400, 200, 100

Some musing about age…

New York’s roots go back 402 years, to the first Dutch settlement. (The official town of New Amsterdam dates to 1626, which is why the official 400-year celebration¹ will be next year.) The only physical remnant of that is the small-village street layout at the southern tip of Manhattan. There are a handful of seventeenth-century buildings in the city, but the only one that comes to mind that wasn’t a house is the Friends Meeting House in Flushing.

There are more eighteenth-century buildings, but still not very many. You start to get bigger numbers of buildings once you get to the 1810s or so. In other words, with a handful² of outliers, nearly all of the buildings in New York are half the age of the city or younger.

Rowhouses – which are still sometimes built in the outer boroughs – stopped being built in Manhattan before 1900. The transition from New-Law tenements to Multiple-Dwelling law apartment houses is not quite 100 years ago, so a lot of people are living in Old- and New-Law tenements that are between 150 and 100 years old. Similarly, the first steel-frame buildings were 135 years ago, but the type hit its stride in the 1920s with pre-war³ apartment houses and Art Deco skyscrapers.

In other words, the building types that define the city in most people’s imagination are less than 200 years old (for the most part, less than 150 years old) but more than 100 years old. Obviously this statement applies to types, not individuals: we have never stopped building skyscrapers, so that type may be old but individual buildings are new.

In other other words, New York went through a period of rapid modernization about 120 years ago, and the basic appearance of the city dates to those changes.

1. “Quadricentennial,” for anyone who cares. ↩︎
2. In a city with over a million buildings, the hundred or so from before 1800 qualify, in my opinion, as a handful. ↩︎
3. Obviously an anachronistic name, since anyone in the 1920s would have said they were post-war. ↩︎