Lefcourt discovered that he liked building even more than he liked making clothes. Over the next twenty years, he erected thirty-one edifices, many of them skyscrapers. Lefcourt used those Otis elevators in soaring towers that covered 150 acres, encased 100 million cubic feet, and contained as many workers as Trenton. The Wall Street Journal wrote that “he demolished more historical structures in New York City than any other man dared to contemplate.” In the early 1920s, the New York of slums, tenements, and Gilded Age mansions was transformed into a city of skyscrapers, as builders like Lefcourt erected a hundred thousand new units each year, enabling the city to grow and to stay reasonably affordable.
By 1928, Lefcourt’s real estate wealth was estimated at $100 million; he would have been a billionaire in today’s dollars. He celebrated by opening a national bank bearing his own name. Lefcourt’s optimism was unfazed by the stock market crash, and he planned $50 million of construction for 1930, sure that it would be a “great building year.” But Lefcourt was wrong. As New York’s economy collapsed, so did his real estate empire, which was sold off piecemeal to pay his investors. He died in 1932 worth only $2,500, seemingly punished, like the builders of Babel, for his hubris.
I suspect that Lefcourt, like many developers, cared more about his structural legacy than cash. Those structures helped house the creative minds that still make New York special. Two economists tried to understand the impact of building height on economic productivity by comparing areas that had natural features like bedrock, which makes it cheaper to build up, with areas where building up was naturally more difficult. They found that labor productivity and wages were significantly higher in those places where density was easier to develop.
Lefcourt’s most famous building, which doesn’t even bear his name, came to symbolize an entire musical style: the Brill Building Sound. From 1958 to 1965, artists connected in the Brill Building produced a string of hits like “Twist and Shout,” “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling,” and fittingly enough, “Up on the Roof.” Cities are ultimately about the connections among people, but structures—like those built by A. E. Lefcourt—make those connections easier. By building up, Lefcourt made the lives of garment workers far more pleasant and created plenty of new space for creative minds in other fields.
Regulating New York
New York’s upward trajectory was not without its detractors. In 1913, the distinguished chairman of the Fifth Avenue Commission, who was himself an architect, led a fight to “save Fifth Avenue from ruin.” At that time, Fifth Avenue was still a street of stately mansions owned by Astors and Rockefellers. The antigrowth activists argued that unless heights were restricted to 125 feet or less, Fifth Avenue would become a canyon with ruinous results for property values, congestion, and the city as a whole. Similar arguments have been made by the enemies of change throughout history and into our time. The chair of the commission was a better architect than prognosticator: Density has suited Fifth Avenue quite nicely.
In 1915, on the corner of Broadway and Nassau Street, in the heart of downtown New York, the Equitable Life Assurance Association constructed a 538-foot-high monolith, which contains almost two million square feet of office space and cast a seven-acre shadow on the city. The building became a rallying cry for the enemies of height, who wanted to see a little more sun. A political alliance came together and passed the city’s landmark 1916 zoning ordinance, which allowed buildings to rise only if they gave up girth. New York’s many ziggurat-like structures, which get narrower as they get taller, were constructed to fulfill the setback requirements of the 1916 ordinance.
The code changed the shape of buildings, but it did little to stop the building boom of the 1920s. Really tall buildings provide something of an index of irrational exuberance. Five of New York City’s ten tallest buildings in 2009, including the Empire State Building, were completed between 1930 and 1933. Development of all of the older sites started during the go-go years of the late 1920s, when the city’s future seemed unlimited. Builders like A. E. Lefcourt were confident they could attract tenants, and their bankers were happy to lend.
In the late 1920s, the builders of the Chrysler Building, 40 Wall Street, and the Empire State Building had a great race to produce the tallest structure in New York and hence the world. It is an odd fact that two of New York’s tallest and most iconic edifices, Chrysler and Empire State, were built with money made from selling the cars that would move America away from vertical cities to sprawling suburbs. As it turned out, the winning Empire State Building, nicknamed the “Empty State Building,” was neither fully occupied nor profitable until after World War II. Luckily for its builders, the building’s construction costs also came in way below budget because there was plenty of cheap steel available during the Great Depression.
In the years after 1933, New York slowed its construction of skyscrapers, and its regulations became ever more complex. Between 1916 and 1960, the original zoning code was amended more than twenty-five hundred times. In 1960, the City’s Planning Commission passed a new zoning ordinance that significantly increased the limits on building. The resulting 420-page code replaced a simple classification of space—business, residential, and unrestricted—with a dizzying number of different districts, each of which permitted only a narrow range of activities. There were thirteen different types of residential districts, twelve different types of manufacturing districts, and no less than forty-one different types of commercial districts.
