Edge City

by Joel Garreau

  • industry,

  • governance,

  • commerce,

  • safety,

  • culture,

  • companionship,

  • religion.*

  Edge Cities function along exactly these lines, although the emphasis has shifted provocatively over the centuries. Take the New Jersey Edge City an hour west of Wall Street, around the intersection of Interstates 287 and 78, in the area from Bridgewater to Basking Ridge and from Warren to Bedminster. Tracing the effect of these seven historical forces on the shaping of this Edge City helps reveal what it is this civilization values.

  Industry, for example—the creation of jobs and wealth—is the very point of Edge Cities. AT&T’s world headquarters is in this “287 and 78” world. It is universally referred to as the Pagoda because it is vaguely Oriental in a Frank Lloyd Wright kind of way. Its tiled, cascading tiers of heavy-lidded roofs and hanging gardens are massive and lavish enough to be the envy of any Chinese emperor.

  The Pagoda opened in 1976 in the 287 and 78 neighborhood of Basking Ridge because AT&T thought that was the best place to grow and make money. Although AT&T was founded in Manhattan in 1885 and still uses that as its corporate address, not a single top executive is permanently located there. In the 1930s, Bell Labs—AT&T’s renowned research and development arm—custom-designed for itself an elaborate 1.7-million-square-foot, high-rise headquarters employing fifty-six hundred people on less than four acres of Manhattan. The plans were shucked in 1939. Corporate archives show that even fifty years ago old downtowns were thought to have competitive problems. “High costs of land in Manhattan,” “high living costs,” and “the urban noise and dirt,” as well as the inefficiencies of skyscrapers and the commuting woes on the ferries and tubes, were already major issues, according to corporate documents.

  So in the opening days of World War II, Bell Labs moved out to a grandly christened “campus” in Murray Hill, near what is now Interstate 78. AT&T never looked back. In 1977, the Long Lines division—the long-distance operation that is now the bulk of the company’s franchise—pulled its headquarters from the bowels of lower Manhattan. It, too, moved to 287 and 78—in Bedminster, near the Far Hills fox-hunt estates of boxer Mike Tyson, the late Malcolm Forbes, and the king of Morocco.

  This is no small deal. The two-story Strangelovian “video-wall” control center for AT&T’s network linking 146 countries is in the foothills there today. If the future belongs to whoever controls the glass-fiber networks of the multibillion-dollar information marketplace, 287 and 78 someday may erupt like a historic boomtown—Chicago in the heyday of railroads or Detroit when the automobile was new or Houston when oil approached $40 a barrel.

  Meanwhile, more than fifty years after Bell Labs made its move—which was back when high technology was a phone you didn’t have to crank—New Jersey’s Edge Cities have proven sufficiently useful that AT&T has 225 facilities in them. They include the headquarters of each major division. AT&T located enough facilities in the New Jersey Edge Cities in the mid-1970s alone to overflow one of the World Trade Center’s 110-story towers. AT&T now occupies twenty-two million square feet of space there. That is more than exists in downtown Seattle. More than fifty-one thousand people are employed by AT&T in New Jersey’s Edge Cities.

  This is increasingly common. Edge Cities are headquarters to such diverse giants as Motorola (Schaumburg, Illinois), K mart (Troy, Michigan), Black & Decker (Hunt Valley, Maryland), and—the Greatest Show on Earth—the Ringling Bros, and Barnum & Bailey Circus (Tysons Corner, Virginia).* Sears, Roebuck and Company recently pulled its headquarters out of that symbol of old downtowns, the world’s tallest building, the 110-story Sears Tower on Chicago’s Wacker Drive. After a nationwide search, it located in the Hoffman Estates neighborhood of the Edge City centered on Schaumburg, thirty miles to the northwest. Sears’ move illustrated what these corporations are trying to do: heighten competitiveness by consolidating entire operations, save a few bucks, and, it is hoped, enhance the quality of the work force and the living and working environment.

