Jason Barr, Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at Rutgers University, is intrigued by the built environment of Manhattan and its many skyscrapers: Why does the skyline look the way it does? He reduced his curiosity to a series of research questions that he has endeavored to answer through historical research and economic theory. This book presents his various studies related to the general questions, “How and why was the skyline (of Manhattan) created, and what were the forces that shaped its history and growth?” More specifically, he focuses on skyscrapers: “what has driven and continues to drive skyscraper heights, locations, frequencies, and shapes since the late nineteenth century” (p. 3).
The book is not a narrative nor an extended argument. Rather, it collects previously published research (half the chapters are revisions of published articles), which deal with the development of Manhattan generally and skyscrapers particularly, and adds some history as background to the studies. The first part of the book, “Before the Skyscraper Revolution,” contains most of the background, with chapters on the geology of Manhattan, and early settlement and patterns of land use. The second part deals with topics related to skyscrapers: what accounts for their height, the reason Midtown became a location for tall buildings, and, most importantly, the reasons for the absence of tall buildings between Lower Manhattan and Midtown.
Because the book treats so many different, often unrelated topics, it is difficult to evaluate as a whole. The most interesting part for me was Barr's discussion in Chapter 9 of who built skyscrapers in the 1920s and a source of project financing called Gold Bonds. But I found many parts of the book problematic. An example concerns the shape of early skyscrapers. He questions Carol Willis's finding (Form Follows Finance. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1995) that the tower-type skyscraper in Lower Manhattan—a tall building on a small footprint—resulted from the difficulty of assembling large sites from the small lots found in the area. Barr asserts that if land prices are rising, landowners will sell; therefore, the specific conditions did not prevent “skyscraper developers from amassing the lots they needed or wanted” (p. 74). Then why this distinctive shape? Yet he argues that early patterns of development were a barrier to redevelopment elsewhere, that is, the reason for the absence of skyscrapers in the area of “warehouses and slums” between Chambers St. and Midtown. Of this area, he wrote, “likely no skyscraper developer was interested in performing the necessary ‘slum clearance’ to have a vacant parcel on which to build” (p. 77).
The question of why there are no skyscrapers between Lower Manhattan and Midtown receives the most attention in the book. It is treated in a chapter devoted to the “bedrock myth” and is the reason for the chapters detailing Manhattan's geology and land use before the Civil War. The idea is that the location of bedrock—hard rock below all other strata of earth—determined where skyscrapers were built. In the “bedrock valley” between Chambers St. and 14th Street, bedrock supposedly was “too far down and hazardous for developers to safely anchor their skyscrapers, so they avoided building them there” (p. 210). Despite Barr saying this story is “accepted as truth” (p. 214) and constantly repeated, it has not led writers of key books on the finances and technology of New York skyscrapers, such as Willis and Gail Fenske (The Skyscraper and the City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), into error. In fact, Barr notes that Sarah Landau and Carl Condit address the story in their book, Rise of the New York Skyscraper, 1865–1913 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996: 24–26), and they set it aside with an explanation similar to Barr's: that “preestablished land use … was a major factor,” later more or less fixed by zoning and historic district regulations, which discouraged skyscraper construction in that area.
That Barr and anyone else would take this story seriously is due to a misconception about building foundations. Throughout the book, Barr describes buildings as being “anchored” to bedrock—a misleading image. Buildings are not always founded on rock—not in the case of low-rise buildings, as Barr discovered: “there was never any need to anchor the (low-rise) building to rock floor” (p. 227). But not in the case of skyscrapers either: foundations of early skyscrapers did not necessarily descend to bedrock. According to contemporary sources, a number of early skyscrapers, such as the World Building, which Barr mentions, and the St. Paul Building (315 feet tall) were built on dense sand, not bedrock.
While holding on to the image of buildings being anchored, Barr comes to the conclusion that the location of the bedrock was not important because foundation costs were a “fixed” percentage of a construction budget. He arrives at this from an analysis of the costs of 53 buildings erected 1899–1915 by one contractor, finding “no statistically significant relationship between bedrock depths and the percentage of the project costs for foundations” (p. 229). But the data include only buildings that were erected, the ones their sponsors expected to be profitable. Not included are projects that, perhaps because of the complexities of a site and therefore high cost of building a foundation there, were never built. So while one must look for reasons beyond simply foundation costs for the absence of early skyscrapers in the bedrock valley, it is not the case—and Barr acknowledges this (p. 226)—that foundation costs are immaterial in a developer's decision about where to build.
Barr looks into many different questions and presents findings on many topics. Readers interested in the development of Manhattan should find something among them that piques their interest. But this variety works against a coherent book. One does not come away feeling she has answers to the main questions.
