Because economic logic suggests that places with high housing prices relative to income must be pleasant, I’ve tried to capture the pleasures of a place by ranking America’s counties based on how unusually high their housing prices were in 1980 relative to their median incomes. On average, counties with high levels of amenities, meaning that they were in the top quarter of areas based on this index, saw their populations grow by 40 percent. Counties in the bottom quarter of areas based on this index had no population growth, on average. The high-amenity counties also saw real median incomes grow by 28 percent, as opposed to 14 percent in the low-amenity counties. The consumer city is on the rise.
The increased demand for city living has also driven the rise in reverse commuting. People who live in one place and work somewhere else are showing their appreciation of the amenities, or low housing costs, of their hometown. We know that New York doesn’t have low housing costs, but there is an increasingly large number of people who live in the city and work outside it. Nationwide, the share of the population that commutes from central city to suburb has increased from 2.4 percent in 1960 to 6.8 percent today. The fact that more people will pay high urban prices and work somewhere else is further evidence that big-city amenities have become increasingly valuable.
Other variables that indicate an attractive location, like an abundance of tourists, also predict urban success. The correlation seems to hold in England and France, as well as in the United States. People are increasingly choosing areas on the basis of quality of life, and the skilled people who come to attractive areas then provide the new ideas that fuel the local economy. Smart, entrepreneurial people are the ultimate source of a city’s economic power, and as those people become more prosperous, they care more about quality of life.
What publicly provided amenities matter most for attracting the skilled? People, especially those with more education, will pay plenty for safe streets and good schools for their children. The growing importance of the consumer city should serve mainly to keep civic leaders focused on doing the basic jobs of local government: policing the streets and improving public schools. Restaurants and theaters are also attractions, but they are neither as critical as safety and schools nor as amenable to governmental intervention. Those amenities come naturally in a thriving city, at least as long as the city hasn’t overregulated its pleasures.
The importance of consumer pleasures also offers a lesson for downturns. City governments must not react to fiscal distress by cutting municipal services, like policing. The easiest way to ensure that a city won’t survive an economic crisis is to turn it into a dangerous no-man’s-land. Unsafe streets will repel the skilled workers that are so vital for urban rebirth.
New York, London, and Paris maybe the world’s most elite consumer cities, but there are plenty of other places that succeed by being playgrounds. University towns, like Charlottesville, Virginia, have attracted many retirees. Las Vegas leveraged its casinos into becoming the fastest-growing large city in America. Indeed, the city’s boosters got so excited about all those restaurants and casinos that it experienced one of the most dramatic of all housing bubbles. Once the pain of the overbuilding has subsided, Las Vegas can go back to being a more normal, midsize place that succeeds by promoting a certain kind of fun.
The problem that New York and London and Paris face is somewhat different. Robust economies and abundant pleasures have made these places highly desirable. People want to live there, and when there isn’t enough housing to satisfy demand, prices can soar. If the most attractive metropolises don’t build more homes, they risk becoming boutique cities, depriving all but the wealthiest of their pleasures and their practical advantages. The barriers that prevent construction in these successful areas are the topic of the next chapter.
CHAPTER 6
What’s So Great About Skyscrapers?
A walk from the Arc de Triomphe to the Louvre along the Champs-Élysées in Paris can seem like a stroll through history. It begins under a two-hundred-year-old arch celebrating French imperial triumphs that was inspired by a far older imperial arch in Rome, the Arch of Titus. It proceeds along one of the most famous boulevards in the world, where Marie Antoinette rode and Hitler marched and countless tourists have eaten ice cream. It passes the Hôtel de Crillon, where Hemingway drank and Woodrow Wilson slept during the Versailles Peace Conference. It crosses the Jardin des Tuileries, that ancient royal playground. It ends in a museum that was begun as a twelfth-century fortress and now houses the masterpieces of many millennia. This walk, like Paris itself, feels timeless: an unchanging urban experience that is far from the ever altering streetscapes of dynamic cities like Hong Kong and Singapore.
