It does, why does it have a particular shape, why do we see one large cluster of skyscrapers downtown and another one several miles to he north in midtown. Theres relatively few skyscrapers even to this day in the area in between. So building the skyline, just very briefly, is a book about my research and im an economist at rutgers newark. Over last decade or so, my interests have primarily been in studying the economys of cities, the economics of real estate and skyscrapers. And much of this book discusses my findings from this Research Agenda over the last decade. So the book is an economic history of the manhattan skyline and from 1626 to the present, perhaps youre wondering what 1626 has to do with the modern skyline. Ill leave that for you to read in the book. The questions that i seek to answer in the book itself are, what were the early real estate decisions that ultimately gave rise to the skyline . What have been the economic of skyscrapers since the late 19th century, and how do these economics influence the number, height, location of skyscrapers throughout manhattan . So thats the book. In a nut shell. Going to talk is focus on one particular topic. I want to talk about the shape of the skyline and to try to answer the question about why theres two centers and why skyscrapers are missing from the area in between. Over the years i found that there hasnt been that Much Research on it and there are, however, a few conventional wisdoms. People talk about a few different items as having been influential and i hope to convince you that these two most frequently discussed items or i should t say the evidence doesnt support these conventional ideas. So then im going to talk about these conventional ideas and then talk about why the evidence doesnt support it and then im going to go on and give you what i have found and what the data suggests about whats going on or what went on in manhattan history. Id also like to say that much of this research was performed much of the research in todays talk as well as the book was performed with my colleague and coauthor, troy, who is an economist at fordham university. Just wanted to give a little shoutout to him. K. Manhattan skyline is a bit different as opposed to other sky lines throughout the world. If we look at this slide, as an example, we see what we might call as sort of the classic look, the classic skyline look. I know its small. But its meant to sort of illustrate what aerial shots of skylines tend to look like. Heres san francisco. Chicago. Boston and philadelphia. They each have, generally speaking, one dense con glom ration of Tall Buildings. The height of these buildings tend to fall off in general rather rapidly. As one moves out of the Business District. Thats not to say that there are thats not to say that each skyline is not unique in some way or theres little subtleties that im not going to discuss. Chicago, for example, extends along north michigan and so forth. These skylines have a more standard pattern in the sense of having this sort of Central Business district and then the ower rise buildings around it. What we can say about these is they all have sort of similar histories in the sense that theyre all Business Districts that formed near the historical ports. And they resulted from a series of positive feedback loops. Early settlers, they developed the area around the port, they come and settle in philadelphia or boston and so forth. And so then theres a lot of port activity over time, as the city grows, as the economy became more sophisticated and technology developed, businesses began to become larger and the revenues that they were generating were much greater and as a result these businesses tend to push outs remain dents residences who then tended to move to the outer areas of the city. As businesses grow, it attracts more businesses and different industrial clusters and it puts pressure on land values and then as a result developers aim to build more provide more space or build taller. And then in the late 1880s, early 1890s, when the technology and the cost efficiency for skyscrapers emerge, cities like chicago and new york got into the kyscraper game as it were. Ut manhattan has a different con figureration. You have lower configure ration. You have lower man configuration. You have Lower Manhattan which fits the classic mold. Then you have midtown, which does not. Im going to talk about some of the evidence on how this came to be. Since i probably wont have time for everything, im going to give you the conclusions up front. First, if were looking for the roots of midtown, we have to go back to the 1830s. Nearly a century before the art deco giant, this is the Empire State Building and the chrysler building. Midtown proper, or what i call midtown 1. 0 was born around Madison Square in the early 1880s. By 1900s, by the turn of the century, land values and office rents are high enough in that neighborhood to establish skyscrapers as profitable investments. Midtown after 1900s continued to move north, due to what i call creative destruction, and transportation infrastructure. Creative destruction in this case is sort of a simple way of saying, as the economy evolves, as technology evolves, there becomes a need for newer buildings and buildings that provide new services and accommodate the new forms of work that occur over time. The second set of conclusions is as follows. The creation of midtown, i would like to argue, is due to four major phenomena. The first is that the dutch few d to settle just a blocks away, yeah, ok, so over i think that way. Basically, on the Lower Manhattan. Today we ceeloer manhattan has expanded quite a bit and in fact im standing on a lands fill right now. They decided to settle at the lower tip of manhattan. The implications of this is that as manhattan grew, as the city grew, much of the Economic Activity would take place in a northward trajectory. This is happening in the context that manhattan is long and narrow and what this is doing is its compressing, if you will, or its making more concentrated all of the Economic Activity thats taking place in the city. Keep in mind that by 1900s, 1. 