Downtown Rises
The term downtown originated from the unique geography of Manhattan, whose first business district was pinned at the bottom of the island around Wall Street. Other American cities quickly adopted the name and the overall urban development model.
The rise of scientific management created legions of office workers who needed to work together on ever more sophisticated tasks. Transit systems helped raise downtown land values to the extent that skyscraper construction was financially justified. Department stores, movie palaces, theaters, nightclubs and nickelodeons attracted people of all ages at virtually all hours. In the 1920s, as much as two-thirds of a typical big city’s population visited downtown every day.
The elevator and the steel frame — the building technologies that made skyscrapers possible — enabled developers to essentially create more land in these exceedingly desirable locations. “A skyscraper is a machine that makes the land pay,” Cass Gilbert, the Woolworth Building’s architect, wrote in 1900.
Social critics denounced early skyscrapers for being exemplars of America’s crass individualism, reaching ever higher without regard for their impact on the cityscape or passerby on the street. But gradually, skyscrapers came to be more aesthetically appreciated. A 1938 Museum of Modern Art exhibition called skyscrapers America’s “most original contribution to world architecture.”
The form reached its artistic peak in the wake of New York City’s widely copied 1916 zoning ordinance. Instead of height limits, the city required tall buildings to grow progressively narrower as they got taller. This created the template for the “ziggurat” or “wedding cake” skyscrapers that proliferated in New York and other cities during the Roaring Twenties.
Upon its completion in 1933, the Empire State Building represented both the apogee of skyscraper architecture and the epitome of downtown development hubris. This 1,454-foot-tall mountain of a building, the tallest in the world for decades, became the undisputed icon of American cities.
But just as skyscrapers were reaching new heights, the economics underlying them were getting shaky. Unlike those soaring monuments to God in old Europe, owned and occupied by the church for eternity, the Empire State Building needed to find tenants. That was a difficult proposition in the depths of the Great Depression. The “Empty State Building,” as New Yorkers called it, would remain unprofitable until 1950.
It wasn’t the only vacant downtown office building in the 1930s and 1940s, as cities across the US had far more office space than companies could fill. This was downtown’s first crisis of capitalism. Somehow, downtown was on top of the world and on the back foot.