Downtown: My Manhattan

by Pete Hamill

  Underneath the great quickening of New York life was a plan. In 1811, the interior geography of New Yorkers was about to change forever, although most people at the time seemed to shrug off the extravagantly ambitious new vision of the city’s future. That year, a master plan for Manhattan was released to the public and approved by the state legislature, which had commissioned the plan in 1807 at the urging of Mayor and then Governor De Witt Clinton, the obsessed, authoritarian politician who was also planning the Erie Canal. The plan had taken four years to complete, and the men who created it—Gouverneur Morris, Simeon DeWitt, John Rutherford, and a young surveyor named John Randel Jr.—came up with a vision of Manhattan so wonderfully simple that we live with it to this day.

  The official name was the Commissioners’ Plan. Its central vision was a grid. The designers’ plan was an imposition of rigid order on wildness, glorying in what New York historians Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace have called “the supremacy of technique over topography.” The grid would eventually have a decisive impact on the city’s economy, on the evolution of the New York human alloy, on art, thought, architecture, and even on urban psychology. By the time I was first exploring Manhattan, I had already been shaped by the grid.

  As imagined by the planners, the future city would rise from a simple grid of avenues and streets. Each of twelve avenues, running south to north, would be 100 feet wide, stretching from about today’s Houston Street to the distant end of the island, at what the planners labeled 155th Street. The streets would move east to west, river to river, roughly 200 feet apart. Each street would be 60 feet wide, with the exception of fifteen streets that would be 100 feet wide: 14th, 23rd, 34th, 42nd, 57th, 72nd, 79th, 86th, 96th, 106th, 116th, 125th, 135th, 145th, and 155th. At the time the plan was drawn, most of that land was made of farms, stubborn hills, racing streams, isolated mansions, and stands of trees that had survived the Revolution. Some streets were altered or subverted over the coming years, or blocked by the creation of Central Park. But basically they are the city’s major crosstown streets to this day.

  Under the plan, all natural topography would be submitted to the discipline of the grid. Hills were leveled. Ponds and swamps would be filled or drained. Streams would be diverted through pipes to the rivers. There would be no European-style stars, ovals, or circles to impede the velocity of traffic. The grid would rule. Each of those streets and avenues would carry only numbers, rather than names, which were dismissed as examples of human vanity. The commissioners in 1811 claimed that the grid would combine “beauty, order, and convenience.” That was a Knickerbocker vision of the future, of course, almost Calvinist in its rigidity.

  Not everybody was pleased. Some objected to the arrogant power of the state to determine what owners could do with the land they owned. Clement Clarke Moore, who owned great tracts of real estate in today’s Chelsea (and who later was credited with writing “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” better known as “’Twas the Night Before Christmas”), complained bitterly: “The great principle which governs these plans is, to reduce the surface of the earth as nearly as possible to dead level. . . . These are men . . . who would have cut down the seven hills of Rome.” A few others shared his complaint about the coming destruction of natural beauty. But at the time, most New Yorkers were indifferent or dismissive, for the plan described an imaginary city, or one that would not exist until most current residents were dead. Almost a century later, Henry James (in his way, a descendant of the Knickerbockers) was to call the grid the city’s “primal topographic curse, her old inconceivably bourgeois scheme of composition and distribution, the uncorrected labour of minds with no imagination . . .”

  Among other flaws, the grid made few provisions for open recreational spaces, for parks, water courses, leafy hills bursting with outcroppings of granite; it would be another forty years before the first plans were made for Central Park. The 1811 planners shrugged and gestured to the rivers, “those large arms of the sea which embrace Manhattan Island . . .” The rivers (and the harbor), they insisted, “render its situation, in regard to health and pleasure, as well as to the convenience of commerce, peculiarly felicitous.”

  It was true for a long time that the rivers drew New Yorkers to their shores in mysterious, primitive, almost religious ways. In the opening chapter of Moby-Dick (1851), New Yorker Herman Melville (born eight years after the unveiling of the grid) evoked that mysterious pulling effect in the years when he was young:

  There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs—commerce surrounds it with her surf. Right and left, the streets take you waterward. Its extreme downtown is the battery, where that noble mole is washed by waves, and cooled by breezes, which a few hours earlier were out of sight of land. Look at the crowds of water-gazers there.

  Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, northward. What do you see?—Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. Some leaning upon the spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads; some looking over the bulwarks of ships from China; some high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward peep. But these are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster—tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this? Are the green fields gone? What do they here?

  But look! Here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water, and seemingly bound for a dive. Strange! Nothing will content them but the extremest limit of the land; loitering under the shady lee of yonder warehouses will not suffice. No. They must get just as nigh the water as they possibly can without falling in. And there they stand—miles of them—leagues. Inlanders all, they come from lanes and alleys, streets and avenues—north, east, south, and west. Yet here they all unite.

  That apparently timeless vision of an east-west city in the embrace of two rivers did not last. In New York, few certainties ever do survive.

