Unrestricted

New York’s first zoning law went into effect in 1916. It is famous for partially restricting heights, by forcing setbacks of building mass facing streets, but it also restricted some uses of land. The map below – an actual blueprint, for what that’s worth – shows “Tentative Use Districts.”

The undifferentiated blur shows areas with no use restrictions, and it covers all of Manhattan below 34^th Street, and everything below Central Park except the slice of midtown from Lexington Avenue to Sixth Avenue, and from 56^th Steet to the park. Two small areas of the exclusion were designated as residential use only, the rest was designated as residential or “business” meaning non-industrial commercial use. The Upper East and Upper West Sides are a patchwork of residential and commercial, except that the area east of Third Avenue is unrestricted. West Harlem – Harlem Heights – has some residential-only areas but otherwise the area is residential or commercial.

To some extent, there are no surprises here. The only areas marked as residential only are where rich people, or at least near-rich, lived. The existing areas with a mixture of residential, commercial, and industrial use – for example, Greenwich Village – are marked as unrestricted, to keep the existing uses legal in the future, not just grandfathered in the (then) present.

On the other hand, the fact that industry was considered essential, not just to New York but to Manhattan, as late as 1915 can be jarring. The area east of Third Avenue was full of small factories and warehouses, mostly gone now, some converted to other uses. The Financial District’s boundaries were still limited to the spine of the island then, with the waterfronts being almost entirely industrial. I spent a fair amount of time last year discussing Berenice Abbott’s mid-1930s “Changing New York” photography project (no links here, use the search box for her name to find the posts) and part of the changes at that time was the death of much of Manhattan’s industry.