  That is why these Edge Cities are hardly one-company towns. A lot of outfits have the same idea. The 287 and 78 area flies the corporate banners of TRW, NYNEX, Chubb, Allstate, Prudential, Beneficial, Bristol-Myers, Hoechst Celanese, Johnson & Johnson, Chase Manhattan, and Dun & Bradstreet. It contains more than sixteen million leasable square feet of office space full of white-collar jobs. That’s larger than downtown New Orleans. This Edge City not only has a corporate-jet airfield fifteen minutes away in Morristown; it has achieved such stature that its heavy hitters recently started to feel put upon. It seems that when they returned from Europe and Asia, the federal government had the annoying habit of forcing their private jets to first land at Teterboro, forty miles east. That was the nearest strip with a customs facility. Only after that stop could they fire up the turbines for the five-minute hop to 287 and 78. So the high rollers bought themselves their own customs office for Morristown. This is an airport with no regularly scheduled commercial flights, but it is now in effect Morristown International. They pay for this customs shed, they use it, it’s theirs.

  (In fact, the rise nationwide of satellite airports with surprisingly high levels of full-blown commercial service is a direct result of Edge Cities. In the orbit of New York’s Edge Cities, for example, there are now six airports with serious, scheduled, national-airline jet service. That is because a lot of people in Edge Cities don’t want to fight their way into La Guardia, Newark, or JFK. The newly important outer airports include MacArthur in Islip, halfway out on Long Island; Westchester; and Stewart International, in Newburgh, New York, seventy-five miles up the Hudson from Manhattan.)

  Although nationally known corporations get a lot of press when they relocate to Edge City, they are not the quoin of capitalism there. It is the young, fast-growing entrepreneurial start-up—especially in high technology—that is the mark of Edge City. Inc. (“The Magazine for Growing Companies”) in 1989 specifically made the connection. “One lure may lie in the basically unsettled nature of life on the edge,” Inc. reported. “The people who like the status quo stay downtown where the old elites are. People who are out there redefining themselves, like entrepreneurs, are attracted to places that are new, where things are more flexible.”

  The creation of enterprise and jobs, and thus cities, has not changed much through history. It’s always required a great deal of raw material drawn to one location, to which is added people to shape the material into something different and useful. The result is then shipped back out to an eager world. Today, that location is Edge City.

  That’s because the raw material has changed. Now that stock is made up of problems. There are so many of them that they come to places like 287 and 78 via huge satellite dishes—the heavy haulers, the railroads of the future. In Edge City, the offices are the factories of the Information Age. That is where problems are accumulated and the information of which they are made is mined for valuable nuggets. There it is digested and decided on by the work force, transformed, and repackaged.

  The finished product shipped back out, essentially, is cleverness. It includes everything from decisions to buy and sell, to designs and redesigns, to software, to reports, to legal opinions, to television advertising. The worth of this cleverness can be thought of as independent of the physical object in which it may be embedded. Take the price of a telephone, for example. No one buying one cares about the cost per pound of this lump of plastic and silicon. The value of the phone is in how ingenious it is—how many features it has, how portable it is, how reliable it is. It is measured by how much cleverness it represents.

  This shift to Information Age cities is as basic a revolution as the one we went through a century and a half ago at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. In 1850, for example, 85 percent of the U.S. population was rural. Cities, such as they were, were small and mercantile. Their landmarks were the counting houses down by the wharves. There, the riches of
the hinterlands were swapped for the complexities of Europe and Asia. By the turn of the century, that had all changed. Mighty cities like Pittsburgh were built not so much on their relationship to farm and woodlands as on the relation of their factories to iron ore, coal, and sweating labor.

  Before the Industrial Revolution, a world like today’s would have been utterly unimaginable—in which only 3 percent of all Americans farm and more than three quarters are metropolitan slickers. Edge City represents as radical a shift. This is not because America’s manufacturing prowess has rusted. Ignore the gloom-and-doom-sayers. The United States is now so technically advanced that it makes a ton of steel with fewer work hours than any nation on earth. From basic metals to chemicals to pharmaceuticals, American industry is strong. The American worker is by far the most productive in the world. Manufacturing jobs in America are actually increasing in absolute numbers.

