Manhattan has long had various types of uses in close proximity to one another. The most common is ground-floor retail with apartments above, but as the 1938 photo by Berenice Abbott shows, it can be a stone’s throw from residential to industrial to offices.
“Midtown Is Reeling. Should Its Offices Become Apartments?” by Matthew Haag and Dana Rubinstein discusses the conversion of office space (emptied by the COVID epidemic) to residential use. The big footprints of many midtown office skyscrapers might seem to argue against it, but we’ve seen a lot of loft apartments that are 60 or 80 feet deep, so it’s physically doable.
