The Wedding-Cake Code: How One Building's Shadow Wrote the Skyline

Walk Wall Street and look up. Many of the towers built between 1916 and 1961 step inward as they rise: a broad base, a midsection that pulls back in stages, and a narrower tower on top. Architects and critics called the profile the "wedding cake". The name makes the shape sound like a taste. Mostly it was a law.

The law is the 1916 Zoning Resolution, which the city's Department of City Planning calls the nation's first comprehensive zoning ordinance. It was a response to one building in particular, and it shaped Manhattan's skyline until a new code replaced it in 1961.

The building that scared a city

In 1915 the Equitable Building opened at 120 Broadway, between Cedar and Pine Streets. It was designed by Ernest R. Graham with Peirce Anderson, and it rose straight up from the lot line on an H-shaped plan with no setbacks at all. The city puts it at 538 feet; the Landmarks Preservation Commission gives about 38 storeys and notes the count is variously reported. On completion it was the largest office building in the world.

What scared the city was its shadow. In a complaint quoted by the commission, its noon shadow covered six times its own area, stretched almost a fifth of a mile, and cut off direct sunlight from the Broadway fronts of buildings as tall as 21 storeys, as far as four blocks to the north. Neighbouring owners claimed lost rent and filed for lower tax assessments. The planning department sums it up as a seven-acre shadow.

The 1916 law that followed did three things. It divided the city into districts by use. It limited bulk. And it introduced setbacks: above a starting height tied to the width of the street, a building had to step back inside a sloping envelope. One more rule mattered as much as the setbacks. If a tower covered no more than a quarter of its lot, it could rise to any height.

How the law turned into a style

The commission describes the typical result as tripartite: a base covering the lot, a midsection with one or more setbacks, and a tower. The planning department says the law fostered both the city's tall, slender towers and its tiered wedding-cake buildings.

Architects of the 1920s and 1930s learned to make the envelope look intentional. The delineator Hugh Ferriss turned the abstract setback envelope into dramatic charcoal drawings in The Metropolis of Tomorrow (1929), and a generation of towers dressed their setbacks in limestone, brick and terra cotta in the style now loosely called Art Deco. Carol Willis's book Form Follows Finance (Princeton Architectural Press, 1995) is the standard account of how money, elevators and the law combined to shape these towers.

Not every tall building of the period was a wedding cake. Some owners used the quarter-lot tower rule instead of stepping back. The Bankers Trust tower at 14 Wall Street, finished before the law in 1912, is a straight shaft crowned by a seven-storey stepped pyramid modelled on an ancient tomb. The commission credits it with setting a precedent for boldly topped towers, not for zoning setbacks.

The loophole and the new code

The 1916 rules had a rarely used clause: an office building could rise to unlimited height if all or part of it covered a quarter of its site. In 1952, Lever House on Park Avenue became the first New York building to use that provision for a tall slab with no setbacks. Downtown, Chase did the same. One Chase Manhattan Plaza, now 28 Liberty Street, designed by Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, won a variance in February 1957 to cover 27.3 percent of its site and rose sixty storeys as a plain aluminium-and-glass slab, its tower opening in 1961 and its two-and-a-half-acre plaza dedicated in 1964. It was approved under the 1916 rules, not the new ones.

Then the rules changed. The 1961 Zoning Resolution replaced the 1916 code with a limit on floor area and bonuses for developments that gave the public open space. The commission says the Seagram Building's plaza on Park Avenue was considered so successful that the 1961 code wrote a plaza bonus into law. The planning department says the new code gave towers greater design flexibility than the wedding-cake form had allowed.

What to look for on the walk

Stand on the steps of Trinity Church and look east down Wall Street. On the right-hand corner is One Wall Street, Ralph Walker's limestone tower of 1929 to 1931, its fluted surface stepping back in subtle setbacks to a narrow top. The commission says the site was considered the most expensive real estate in New York. Further down on the left, look for the stepped pyramid on top of 14 Wall Street, and beyond it the pyramid and spire of 40 Wall Street, completed in 1930, seventy-one storeys of limestone base, setbacks and buff-brick tower.

Then walk to Liberty Street. Across from the Federal Reserve, the dark slab of One Chase Manhattan Plaza shows the other answer to the same 1916 law: no wedding cake, just a tower on a quarter of its site and a plaza at its feet. A few minutes away, Zuccotti Park faces the Equitable Building itself, the building that started it.

All of these are on the Lower Manhattan walk: twelve stops and about three and a half kilometres from Battery Park to the African Burial Ground, which reads the zoning story at Wall Street, Trinity Church and Zuccotti Park. For the building that provoked the law, read the Equitable Building. Uptown, the Midtown walk carries the same rules from the Empire State Building's setbacks to the Seagram plaza.