Filling In The Gaps

That’s a new building under construction on lower Sixth Avenue, in Tribeca. If you look closely, you’ll see that it consists of two wings, one running off the edge of the picture to the right, and the other from the mid-left to about where the taxi is. The wings will be barely connected, if at all, because each of them is, in plan, a narrow right triangle with the street as the hypotenuse. In other words, each wing tapers to a zero width on its righthand edge. You can see this if you look closely (click on the picture to expand it) at the lefthand wing. The obvious questions are why anyone would build such a silly building and why there are such silly lots in the city. The first question is easy to answer: we’re in the middle of a real estate boom in the city, and even small and oddly-shaped lots can be built up to make money. The second question is a little more difficult…

I like leading tours around the city and get called on to do so maybe once or twice per year. I always make a point of saying that the numbered street grid gives the illusion of rationality to Manhattan but it’s badly misleading. The grid was planned in 1811 and obviously took decades to implement; meanwhile the city was already 187 years old when it started. The street layout south of Houston Street and a fair amount north of it already existed when the grid was planned. That clear division between new and old was blurred in the early 1900s when Sixth and Seventh Avenues were extended southward, into the pre-grid street plan. You can be standing – as I was when I took that photo – south of Canal Street, more than half a mile south of the grid, and still be on Sixth Avenue. In pop-culture terms, Sixth and Seventh Avenues were retconned into the old city.

This is best illustrated by looking at a pre-extension map. Here’s a chunk of Greenwich Village and the Lower West Side (aka SoHo) in 1891. Sixth Avenue is visible at top, near the right side, rather abruptly ending at the intersection of Minetta Lane (a tiny street) and Carmine Street.

The reason for hacking two large streets through the old layout of Greenwich Village was not really to ease traffic flow, although it certainly helped with that. It was because the portion of the subway system constructed before World War II was mostly built cut-and-cover, and lines were planned under Sixth and Seventh Avenues, including their theoretical southward extensions.

Here’s the same map showing (on the left) the line of the southern end of the new connection from Seventh Avenue to Varick Street and (on the right) the line of the new lower portion of Sixth Avenue from Carmine to Broome. Both extensions are longer than shown here – I’m just using this map to make the point.

The extension of Sixth Avenue, in particular, left a lot of surveying chaos in its wake. A number of small streets (on this map, Cottage Place, Congress Street, and Clark Street) were absorbed into the line of the new avenue, and a number of buildings that were adjacent to the new diagonal of the avenue were demolished. Both of these actions left an irregular sawtooth edge to the avenue. That sawtooth edge has a bunch of narrow triangular lots, which have been sitting around waiting for real estate pressure that made them economic to develop.