Getting Crowded

From Max Hubacher, February 9, 1951, “Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, N.Y.”:

That’s the Willamsburg Bank tower in the center, looking lonely. As I’ve discussed before, this was the third-tallest building on the east coast not in Manhattan when it was built, but today, at some 500 feet, it’s not really on anyone’s radar for height. It’s standing so very alone because the bank made a bet that the downtown area of Brooklyn, which had been growing for some time, would continue to grow until it reached this location, about a mile east of the downtown skyscraper cluster. The Great Depression put an end to that.

Here’s the same angle today:

There are at least eight high-rises – apartments, not offices – in the view around Williamsburg, which has itself been converted to apartments. I doubt anyone in the 1920s would have expected a big cluster of high-rise apartment houses in Brooklyn; I doubt anyone in 1951 would have either. There are still a bunch of big office buildings in downtown Brooklyn, including a number of new ones constructed starting in the 1990s, but the real growth in office space in the city has been in Manhattan. But downtown and the adjacent neighborhoods have gotten a lot denser in the past twenty years.