Each type of district narrowly classified the range of permissible activities. Commercial art galleries are forbidden in residential districts but allowed in manufacturing districts, while noncommercial art galleries are forbidden in manufacturing districts but allowed in residential districts. Art supply stores are forbidden in residential districts and some commercial districts. Parking space requirements also differed by district. In an R5 district, a hospital must have one off-street parking spot per every five beds, but in an R6 district, a hospital must have one space for every eight beds. The picayune detail of the code is exemplified by its control of signs: “For multiple dwellings, including apartment hotels, or for permitted non-residential buildings or other structures, one identification sign with an area not exceeding 12 square feet and indicating only the name of the permitting use, the name or address of the building, or the name of the management thereof, is permitted.”
The code also removed the complex system of setbacks and replaced it with a complex system based on floor area ratios or FARs—a FAR is the ratio of interior square footage to ground area. A maximum FAR of two, for example, means that a developer can put a two-story building on his entire plot or a four-story building on half of the plot. In residential districts R1, R2, and R3, the maximum floor area ratio was 0.5. In R9 districts, the maximum FAR was about 7.5. The height restriction was eased for builders who created plazas or other public spaces at the front of the building. While the standard building created by the 1916 code was a wedding cake that started at the sidewalk, the standard building created by the 1961 code was a glass-and-steel slab with an open plaza in front.
Fear of Heights
New York’s zoning codes were getting more rigorous, but so were other restrictions on new development. After World War II, New York made private development more difficult by overregulating construction and rents while building a bevy of immense publicly supported structures, such as Stuyvesant Town and Lincoln Center. But then, during the 1950s and 1960s, both public and private projects increasingly ran into resistance from grassroots organizers, like Jane Jacobs, who were becoming adept at mounting opposition to large-scale development.
Jane Jacobs hardly seemed cut out for big-city glory. She graduated from Scranton’s Central High School in 1934 and left the next year for New York City, because she thought it would be more fun than northeastern Pennsylvania. She took extension-school classes at Columbia University without ever getting a college degree. Later she would turn down abundant offers of honorary degrees. When we f
irst met in 1993, I was struck by how much pleasure she took in her self-made status. She got started writing freelance articles about the city for the Herald Tribune, eventually rising to the position of associate editor at the Architectural Forum, a monthly magazine that focused on buildings. She married an architect, Robert Jacobs, and chose to raise a family on Hudson Street in the West Village.
Her remarkable intellect, which still sparkled well into her eighties, and her New York City experiences led her to many profound and prescient insights. In the 1950s, she saw clearly the folly of those efforts of urban renewal, which replaced well-functioning neighborhoods with immense towers that were isolated from the streets that surrounded them. She opposed the accepted wisdom of urban planning, with its penchant for single-use neighborhoods; she advocated diversity. In the 1960s, she grasped the role that cities play in spreading knowledge and ideas and creating economic growth. In the 1970s, she understood that cities were actually better for the environment than leafy suburbs. Her insights came from her enormous gifts as an observer living and working in New York. Her knowledge came from walking around with her eyes open, which is still the best way to learn how a city works.
Gradually Jacobs also started getting involved in fights over urban development. As a Greenwich Village resident, she opposed a plan to run a road through Washington Square Park. While zoning advocates were increasingly pushing for single-use zoning, Jacobs became an advocate of mixed-use zoning, opposing “segregating New York into economically independent islands with endless, dreadful consequences.” She vehemently opposed retail-free public housing projects, deriding them for their single-purpose sterility. She criticized Lincoln Center as a “piece of built-in rigor mortis.”
In 1961, the same year that the City Planning Commission’s new zoning plan came into effect, the commission got into a fight with Jane Jacobs over demolishing sixteen blocks of Greenwich Village for urban renewal. Jacobs got a court order to stop the project. She assembled a broad range of supporters who rushed the podium at a commission planning meeting. She insinuated that there were corrupt deals between city officials and builders. Eventually, she created enough heat so that the mayor himself, once a strong supporter of the project, gave it up.
In that same year, a few months after beating City Hall, Jacobs published her masterpiece, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. It is a great book, which investigates and celebrates the pedestrian world of mid-twentieth-century New York. She grounds her case for mixed-use zoning by arguing that street life is the essence of city living and city safety. She argues against high-density dwellings by pointing out that they segregate residents from their streets. In a world of short buildings, residents can monitor the paths outside their home, and eyes on the street make pedestrians safer. In a world of high-rises, those residents become oblivious to the street life beneath them.
There is some truth to her assertion that streets can suffer from high-rise buildings, at least when they’re poorly designed and discourage street life. People who live in high-rises are about 6 percent more likely to be victimized by street crime than people who live in single-family dwellings, even controlling extensively for individual attributes of each potential victim. The people who live in big buildings are actually less likely to have their homes burgled, but they’re more likely to be robbed on the street. Among richer people, there is no link between height and crime. My own interpretation of these facts is that the taller towers, occupied by the poor, are often public housing projects, where poverty is concentrated and ground-floor retail is rare. These conditions mean that streets can become dominated by troublemakers.
