Twenty Years On

Unsurprisingly this photo by Max Hubacher is titled “View from the Manhattan Bridge towards lower Manhattan”:

It’s a reasonably straightforward view with the iconic towers of lower Manhattan behind the Brooklyn Bridge. Want to find Wall Street? Look for the tallest cluster of buildings. There’s only one real oddity: this view is from October 3, 1952. Just about everything we see here is from 1930 or earlier. Some of the most expensive real estate in the country was frozen in time.

Some of that suspension of time is obvious: the Depression pretty much ended large construction projects in New York by 1931, with Rockefeller Center being one of the few exceptions in terms of buildings. The George Washington Bridge was under construction, far uptown, and there were other infrastructure projects, but nothing in this area. By the time that the economy was starting to move again, World War II had put a stop to most large projects with restrictions on materials, equipment, and labor. So there’s a 13 to 15 year gap when outside circumstances were stopping the construction of new buildings and of large-scale projects like redevelopment of the East River piers, which are mostly abandoned in this photo.

The other reason was a social change. Rockefeller Center marked, at least symbolically, the rise of the midtown office district relative to downtown. Financial services stayed downtown, but a lot of other businesses moved north, and the first big new office towers of the 1950s were in midtown. This shift so scared people with heavy investments in downtown real estate that there was a backlash, leading to the Chase Manhattan Bank building, the widening of Water Street (and demolition of a lot of old and small buildings in the process) to encourage new development, and eventually the World Trade Center. But all of that was a few years in the future in 1952.