But of course, Paris had its beginnings and its builders. Today the city seems like a perfect argument for the value of preserving the past, but with a bit more historical perspective, Paris also makes a case for the virtues of allowing enormous change. Much of the Paris that people love most is the handiwork of one man, Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, who rebuilt the city in a single generation.
What comes to mind when you think of Paris? Perhaps a café au lait at Sartre’s old haunt, Les Deux Magots, after a walk along the Boulevard Saint-Germain. That thoroughfare, like the Boul’Mich (Boulevard Saint-Michel), was created by Haussmann, carved out of a mess of older streets. If you prefer the walk I described along the Champs-Élysées, enjoying the view of the Arc de Triomphe, you are again in Haussmann territory. The street and the arch predate the Baron, but he planned the square that provides such clear views. Do you enjoy the miraculous uniformity of all those five-story buildings that line Parisian streets? That’s Haussmann too. The Opéra? Haussmann. Beneath all that French glamour, there is a sewer system that separates clean water from waste. Thanks again to the Baron. Between 1853 and 1870, Haussmann’s work removed more than half of the buildings in Paris. Haussmann did, in fact, destroy a city to save it.
Paris is an ordered whole. We relish the great monuments of Paris because they are easy to see, not obscured by nearby buildings. It’s obvious that Paris wasn’t built through the gradual accretion of density recommended by grassroots urbanists. No, Paris is unified because it was the planned product of a single master builder, whose imperial overlord gave him a free hand.
Shakespeare’s line “What is the city but the people” is true, but people need buildings. Cities grow by building up, or out, and when a city doesn’t build, people are prevented from experiencing the magic of urban proximity. Preserving a city can, in fact, require destroying a part of it. The modern desire to preserve Haussmann’s Paris has helped turn the affordable Paris of the past into a boutique city that can today be enjoyed only by the wealthy. The history of Paris is replete with great artists who spent their impecunious formative years there, but what poor artists can afford to live in central Paris today? When places overrestrict construction, they risk stagnation and steadily rising prices.
There is great value in protecting the most beautiful parts of our urban past, but cities shouldn’t be embalmed in amber. Too much preservation stops cities from providing newer, taller, better buildings for their inhabitants. Height restrictions, in Paris and New York and Mumbai, may seem like obscure arcana of interest only to planning professionals. Nothing could be more wrong. These rules are shaping the future of our cities and our world. If the cities’ history becomes a straitjacket, then they lose one of their greatest assets: the ability to build up.
Inventing the Skyscraper
In the Book of Genesis, the builders of the Tower of Babel declared, “Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.” These proto-developers correctly understood that cities could connect humanity, but God punished them for monumentalizing terrestrial, rather than celestial, glory. For much of the past two thousand years, Western city builders have taken this story’s warning to heart, and the tallest structures were typically chu
rch spires. The wool-making center of Bruges was one of the first places where a secular structure, the 354-foot belfry built to celebrate cloth making, towered over a religious structure, the nearby Cathedral of Saint Donatus.
In worldly Bruges, wool topped worship by the end of the fifteenth century, but elsewhere it took another four centuries for secular structures to surpass religious towers. Until 1890, the 284-foot spire of Trinity Church, where my great-grandmother knelt in prayer, one block away from the Stock Exchange on Wall Street, was the tallest structure in New York. Perhaps that date, when this religious edifice was eclipsed by a skyscraper built to house Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, should be seen as the true start of the irreligious twentieth century. At almost the same time, Paris celebrated its growing wealth by erecting the 1,000-foot Eiffel Tower, which was 700 feet taller than the Cathedral of Notre Dame.
Since that tower in Babel, height has been seen both as a way to provide more space on a fixed amount of land and as a symbol of power. The belfry of Trinity Church and Gustave Eiffel’s icon did not provide usable space. They were massive monuments to God and French engineering respectively. Pulitzer’s World Building was certainly a monument to Pulitzer, but it was also a relatively practical means of getting his increasingly large news empire into a single building where journalists and editors and Mr. Pulitzer himself could interact.