  The template of Manhattan had changed forever by the time the children and grandchildren of Melville’s river-bound landsmen were singing, “East Side, West Side, all around the town . . .” In 1894, when James W. Blake and Charles B. Lawlor composed “The Sidewalks of New York,” the famous chorus was another reflection of New York’s abiding nostalgia. Fewer New Yorkers thought in terms of east and west. As a place to live or to play, uptown was leaving downtown behind. The waterfront was blocked from view by commerce. Central Park now existed, and it was way uptown, above Fifty-ninth Street. A vast tract of real estate that was marginal in the time of Melville was now considered central.

  The most enormous changes were made by real estate people, their engineers and architects, and the elites who possessed secular power. A small downtown city became a city that would reach, eventually, the full length of the island. For real estate speculators the island was the new promised land. Each block could be broken into lots, usually 25 feet wide and 100 feet deep, which made investment more attractive to individuals and to large-scale developers. The adherents of the secular New York religion founded by John Jacob Astor saw manna falling from the skies. As the planners themselves said in 1811, it was self-evident that “strait-sided and right-angled houses are the most cheap to build, and the most convenient to live in.”

  That turned out to be true. North of Greenwich Village (which was such a jumble that planners mercifully left it alone), Manhattan today is an island of right angles in a way that Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Queens are not. The hamlets of the other boroughs have streets and avenues too, but the hamlets themselves shift and wander. Manhattan never wanders, at least above Greenwich Village. This has had its effects on the residents, and even upon those who live elsewhere but work eight or more hours a day in what most still call “the city.” In 1964, the British writer V. S. Pritchett wrote, “The physical course of a New Yorker’s daily life is a preoccupation with right angles; he is a man conditioned to an a
utomatic process of anxiously going along and inevitably going up.”

  Inevitably, Manhattan went up. First, uptown. Then to the sky.

  In Old New York, the word skyscraper described the tallest mast of a sailing ship. And so the word would be used until the last decades of the nineteenth century. But the more occupied Manhattan became, the more the real estate men looked up at the sky, beyond the tip of Trinity’s lovely Gothic tower, up at the emptiness above the crowded city. They looked at the emptiness with longing.

  After the Civil War, the real estate people began a new kind of building, exclusively for offices, at first to replace more efficiently the inadequate old countinghouses that were falling into decay along South Street. A surging capitalism was creating many tons of paper: receipts, records, correspondence, notices from bureaucracies. But the new office buildings were limited by a number of factors: the rising cost of downtown real estate, the generally accepted height limits of five or six stories, and extraordinary technological problems. Truly tall buildings—higher than six stories—had to have creative ways to carry workers from the street to their offices, and to provide them with light, air, and plumbing.

  One major solution would come in the 1880s with the development of electric power by Thomas Alva Edison and others. The concept of mechanically moving loads to higher floors was there from the time of the Dutch, but all such devices were operated by ropes and pulleys, powered by human muscle, and, of course, few houses were taller than four stories (I remember hand-pulled dumbwaiters, as they were called, surviving in the four-story tenements of my childhood). The Astor House of 1830 used a primitive steam-powered elevator for baggage (and a few brave passengers), but the hotel was only five stories high, and the elevator was always in danger of falling. Two decades later, a man named Elisha Graves Otis, working and dreaming in Yonkers, invented the spring lock that would break the fall of an elevator if the rope broke, and demonstrated it at the great Crystal Palace exhibition in 1854. Development was coming one small step at a time.

  The first Otis elevator was installed three years later in the new cast-iron E. V. Haughwout Building on the corner of Broadway and Broome Street. Steam provided the power. Miraculously, the five-story building is still there, with a large Staples store occupying the ground floor. Its design is simple and elegant. I pass it a few times a week and always think about those men who built it, and whether they understood that they were making one of the first moves toward creating the city we inhabit. Our present was their future. In their New York, height was not truly important to most citizens; it remained a horizontal city. But their elevator made great height possible. The success of that first elevator allowed other men to dream.

  Otis, who was born in 1811, continued working, directing his staff, while other New York engineers began making variations on elevators, particularly for use in those new warehouses along the North River. Power was the greatest limitation to their visions, and it was not solved at the time of Otis’s death in 1861. After his death, his small company continued working on newer, safer, and better elevators. So did a rival named Charles Pratt. All tried screw, steam, and hydraulics for power. None of these was truly satisfactory. The first great generation of American mechanical engineers was also hard at work on other problems with tall buildings. Even if elevators were able to soar to the upper floors, the conventional load-bearing walls of solid masonry would become so thick at the base that office space on the lower floors would be limited, particularly on the small but desirable plots of land in downtown Manhattan. A few engineers understood the concept of load-bearing steel frames and light curtained walls. But for a long time, that understanding was only theoretical.

  All awaited electric power, which was being developed slowly, incrementally, throughout the 1880s. That tale is primarily the story of Edison, who started as an assistant to telegraphers and ended up a tycoon. He lived for a long time in New York before moving his company to New Jersey, but his restless, inventive mind was crucial to the story of the city, and all the cities of the world. There were other creative engineers and inventors involved in the process, of course, but the public face of the electric age belonged to Edison.

