New Ringing The Old

Here’s a terrible photo I took through the window of a ferry:

There’s a weird concentric-circle effect to the buildings in much of lower Manhattan that you can see clearly here, that the buildings on the waterfront are new and bigger than the ones behind them. It’s a simple accident of history: when people started building skyscrapers here, the waterfront was still a working industrial area. The nineteenth-century warehouses that had served the piers since the days of sail were still in use making the blocks between Pearl Street and the East River an unpleasant and unfashionable place to put office workers. The economics of tall buildings wouldn’t have worked, even though the land was cheaper than that just a few blocks away, because a big building there wouldn’t be able to command high rent.

After World War II, the last remaining industrial uses of the waterfront died off. Some of the old loft buildings were converted to residences, some became part of the preservation project at the South Street Seaport, but most were demolished for new high-rises in the now-viable extension of the office district.