  But the way the world measures success in manufacturing today is by how quickly the number of blue-collar workers per object created can decline. That means increased productivity—more output per person—which means competitiveness with the rest of the world. Thus, it is possible to imagine an America with as strong a manufacturing base as there is now an agricultural base, in which the share of people actually turning widgets is astonishingly low. It is already no more than 18 percent of the work force—and it sank below 50 percent for the first time only in 1953.

  That leads to the key work location being the office. That is industry in the late twentieth century. Instead of actually making airplanes, people more typically are figuring out how to make stronger, lighter composites to translate less fuel into more passengers in airplanes. Or they are supporting the people who do—either directly as researchers or word processors, or indirectly, by delivering their meals, fixing their Xerox machines, or nurturing their children.

  That is why five million square feet of leasable office space is the point of critical mass for Edge City. The developer’s rule of thumb is: One office worker equals 250 square feet. That’s the size of a fair-sized living room, and counts not just the worker’s desk area, but her share of reception rooms, file rooms, stockrooms, and Xerox rooms.

  Why do Edge Cities seem to hit critical mass at five million square feet of leasable office space? No one knows exactly, at a theoretical level. But the figure does work like crazy as a predictor. When one drives out to see a place so measured, one always finds the same tall buildings, bright lights, and a hustle and bustle that is distinctly urban, albeit a little raw and cracked.

  Five million square feet of office is a point of spontaneous combustion. It turns out to be exactly enough to support the building of a luxury hotel. It causes secondary explosions; businesses begin to flock to the location to serve the businesses already there. Five million square feet is a huge number; more than a hundred acres. That much space dwarfs the sizable downtown of Dayton, Richmond, Wilmington, or Spokane. It represents dozens of office buildings that would cover blocks and blocks in an old downtown. The number instantly and decisively rules out our using “city” for any suburban office strip of dentists and cut-rate tax-return accountants. The number represents a reality that is so quantitatively different as to be qualitatively different.

  This measure of Edge City is especially useful because it is easily gathered. Edge City is a creature of the marketplace, and commercial real estate agents are its most devoted acolytes. Their mental maps of what constitutes a single commercial real estate “submarket” is usually an exquisite description of the functional outlines of Edge City. If you wish to know whether a place near you is a full-blown Edge City, simply ask a commercial real estate agent to total up the leasable square footage numbers in his computer by submarket.

  Interestingly, it has to be office space. Industrial and warehouse space does not create anything urbane. No dense centers ever evolve. Factories usually figure one worker for every forty-five hundred square feet. This is eighteen times less dense than office space. Warehouse space has even fewer workers than that. Only one story high, a warehouse sprawls over the landscape much more than does Edge City. North Carolina is the tenth most populous state in the Union. It has 35 percent of its work force in manufacturing—the highest level in the nation. Yet it has no large downtowns at all, and not much in the way of an Edge City outside the white-collar confines of the Research Triangle: Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill. City of Industry, California, aptly named, has a staggering hundred million square feet of factory and warehouse space—almost four square miles under roof. But precious little of that Southern California site passes for civilization. Industrial and warehouse workers rarely demand specialty retail, high-end services, cloth-napkin restaurants, hotels, and bookstores.

  With the workplace now centered on offices, cities are transformed. For one thing, “cleverness” is not heavy; it is not measured in tons, like steel or corn or petroleum. Thus, it does not have to be, like an old downtown, near water or rail—the preferred movers of “heavy.” Edge Cities, in fact, typically rise at the interchange of freeways. This should come as no surprise. “Whatever its shape, its architecture, or the civilization that illuminates it, the town creates roads and is created by them,” Fernand Braudel wrote of the Middle Ages. “We should imagine the great trade route to the East [of the 1500s] as something like today’s autostrada.”

  Cities are always created around whatever the state-of-the-art transportation device is at the time. If the state of the art is sandal leather and donkeys, you get Jerusalem. Even when wheeled vehicles replaced pack animals as the freight technology of choice fifteen centuries after Jesus, Jerusalem remained shaped by its transportation origins.

