Sawtooth

Looking east on 23rd Street from between Madison and Fifth Avenues:

Note the street sign below the McDonald’s flag: Madison Avenue starts (or ends, if you prefer orienting yourself to the south) at 23rd Street and runs off to the left, out of frame. Also off to the left, Madison Square. With one exception – the tallest building on view, the new (2008) glass-facade residential tower to the right of McDonald’s^[1] – the whole south side of the street is a series of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century commercial buildings, Most of them are one lot wide, and since the height of those buildings varies widely, you get the sawtooth effect. From the left: tall, medium, short, short, tall, short, very short, tall, very short, very short, very tall, short, medium, short…

Madison Square was mostly a residential neighborhood east of the commercial Ladies’ Mile shopping district; the old streetcar barn on the east side of the square was converted to an event space and named Madison Square Garden in 1879; it was demolished and the far-grander second MSG constructed in 1890. In retrospect, that was the starting signal for commercial construction in the area. Met Life moved to the northeast corner of 23rd and Madison two years later.

The sawtooth effect is the result of a specific moment in building design and real-estate development. The individual lots along 23rd Street were becoming valuable as development sites just as tall commercial construction was becoming popular. So (a) why sell your lot to someone trying to assemble a bigger site if you could make money off it? and (b) why not try to develop it yourself by building tall even though you only had a single lot? The single-lot slab building – like the one just to the left of McDonald’s – is not unique to New York, but we certainly have a huge oversupply of the type compared to the rest of the country. The economics of 120 years ago seemed to many land owners to suggest that single-lot mini-skyscrapers were a path to riches. That turned out to be not true, and the construction of these buildings died out as people went back to assembling lots for bigger buildings. So the sawtooth, in a roundabout way, gives us the date when this block mostly reached its current form.

1. Regardless of the food, it makes an excellent landmark in this kind of discussion.↩︎