8 Million People were living on the island of manhattan. So its a relatively small Geographic Area with a very high concentration of population. In what i like to call a much of the action is along this 13 mile axis. Another key thing is here in this country, americans had traditionally voted with their feet by moving out to what i would call the suburbs. As i go through the talk i am not talking about the modest suburbs of quarter acre lots. I am talking about living on the , middle and upper income People Living on the outer edges of the city. There is nothing inevitable about that occurring. It seems to be the basic reference we have in this country. This all emerging during the 1850s, what i call the first inversion. There is a pattern of where verts afteriving in the introduction of the streetcar. In verts after the streetcar let me move on to the most commonly emerged regions. Ok, conventional wisdom number one is what i call the bedrock. Bedrock theory. Call me crazy. So the story goes Something Like this. Imagine we have a shovel, and you started digging. Maybe not here, but along wall street or Something Like that. You start digging, eventually hit the bedrock. Where thet the, maybe Bowling Green is or Something Like that, i dont have an exact number, maybe 15 or 20 miles below the surface. As you walk north, bedrock bedrock starts to extend. He keeps extending until the Lower East Side where it hits the lowest part 300 feet below the surface. Now after skyscrapers were invented in the late 1880s, 1890s, these buildings became. Ery tall and very heavy it was at that point when engineers developed how to foundation. Ablish a so the building does not lean or settle, or such like that. So the story goes Something Like this is the story. The difficulty of reaching the rocks were to anchor the rock too the brit buildings on the Lower East Side, there are no Tall Buildings because of the difficulty in reaching the bedrock. But a sort of the end of the story from sort of a general perspective. It is missing a lot of detail. So we did some investigation into this. Conclude led me to what i call the bedrock myth. It is a nice story but it does not hold up. So a paper by myself, troy, and a graduate student as well as given in Chapter Seven of the ink, we detail the evidence a lot of the tells a lot of details. I went to summarize what we found. From the perspective of a developer and the demand story, the consumer. Supply and demand is my stock in trade. And trade. We dont find any evidence of technological barrier. Ine of the tallest buildings Lower Manhattan are built over the geologically worst environment. Most notably the board municipal building. If you look at the cross data, what is called the marginal cost of going back to the bedrock is not sustainable to add to the cost of construction. It even relates to the case on technologies which were very expensive. Once you establish, once you created these caissons and started digging, the cost of going deeper did not matter all that much. The cost was paid up front. The majority of the costs were paid up front. Importantly, i dont have it on the slide, but you look at the land values. The land values in washington so 180, 1900 or per square foot. You just need to walk. The cost of digging foundations were not that high. They were relative to the overall cost. We did some calculations, and we showed that a rational developer was looking to save money, save money, could have gone to the withwhere the land values 1600 per square foot, purchased , and would have reduced the total cost of the project substantially. But they did not do that, and the reason is because they would not have made the kind of revenue over the north of city hall and would have justified paying those costs. With me here, because i am going to show you a graph. That is another one of my stock and trade. It may look a little scary, but it is not. I am telling you a story. Here is the story. So this is, this is the latitude of the southern point of manhattan over there. Latitude ofthe central park south. So we are going down to north. And so here is, this is measuring how deep is the bedrock below these buildings. Each dot is a building. If you take a random. , and you go over here and say, this. Has drug from 40 meters below and is located a bit north of city hall near canal street, very simple. The triangles are skyscrapers. We took all the buildings we could find that were 80 miles were taller and make them skyscrapers for the analysis. This is as of 1916. 70 meters was considered tall. So going south to north, the bedrock, it gets deeper and deeper. Here is the area that is considered bedrock valley. Backdrop one, if you look at these two buildings, they are built over the deepest bedrock in the city. If you read old articles from time, you can get these amazing chronicles of all the difficulties the engineers and difficulties developers had trying to create a foundation, but they did it. The reason they did it was because there was demand for these buildings. Fact number two, if the desire to be in Lower Manhattan was createdbut the bedrock a barrier, you would see over here a number of skyscrapers. So i am making this up as an example. Say 133 meters was a natural barrier. Then you see an 18 story building, but you dont see that. North of canal street, you jesse lowrise buildings. I want to mention that you just see lowrise buildings. I want to mention that. Mostly firestone. This is what i think is a