For centuries, ever taller buildings have made it possible to cram more and more people on an acre of land, without forcing those people to cram together in coffin-size rooms, like those offered in some infamous Tokyo hotels. Yet until the nineteenth century, the move upward was a moderate evolution by which two-story buildings were gradually replaced by four- and six-story buildings. Until the nineteenth century, heights were limited by the cost of building and the human tolerance for climbing stairs. Church spires and belfry towers could pierce the heavens, but only because those towers were narrow and because few people, other than the occasional bell ringer, had to climb them. Tall buildings became possible in the nineteenth century when American innovators solved the twin problems of crafting tall buildings without enormously thick lower walls and of safely moving up and down in them.
Elisha Otis didn’t invent the elevator; Archimedes allegedly built one, possibly in Sicily, twenty-two hundred years ago. And Louis XV had his own personal lift in Versailles so that he could visit his mistress. Yet for the elevator to become mass transit, it needed a good source of power, and it needed to be safe. Messrs. Matthew Boulton and James Watt provided the early steam engines used to power industrial elevators, which were either pulled up by a rope or pushed up hydraulically. As engines improved, so did the speed and power of elevators, which could haul massive amounts of coal out of mines or grain from boats.
But humans were still pretty wary of traveling long distances upward in a machine that could easily break and send them hurtling downward. Otis, tinkering in a Yonkers, New York, sawmill, took the danger out of vertical transit. He crafted a safety brake, which could work for either elevators or trains, and presented his invention at the 1853 New York World’s Fair. He had himself hoisted on a platform pulled by a rope, and then, dramatically, an axman severed the rope. The platform dropped slightly, then came to a halt as the safety brake engaged. The Otis elevator was a sensation, and Otis’s company remains one of the world’s leading elevator makers.
The first two buildings to install powered safety elevators were both in New York City: a department store on Broadway and the Fifth Avenue Hotel. In the 1870s, the elevator enabled pathbreaking structures, like Richard Morris Hunt’s New York Tribune building, to reach ten stories. Across the Atlantic, St. Pancras Station in London also reached ten stories, and at 269 feet it was far taller than Hunt’s New York skyscraper.
But the fortresslike appearance of St. Pancras hints at the building’s core problem. The station lacks the critical cost-reducing ingredient of the modern skyscraper: a load-bearing steel skeleton. Traditional buildings, like St. Pancras or the Tribune building, needed enormously strong lower walls to carry the weight of a tall building. To go further up, lower walls had to get thicker and thicker, and that made costs prohibitive unless you were building a really narrow spire.
The load-bearing steel skeleton, which pretty much defines a skyscraper, applies the same engineering principles used in earlier balloon-frame houses. In a balloon-frame house, a light skeleton made up of standardized boards—two-by-fours, two-by-eights, one-by-tens—supports the weight of the structure. The walls then are essentially a curtain hung on the frame. Balloon-frame houses reduced the costs of putting up homes throughout nineteenth-century rural America. Skyscrapers, like balloon-frame houses, rest their weight on a skeleton frame, but in this case the frame is made of steel, which became increasingly affordable in the late nineteenth century.
William Le Baron Jenney’s 138-foot Home Insurance Building, built in Chicago in 1885, is often seen as the first true skyscraper, but there is a lively architectural debate about whether Jenney was really the inventor of the skyscraper. That debate reflects the fact that the development of the skyscraper, like most other gifts of the city, didn’t occur in a social vacuum, and it didn’t occur all at once. Jenney’s “first skyscraper” didn’t have a complete steel skeleton. It had just two iron-reinforced, fireproof walls. Previous tall buildings in Chicago, such as Daniel Burnham and John Root’s Montauk Building, built two years earlier, had also used steel reinforcement. Industrial structures, like the McCullough Shot Tower in New York and the St. Ouen Docks Warehouse near Paris, had used iron frames decades before.