  In 1889, the Otis Company would finally install its first electric-powered elevators in the Demarest Carriage Company Building at Fifth Avenue and Thirty-third Street. In the climb to the skies, one major problem had been solved. In that same year, the first true New York skyscraper opened at 50 Broadway, near Exchange Place. This was the Tower Building, designed by Bradford Lee Gilbert, which rose eleven stories from a lot only twenty-two feet wide, less than the land under the average New York residence. It featured a steel skeleton and thin exterior walls, inspired by the success of Chicago’s Home Insurance Building of 1884 (designed by William LeBaron Jenney), which proved that such a technique was no longer mere theory. The steel frame would bear the load of all the floors.

  Still, many New Yorkers feared the Tower Building would go over in a high wind. Just before its completion, a hurricane struck the city with winds of eighty miles an hour. Gilbert rushed to the building and met the developer, a silk merchant named John L. Stearns. Crowds were gathered at a safe distance, and some buildings across the street were evacuated. My late friend the New York historian Edward Robb Ellis wrote an account of what followed:

  Gilbert grabbed a plumb line and began climbing a ladder left in place by workmen when they had quit work the evening before. Stearns followed at his heels. From the crowd arose screams: “You fools! You’ll be killed!” The architect and businessman could barely hear them above the shriek of the hurricane. Stearns’ courage gave out when they reached the tenth floor. There he sprawled full length on a scaffold and held on for dear life. Gilbert, who felt the risk of his reputation was worth the risk of his life, continued to climb the ladder, rung by painful rung, his knuckles whitening with strain and gusts of wind battering him unmercifully. When he reached the thirteenth and top floor, he crawled on hands and knees along a scaffold. At a corner of the building he tugged the plumb line from a pocket, got a firm grip on one end of the cord, and dropped its leaden weight toward the Broadway sidewalk. He later reported, “There was not the slightest vibration. The building stood as steady as a rock in the sea.”

  In that moment of triumph Gilbert rashly jumped to his feet on the scaffold. His hat had been tightly crushed on his head. Now he snatched it off and waved it exultantly. The wind knocked him down. It scudded him toward one end of the scaffold. He gulped. He prayed. Wildly he grabbed about him. Just as he was about to be swept off the end of the board and down to certain death, he caught a rope lashing about in the wind from an upright beam of the tower. His grip held. The rope held. He steadied himself, eased down onto his knees, and carefully picked his way back to the ladder. Climbing down the ladder, he was joined by Stearns at the tenth floor, and the two men then made their way slowly back to street level.

  Spectators cheered the heroes of the hour and gave way to let them pass. Locking arms, their chins upthrust, the architect and the businessman marched up Broadway, dumbfounding Trinity Church members just leaving the morning service by singing in unison: “Praise God from whom all blessings flow . . .”

  After that, the sky was literally the limit. Up ahead, in the early twentieth century, lay Oz.

  While the fabled towers were beginning to rise from the tough granite bedrock of the downtown city, another version of New York was being created. From roughly 1880, and for another fifty years, there was a vivid architecture of New York grandeur. Some have called it the New York Renaissance. Others define it as part of the City Beautiful movement. The name doesn’t truly matter. But most of the physical New York I love comes from that era. I cherish certain solitary skyscrapers: the Woolworth Building, the Flatiron, the Daily News Building, the Seagram Building, the Chrysler Building. But I could not live without the various enduring splendors of that older era, buildings created on a more human scale, closer to the ground, buildings I can see without looki
ng up to the sky. I mean these buildings, among others: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Frick Collection, the New York Public Library, the old Custom House, the New York Stock Exchange, Carnegie Hall, Judson Memorial Church, the former Police Headquarters on Centre Street, the Little Singer Building, the tower of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, the General Post Office on Thirty-third and Eighth, the old B. Altman’s store (now part of the City University), the Pierpont Morgan Library, the salvaged Bowery Savings Bank at the corner of Grand Street, the Century Association, the Art Students League, the Metropolitan Club, the Dakota Apartments, the Ansonia Hotel, the Apthorp, Congregation Shearith Israel, the Low Library at Columbia University, and dozens of others scattered through the city. When I think of New York as a visible city, these are the buildings that dominate all others.

  Over five decades, I came to know these buildings as an adult New Yorker, not as a student of architecture, and for me they are essential to the idea of New York. They represent continuity with the New York past and the original values that made the modern city such a thing of wonder. They tell us that excellence endures. They offer visions of solidity and power without being even vaguely totalitarian. With their adornments of sculpture or ornament, each displays the work of human hands. All of them can be gazed upon, experienced, read, from street level; that is, from the place where all the collisions and surprises of New York life occur. In the city that sometimes prides itself on being vertical, they are triumphs of the horizontal. Over decades, I learned much of the story of the buildings that so captured me when I was young. In my own erratic way, I absorbed the story of how a generation of American architects came to New York after training in the famed nineteenth-century ateliers of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. As mature architects, they didn’t truly form a “school” in the narrowest understanding of the term. They took different approaches to the work itself, developed their own mannerisms, used different craftsmen to execute their visions. But they had one uniting vision. They wanted to create buildings that expressed the triumphant emergence of one of the great cities of the world. For me, they succeeded beyond all dreams.