  When the state of the art is carriages and oceangoing sail, you get the compact, water-dominated East Coast cities of Paul Revere’s Boston and George Washington’s Alexandria. Or Amsterdam and Antwerp.

  Canal barge and steamship give you Boss Tweed’s New York. Intraurban (the El) and transcontinental rail (the stockyards) yield Bugsy Moran’s Chicago. The automobile results in Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles.

  When, in 1958, you threw in the jet passenger plane, you got more Los Angeles in strange places—Atlanta, Denver, Houston, Dallas, and Phoenix.

  The combination of the present is the automobile, the jet plane, and the computer. The result is Edge City. The proof is the half-million-square-foot corporate headquarters of Beneficial Corporation, formerly Beneficial Finance. Incongruously located off a two-lane country road one exit north of the interchange of Interstates 287 and 78, Beneficial’s headquarters is a complex of low, brooding brick linked by cobblestone courtyards and crowned by an eighty-foot clock tower that management is pleased to refer to as “the campanile.” This headquarters looms like a baronial castle over the swale in which the perfect white spire of the Reformed Church marks the picturesque village of Peapack. The effect is supposed to be campus-like. It did indeed overpower one would-be Beneficial executive. At his hiring interview, having seen the place for the first time, he looked out over one quadrangle and couldn’t help himself. Out he blurted, “So how’s the football team doing?”

  The Beneficial site is achingly bucolic. The “guest house” is Hamilton Farm, the former estate of the Brady dynasty, from which sprang Nicholas Brady, secretary of the treasury under George Bush. The sixty-four-room manse is profusely hung with oil portraits of horses with names like Exterminator and Twenty Grand. Out back, the carefully rolled lawn sports a wind sock. For the helicopters. When I mentioned I’d almost clobbered four deer in the driveway, the chairman and chief executive officer, Finn M. W. Caspersen, replied idly, “Only four?” There are usually more, he said, showing only the mildest interest in the fact that there were all these large wild animals bounding around his Edge City.

  The deer, after all, are not the stars of the show in these parts. The horses are. The long-time headquarters of the U.S. Olympic Equestrian Team is at Hamilton Farm. The stables, when they were built in 1916, were described as the larges
t and most lavish in the United States. They have forty ornate carriage rooms, harness rooms, and human bedrooms featuring tile walls, terrazzo floors, and brass fittings. The floors of the fifty-four twelve-foot-square box stalls are made of bricks of cork.

  As it happens, Caspersen is a competitor in an event called the “four in hand.” That involves making four horses pulling a carriage perform like gymnasts. It is an exotic sport by the standards of fox hunting. When Caspersen beat Prince Philip at it in England to take the world championship, the glass trophy came home next to him in the seat he’d bought for it on the Concorde. Nonetheless, Caspersen protests it was not he who insisted that the Beneficial headquarters be built next to the headquarters of the U.S. Olympic Equestrian Team. It was just a happy coincidence. The serendipity of corporate decision making.

  Caspersen’s version of the logic that brought the diversity, complexity, size, and function of a major corporation out to Edge City—of how his Machine of many parts was brought out to the Garden—goes like this:

  “We came to the conclusion in the 1970s that the rest of the century was going to put a premium on employees in our business—financial services. And many employees were going to want a life style more than just money—a helpful environment and a pleasant environment.

  “We also came to the conclusion that women were becoming more and more of a factor in our business. And when a woman has to combine raising a family and working, there’s a very strong argument for being out near where people live.

  “And personally, I am not a proponent of skyscrapers. I think there’s an impersonal feeling about a skyscraper that makes it very difficult to have any kind of corporate culture. The only time you see people is in the elevator.

  “So with that combination, what we were looking for was 80 percent of our people being able to live within twenty miles. That location had to be within three or four miles of a major interstate and it had to have room for expansion. An hour from a major airport—Newark is now thirty-five minutes away. We also wanted to have a railroad nearby. We weren’t quite sure what role that was going to play—it turns out not too much.