Jenney’s proto-skyscraper was a patchwork, stitching together his own innovations and ideas that were in the air of architect-rich Chicago. Other builders, like Burnham and Root, their engineer George Fuller, and Louis Sullivan, a former Jenney apprentice, then further developed the idea. Sullivan’s great breakthrough came in 1890, when he designed a skyscraper, St. Louis’s Wainwright Building, free from massive amounts of ornamental masonry. Whereas Jenney’s buildings look Victorian, the Wainwright Building points the way clearly toward the modernist towers that now define so many urban skylines.
Ayn Rand’s novel The Fountainhead is loosely based on the early life of Louis Sullivan’s apprentice Frank Lloyd Wright. Sullivan and Wright are depicted as lone eagles, Gary Cooper heroes, paragons of rugged individualism. They weren’t. They were great architects deeply enmeshed in an urban chain of innovation; Wright riffed on Sullivan’s idea of form following function, and Sullivan riffed on Jenney, and Jenney relied on the fireproofing innovations of Peter B. Wight.
Their collective creation—the skyscraper—enabled cities to add vast amounts of floor space using the same amount of ground area. Given the rising demand for center-city real estate, the skyscraper seemed like a godsend. The problem was that those central cities already had buildings on them. Except in places like Chicago, where fire had created a tabula rasa, those cities needed to tear down in order to build up.
The demand for space was even stronger in New York than in Chicago, and skyscrapers were soon springing up in Manhattan. In 1890, Pulitzer’s World Building had some steel columns, but its weight was still supported by seven-foot-thick masonry walls. In 1899, the World’s height was surpassed by the Park Row Building, which soared to 391 feet supported by a steel skeleton. Daniel Burnham traveled east to build his iconic Flatiron Building in 1907, and in 1909, Wight’s National Academy of Design was torn down to build the 700-foot Metropolitan Life tower, then the tallest building in the world. In 1913, the Woolworth Building reached 792 feet, and it remained the world’s tallest building until the boom of the late 1920s.
The Soaring Ambition of A. E. Lefcourt
Those tall buildings were not mere monuments. They enabled New York to grow and industries to expand. They gave factory owners and workers space that was both more humane and more efficient. Manhattan’s master builders, such as A. E. Lefcourt, made that possible.
Like a proper Horatio A
lger hero, A. E. Lefcourt was born poor and started work as a teenage newsboy and bootblack. When he began working full-time in retail, he kept selling papers in the morning and shining shoes in the evening. He saved enough cash to buy a $1,000 U.S. Treasury bond, which he kept pinned to his shirt. When he was twenty-five, his garment industry employer decided to retire; Lefcourt shocked the man by announcing that he wanted to buy the firm. For about a decade, Lefcourt built up his business to the point where it was doing $2 million a year in sales (more than $40 million in 2010 currency).
In 1910, New York City was hit by the Great Revolt, in which sixty thousand garment workers stayed on the picket lines for ten weeks. Lefcourt, still in his early thirties, led the management side of the battle as the chairman of the Cloak, Suit and Skirt Manufacturers’ Protective Association. Despite the fact that the courts seemed willing to back the manufacturers all the way, Lefcourt accepted the terms of the mediator, future Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis, in what became known as the Protocol of Peace. While Pittsburgh’s Henry Clay Frick earned a place in history for using overwhelming force against the Homestead Strike, Lefcourt deserves credit for finding a less bloody and likely more profitable middle ground.
In the summer of 1910, at the same time that he was bargaining with the labor unions, Lefcourt began a new career as a real estate developer. He sank all of his capital into a twelve-story loft building on West Twenty-fifth Street that would house his own firm. He built more such buildings and helped move his industry from the old sweatshops into the modern garment district. Whereas the old downtown garment district had been anchored by the value of proximity to the port, Lefcourt’s new garment district lay between Pennsylvania and Grand Central stations, anchored by the rail lines, which continued to give New York a transportation advantage. Transportation technologies shape cities, and Midtown Manhattan was built around two great rail stations that could carry in oceans of people. (Bedrock may have also played a role, but its impact appears to have been modest.)
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