How to See New York: A City Built in Layers

The first thing to know is that Manhattan is not chaotic. The second thing is that almost everything you see was the consequence of a specific decision made on a specific date, and the dates are surprisingly few. Five of them will get you most of the way.

Start with 1811. In that year a state commission appointed by the City of New York published the Commissioners' Plan, which laid a rectangular grid across most of the island north of Houston Street. Twelve numbered avenues running roughly north-south. One hundred and fifty-five numbered cross-streets running east-west. No squares, no diagonals (Broadway, the diagonal that does survive, is older than the grid). The Commissioners explained that they preferred right-angled houses because they were cheapest to build and live in. They were planning a real-estate market more than a city. Almost every block above Houston that you walk through today is doing what the 1811 plan told it to do.

Then 1853. The State Legislature authorized New York City to seize 700 acres of mid-island land to build a public park. The first landscape-design competition in the United States followed in 1857; Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux won it the next year. Their Greensward Plan built Central Park between 1858 and roughly 1873. It is the first thing to understand about Manhattan that contradicts the grid: a deliberate void, the size of a small town, dropped into the middle of the city, with engineered sunken roads to keep crosstown traffic out of the listener's sightline. The park established the principle that a city could build its own counter-image into itself.

The zoning hinge

Then 1916. A 555-foot office tower called the Equitable Building was finished at 120 Broadway, casting a seven-acre shadow on its neighbors. The shadow scared the city into passing the country's first comprehensive zoning code. Above a certain height equal to street width, towers had to step inward inside a diagonal envelope. Above a smaller base, the building could rise indefinitely on a quarter of the lot. This produced what historians later called the wedding-cake skyline. Every Manhattan tower between 1916 and the early 1960s wore some version of the same stepped-pyramid silhouette. The Chrysler. The Empire State. 40 Wall. 70 Pine. One Wall. None of those architects chose the shape. The law required it.

Then 1961. The city revised the zoning code. The new version traded the setback formula for a floor-area ratio plus bonuses for public plazas. Lever House (1952) and the Seagram Building (1958) had already shown the city what the new shape looked like: a slim slab on an open plaza. The 1961 code made that the default. The wedding-cake silhouette stopped getting built. Park Avenue and Sixth Avenue filled with glass curtain walls and bronze mullions for the next thirty years.

Then 2014. One57 opened on West 57th Street, ninety stories tall and unusually slender. It was followed by 432 Park, 220 Central Park South, Central Park Tower, and Steinway Tower at 111 West 57th, the last with a width-to-height ratio of about one-to-twenty-four, the most extreme structural slenderness ever built in residential form. None of these towers occupy especially large lots. They got tall by buying unbuilt zoning envelope from low-rise neighbors and stacking it on their own land. The air-rights market that made this possible had existed in the code for decades. The financing market caught up around 2010 and the engineering, particularly the tuned mass dampers that keep slender towers from swaying visibly in wind, caught up a few years before that. Five dates, five legible chapters.

How to use the dates on a walk

Once you have the dates in your pocket, the city's neighborhoods sort themselves. Lower Manhattan, below City Hall, is older than the grid. The streets there follow the Dutch and English colonial pattern, narrow and irregular, because they were laid out before 1811. Walk Wall Street, Pearl, Stone, William, Beaver. They wander. They were never planned by a commission. The financial city sits on top of an even older layer: a defensive wall built in 1653, a slave market authorized by the Common Council in 1711, an African burial ground in continuous use from roughly 1697 to 1794 that was paved over and forgotten for two hundred years, until a 1991 federal construction project rediscovered four hundred and nineteen intact graves. The southern tip of Manhattan is the place to walk if you want to feel the city before it was a grid.

SoHo, just north, is the place to walk if you want to see the 1850s. Twenty-six blocks of cast-iron commercial buildings, the largest concentration in the world, built mostly between 1850 and 1880 for textile merchants and dry-goods importers. The cast-iron grammar (slim columns, repeated bays, ornamented spandrels) is the system that taught American architects to think of the front of a building as a manufactured product. Every glass curtain wall on Park Avenue is downstream of SoHo.

Greenwich Village, west of Broadway and south of 14th Street, predates the grid. The streets in the Village are also crooked, but for a different reason: this was a colonial-era settlement that grew up along old farm lanes, and when the 1811 commissioners reached its boundaries they routed the grid around it. The Village has always been the place in Manhattan where the official street pattern fails, and the irregularity is part of why a century and a half of bohemias took root there.

The Financial District, the High Line and Hudson Yards, Midtown, Central Park, and the Upper West Side and Upper East Side along the park's flanks each tell one or two of the five chapters most clearly. A tour of each takes about an hour. Walking all of them in sequence is a few days of work. What you build is a kind of mental palimpsest, an ability to look at a tower and read which date made it possible.

What the dates do not tell you

The dates do not explain why a particular tenant moved into a particular building, or why a particular fortune was made or lost on the corner. They do not explain neighborhood demographics, or which kinds of people the city has loved and which it has discarded. The Village's outsider history (queer, immigrant, bohemian, working-class) is its own story. The Lower East Side's tenement history is its own story. The Harlem Renaissance, the South Bronx in the 1970s, the Brooklyn waterfront in the 1990s, Hudson Yards now: each has a thread that runs alongside the architectural one. The five dates explain the built form. They do not explain the people who filled it.

But the built form is what you walk through, and once you can read it the city stops being noise. The grid above Houston is a real-estate decision from 1811. The void of the park is an engineering decision from 1858. The wedding-cake silhouette of every prewar tower is a public-health decision from 1916. The slab-and-plaza of every mid-century glass tower is a 1961 revision. The pencil towers on 57th Street are 2014. The next chapter is being negotiated right now in zoning hearings nobody attends. New York is not a museum. It is a working laboratory of the way American cities have argued with themselves about how to be cities, written in stone and steel and glass, available to anyone who knows when to look.