In more mixed settings, there are more shoppers and workers. In wealthier areas, there are doormen. A modicum of good urban planning can ensure that high-rises have enough foot traffic to keep streets safe. Neither Midtown Manhattan nor Hong Kong is short on pedestrians, and crime is relatively rare.
Jane Jacobs’s opposition to urban renewal led her to a more sweeping dislike for tall buildings in general. In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, she argued that urban neighborhoods can only thrive when they have between one and two hundred households per acre. She argued that cities need at least a hundred homes per acre to generate enough street traffic to support exciting restaurants and shops. She also argued that two hundred homes per acre was a “danger mark”; once neighborhoods crossed that point, they risked sterile standardization. A typical Manhattan apartment, like the one that I grew up in, has about 1,300 square feet of floor space. To accommodate two hundred households per acre, structures should be about six stories high, just about the standard height for apartment buildings constructed before the age of the elevator.
While Jacobs well understood the virtues of the shorter neighborhoods that she lived in, it is less clear that she grasped the strengths that are also present in places with loftier structures. There’s nothing particularly sterile about high-rise Manhattan neighborhoods, as long as they have enough ground-floor action. Taller neighborhoods can also have plenty of interesting stores and restaurants. Densities of three hundred or more households per acre are surely not for everyone, but human diversity demands a variety of living arrangements, and some people do want tall buildings. Jacobs’s own preference for Greenwich Village-like neighborhoods was quite reasonable—I like the Village too—but one’s own tastes are rarely a sound basis for public policy. For the government to mandate a single style of urbanism is no more sensible than for the government to enforce a single style of literature.
Jacobs’s belief in the value of moderate densities led her to fight against tall structures, such as a nine-story library for New York University, just as she fought against single-use zoning and new expressways. Her urban vision was very much grounded in the experience of her own Greenwich Village neighborhood, with its taverns and thinkers and low-rise townhouses. She liked old buildings and thought that new skyscrapers wouldn’t permit the mixed uses that she loved.
Jane Jacobs liked protecting old buildings because of a confused piece of economic reasoning. She thought that preserving older, shorter structures would somehow keep prices affordable for budding entrepreneurs. That’s not how supply and demand works. Preserving an older one-story building instead of replacing it with a forty-story building does not preserve affordability. Indeed, opposing new building is the surest way to make a popular area unaffordable. An increase in the supply of houses, or anything else, almost always drives prices down, while restricting the supply of real estate keeps prices high.
The relationship between housing supply and affordability isn’t just a matter of economic theory. There is a great deal of evidence linking the supply of space with the cost of real estate. Simply put, the places that are expensive don’t build a lot, and the places that build a lot aren’t expensive. Several papers have shown that new construction is lower and prices are higher in places that restrict building. One of the cleverest papers in this genre uses natural barriers to building, such as the hilliness of an area, and shows that places with tough topography have less new construction and higher prices.
Perhaps a new forty-story building won’t itself house any quirky, less profitable firms, but by providing new space, the building will ease pressure on the rest of the city’s real estate. Price increases in gentrifying older areas will be muted because of new construction. Growth, not height restrictions and a fixed building stock, keeps space affordable and ensures that poorer people and less profitable firms can stay, which helps thriving cities remain successful and diverse. Height restrictions do increase light, and preservation does protect history, but we shouldn’t pretend that these benefits come without a price.
The Perils of Preservation
In 1961, the same year that Jane Jacobs published her great book, the Pennsylvania Railroad was preparing to raze its old New York station. That railroad had built the station on Thirty-third Street as a temple to trains in 1908, the height of the rail era. The old Penn Station was a stunning
structure, complete with Doric columns and a waiting room based on the Baths of Caracalla. The building’s architect, like Jane Jacobs, saw height as inimical to urban life, so he insisted that the building be short.
The decision to go low would prove to be the station’s undoing. While the structure was an acknowledged architectural masterpiece, it also made less sense as rail travel declined in the twentieth century. By the end of the 1950s, the Pennsylvania Railroad was determined to get more value out of their wellplaced, central Manhattan property. They tore down the Beaux Arts structure and replaced it with today’s far less loved station and a thirty-four-story office tower. The rents from the tower could make up for some of their declining rail revenues.
Everything the Pennsylvania Railroad did was entirely legal, but the old station had been loved by both cognoscenti and ordinary commuters. The demolition of the beautiful station became a rallying cry for a growing preservationist movement that aimed to protect New York’s most beautiful older buildings from Penn Station’s fate. In 1962, Mayor Robert Wagner established a Landmarks Preservation Commission. Just in case there was any confusion about the mayor’s motivation, the subtitle of the New York Times article announcing the formation of that new agency was “Wagner Names 12 to New Agency—Architects Decry Razing of Penn Station.”
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