, the development along Broadway was not a steady march northward, but a simultaneous filling in along the length of the corridor. This high-rise development was not only office buildings, but also lofts and hotels. Slide the bar slowly to add footprints from 1893 – when there were just four buildings of ten or more stories on Broadway from Chambers Street to 34th Street – to 1900, when there were fifty. Our map’s interactive slide bar that can add footprints by year dramatizes the explosion of construction in the last years of the century, especially from 1896 through 1900 (the end year of our survey). In addition, the map demonstrates the importance of Broadway as the corridor for high-rise, high-value development. Second, these were separated into different zones of development – with offices in lower Manhattan and apartments and hotels in the area north of 23rd Street and especially bordering Central Park. First, from the early proliferation of big, multi-story buildings in the 1880s, there were two principal use types that were equally large: office and residential. This mapping process clearly reveals two key insights. The video summarizes our historical observations based on a new ability to see the footprints of tall buildings added to the map by year. Each interface – the Map, the Timeline, and the Grid – offers a way to see the entire group of buildings, in effect, simultaneously.īy encompassing all uses (offices, apartments, hotels, lofts, and a category called “other”, which includes stores, factories, warehouses, as well as some institutional structures), this survey creates a more accurate picture of the complexity of the city’s high-rise commercial development than a census of only office buildings. Our TEN & TALLER survey is the first to include every building in the category of those erected in Manhattan that were ten stories of taller from 1874-1900, and our three interfaces thus present an unprecedented way of visualizing the historical development of New York’s commercial architecture.
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