Manhattan’s skyline looks the way it does for four reasons, and only one of them is ambition. The others are a piece of safety equipment demonstrated at a fair in 1854, a change in structural engineering, and a zoning ordinance passed in 1916 in response to a single building that annoyed everybody.
The lift came first
Before 1854 the top floor of a building was the cheapest. Nobody wanted to climb six flights, so the upper storeys were servants’ quarters and storage, and a building’s practical height was about five or six floors.
Elisha Otis did not invent the lift. Hoists had existed for centuries and the problem with them was obvious: if the rope broke, the platform fell. What Otis invented was a safety brake — a spring-loaded catch that engaged automatically the moment tension on the rope was lost.
He demonstrated it at the Crystal Palace Exhibition in New York in 1854 by standing on a raised platform and having an assistant cut the rope with an axe. The platform dropped a few inches and stopped. He installed the first passenger safety lift in a commercial building in 1857, in the Haughwout Building at Broadway and Broome Street in SoHo, which is still standing.
With a safe lift, the top floor became the most desirable, and height became worth paying for.
Then the frame
Masonry buildings carry their load in their walls, which means the taller they get, the thicker the walls at the bottom must be. The Monadnock Building in Chicago, sixteen storeys, has walls six feet thick at street level. That is close to the practical limit.
The cast-iron buildings of SoHo, put up between the 1850s and 1880s, were a step toward the answer: iron columns are thin, so the façades could have far more glass. But they were still load-bearing.
The real change was the steel skeleton frame, where the structure is a cage of riveted steel and the walls hang off it, carrying nothing but themselves. Chicago got there first after its 1871 fire cleared the ground, but New York had the land values that made going up worth the expense, and by the 1890s it had taken the lead.
The Flatiron Building of 1902 is a demonstration of the principle: twenty-two storeys on a triangular lot six feet wide at the point, which no masonry building could have managed. New Yorkers were convinced it would fall over.
The race
Height became a corporate advertisement. The Woolworth Building of 1913, paid for in cash by a man who sold nothing over ten cents, took the title at 792 feet and held it for seventeen years.
Then came 1929 and the fight between William Van Alen, building the Chrysler Building for Walter Chrysler, and H. Craig Severance, his estranged former partner, building 40 Wall Street for the Bank of Manhattan. Severance kept revising his height upward each time the Chrysler plans leaked.
Van Alen’s answer was to assemble a 185-foot stainless steel spire in four sections inside the building’s fire shaft, in secret, and raise it through the roof in about ninety minutes on 23 October 1929. The Chrysler Building was suddenly 1,046 feet and Severance had no answer.
It held the record for eleven months. The Empire State Building, built in 410 days, took it in 1931 and kept it for forty years.
Then the Depression emptied all of them. The Empire State was so poorly let through the 1930s that New Yorkers called it the Empty State Building, and it did not turn a profit until 1950.
The law that made the shape
In 1915 the Equitable Building went up at 120 Broadway: forty storeys rising straight from the pavement with no setback at all, on a full block, casting a shadow over seven acres and putting its neighbours into permanent darkness. Property owners nearby were furious and property values around it fell.
The response was the 1916 Zoning Resolution, the first comprehensive zoning law in the United States. It did not limit height. It required buildings to step back from the street line as they rose, according to a formula based on the width of the street, so that light reached the pavement. A tower could rise without limit on a quarter of the lot.
That single rule produced the wedding-cake silhouette of every New York building put up between 1916 and 1961 — the setbacks on the Empire State, the Chrysler, and every anonymous office block in Midtown. Architects designed to the envelope the law described, and the illustrator Hugh Ferriss drew what those envelopes would look like, producing images that shaped how a generation imagined the future city.
The law was replaced in 1961 with a system that traded height for public plazas instead, which is why the buildings of the 1960s and 70s stand back from the street on empty forecourts rather than stepping up from it.
What came after
The World Trade Center towers of 1973 used a structural tube — the exterior wall carrying the load — which allowed enormous column-free floors.
The current generation is the supertall residential tower: pencil-thin shafts along 57th Street, made possible by high-strength concrete, tuned mass dampers to control sway, and the practice of buying air rights from neighbouring lots. One World Trade Center at 1,776 feet is the tallest in the western hemisphere; several of the 57th Street towers are taller than the Empire State Building and much thinner.
Whether that generation is an achievement or a symptom is argued about constantly in New York, largely because the buildings are substantially empty and cast mile-long shadows across Central Park.
Where to see the sequence
Haughwout Building, Broadway and Broome — the first passenger lift.
SoHo cast-iron district — the pre-steel façades.
Flatiron Building, 23rd and Fifth — early steel frame.
Woolworth Building, Broadway — Gothic revival at height.
Chrysler and Empire State — the Art Deco peak and the setback law.
Seagram Building, Park Avenue at 52nd — Mies van der Rohe’s 1958 tower with the plaza that inspired the 1961 rule change.
57th Street between Sixth and Seventh — the supertalls.