great bedrockillustrating how story does not hold up. Do you mean the bedrock is closer to the surface over here . Jason it is relative. When you get to 14th street or go to central park, there are outcroppings, so some of it is above the street level. The bedrock here, Bowling Green, the buildings here have bedrock just about 10 meters and then in this sample, maybe 45, 50 meters. If you keep going north along broadway for example, once you get out north of canal street and get to 14th street, once you are at 14th street, the bedrock is just very close to the surface. Moving on. Twoentional wisdom number is Grand Central station. What i call the Grand Central station. Theory was as natural presentation hub. Excuse me here for a second. I will take a minute here to how grandscuss Central Station was not the birth or not the reason for the birth but the reason for the cause. Promoted expansion in 1920. Just a little bit of background here. In 1902, there was a tunnel crash and a debt forced the railroad to elect or five the tracks. And it forced the railroad to electrify the tracks. The trains ran on steam before that and tracks were open and uncovered. The current station was , and at that1913 point, park avenue was created and a little Terminal City was created above the track. These were new york central ,romoted highend real estate and you can see this today at waldorf astoria or the helms worth building, which is the new york central building. These were terminals promoted in the city. The problem with the Grand Central station theory is, it was of little interest before 1913. I will talk about that in a minute. Depotroadly, north of the , there was pollution. Trains were running on coal and steam, and it was not a Good Environment overall. And furthermore, all the crosstown streets north of the station were highly constricted. Some were only open to pedestrians. Some were, a few were open to cars. You did not have the kind of eastwest access you would have real estatemote development. As i want to show you, the first skyscraper was developed around Madison Square. These are the buildings, all the buildings we could find, that were created between 1890 and 1900 that were 80 meters or higher. They were all built in Lower Manhattan. This is in year for the fact that it is 80 meters taller. Bell over Madison Square garden. All of the skyscrapers built between 1890 and 1900 constructed in Lower Manhattan. And then around the turn of the 20th century, something happened. There was a jump. These Office Buildings 80 meters taller completed between 1901 and 1912. And if you look more closely, what you can see is the greatest concentration of these buildings. Remind you, this is before Grand Central station was electrified and open. Most of the buildings were built between union square and madison oh, i threw away my. Next slide. This was in anticipation. There was a hotel. Causes . Were the if Grand Central station is not there and the bedrock theory evidence is not there, what was going on . I want to turn to some of the evidence that we have collected over the years, and to do this, we need to go back in time to about the year 1830. During this time, much of new was, much of new york was contained in the lower tip of the island, and Residential Development only went up to about 13th street. It was relatively undeveloped below that. Around 1830, there were two major renovations in transportation. The first with the omnibus. Saw the new york city introduction of the omnibus, which is essentially a stagecoach outfitted for urban use. It had several horses pulling these cars, and 15 people could comfortably ride in one of these. Writing on imagine cobblestone street in one of these things was not very pleasant. Introductionf the of the horsedrawn streetcar. This turned out to be a very important technological information innovation in new yorks history. So the horsedrawn streetcar was, as you can imagine, you have the car which holds maybe 20 people lets say, and is pulled by a horse. But the wheels are embedded in rail, was are embedded in the street. The efficiency of the horsedrawn streetcar was important because it now, for the first time in new york city history allowed people to commute. They do not have to be dependent on their foot, on walking to get basically from their homes to work. Ok . So the first question is, what was the where were People Living before the introduction of this . To do this, what i did was i went back to these old directories. New york city directories have been published probably annually since the second half of the 18th century. Each of these directories, if you ask a 14yearold mother phone book, he wont know. But these were like the phonebooks without the phone. They listed the persons name, their residence, and for many of these people or most of these people, they also told you their occupation. You also have business directories, which tell you the name of the company and its location. I have used these residencies, these directories to sort of explore and understand the demographic patterns that were taking place on the island in the 19th century. So dont be scared, i promise it will all be cleared. So what i did was i collected the residential locations of three groups of people. Those identified as merchants, those who were smiths, any kind of smith, iron smith, someone who is a craftsperson, and a laborer. These to meet represent three different economic classes. The green dots are the merchants. Living. E the merchants the smiths are the blue dots and the laborers are the red dots. Inthe merchants are living the very heart of the old city. They are walking to their jobs on foot. The laboring classes are on the periphery, ok . This is what this graph tells you here. It is just a way to measure going from the lower tip north,