The title of this blog post is true of a lot of narrative history. Simple stories are more effective on an emotional level, and are easier to tell. So we often tell them. For example, Wikipedia (my go-to source for oversimplified explanations) states that the 1916 New York zoning law “was proposed after the Equitable Building was erected in Lower Manhattan in 1915.” That is somewhat true, if taken at face value, but there’s a conflation of correlation and causation there. And you’re not supposed to do that, as Randall Munroe has sort-of pointed out:
The Equitable building was an egregious example of what can happen with no zoning controls on building massing – it has a floor-area ratio of something like 38, versus the 12 to 15 maximum allowed in current zoning. But it was far from the first example. Lower Manhattan used to be full of such examples, but the replacement of first-generation skyscrapers with new building under the plaza-oriented 1960 zoning law, the creation of new parks, and the widening of some streets have wiped out most of the old craziness. To explain what I mean, the photo below shows the back (west) facades of 115 (left) and 111 Broadway, separated by Thames Street. The building in the distance, past Broadway, is Equitable.
To put that picture in some kind of geometric perspective, Thames Street is 20 feet wide and the block from Broadway to Trinity Place is 263 feet long. Both buildings are approximately 275 feet high. So when you’re standing in the middle of that block, it’s 130 feet to the east or west to escape the buildings or 275 feet straight up. I like the very weird view from there, but it can be simultaneously claustrophobic and agoraphobic for some people. You can also get a somewhat similar feeling on Pine Street between Broadway and Nassau Street. There’s a reason that people started referring to Lower Manhattan’s streets as “canyons” around 1900: this kind of thing used to be visible in dozens of locations. It’s what happens when you plunk a bunch of skyscrapers – and twenty-story buildings were skyscrapers in 1900 – on a 17th century street plan. Equitable may have been the last straw, but the gears of legislature were grinding towards zoning before it was completed.
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