The building form most closely associated with New York City is the skyscraper, which has shifted many commercial and residential districts from low-rise to high-rise. Surrounded mostly by water, the city has amassed one of the largest and most varied collection of skyscrapers in the world.
New York has architecturally significant buildings in a wide range of styles spanning distinct historical and cultural periods. These include the Woolworth Building (1913), an early Gothic revival skyscraper with large-scale gothic architectural detail. The 1916 Zoning Resolution required setback in new buildings, and restricted towers to a percentage of the lot size, to allow sunlight to reach the streets below. The Art Deco design of the Chrysler Building (1930) and Empire State Building (1931), with their tapered tops and steel spires, reflected the zoning requirements. The Chrysler Building is considered by many historians and architects to be one of New York's finest, with its distinctive ornamentation such as V-shaped lighting inserts capped by a steel spire at the tower's crown. Early influential examples of the International Style in the United States are 330 West 42nd Street (1931) and the Seagram Building (1958). The Condé Nast Building (2000) is an important example of green design in American skyscrapers.
The character of New York's large residential districts is often defined by the elegant brownstone rowhouses, townhouses, and tenements that were built during a period of rapid expansion from 1870 to 1930. In contrast, New York City also has neighborhoods that are less densely populated and feature free-standing dwellings. In the outer boroughs, large single-family homes are common in various architectural styles such as Tudor Revival and Victorian. Split two-family homes are also widely available across the outer boroughs, for example in the Flushing area.
Stone and brick became the city's building materials of choice after the construction of wood-frame houses was limited in the aftermath of the Great Fire of 1835.Lankevich (1998), pp. 82–83. Unlike Paris, which for centuries was built from its own limestone bedrock, New York has always drawn its building stone from a far-flung network of quarries and its stone buildings have a variety of textures and hues. A distinctive feature of many of the city's buildings is the presence of wooden roof-mounted water towers. In the 19th century, the city required their installation on buildings higher than six stories to prevent the need for excessively high water pressures at lower elevations, which could burst municipal water pipes. Garden apartments became popular during the 1920s in outlying areas, including Jackson Heights in Queens, which became more accessible with expansion of the subway. __TOC__
Concentrations of buildings
New York has two main concentrations of high-rise buildings: Midtown Manhattan and Lower Manhattan, each with its own uniquely recognizable skyline. Midtown Manhattan, the largest central business district in the world, is home to such notable buildings as the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, and Citigroup Center, as well as the Rockefeller Center complex. Lower Manhattan comprises the third largest central business district in the United States (after Midtown and the Chicago Loop). Lower Manhattan was characterized by the omnipresence of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center from its completion in 1973 until its destruction in the September 11 attacks in 2001.
In the first decade of the 21st century, Lower Manhattan saw reconstruction, which included One World Trade Center within the new World Trade Center complex. The Downtown skyline received new designs from such architects as Santiago Calatrava and Frank Gehry. In 2010, a , 43-story tower named 200 West Street was built for Goldman Sachs across the street from the World Trade Center site.
New York City has a long history of tall buildings. It has been home to 10 buildings that have held the world's tallest fully habitable building title at some point in history, although half have since been demolished. The first building to bring the world's tallest title to New York was the New York World Building, in 1890. Later, New York City was home to the world's tallest building for 75 continuous years, starting with the Park Row Building in 1899 and ending with One World Trade Center upon completion of the Sears Tower in 1974. The 1899 Park Row Building, one of the world's earliest skyscrapers, is still standing.
The high-rise buildings of Brooklyn constitute a third, much smaller skyline. Downtown Brooklyn is also experiencing an extensive building boom, with new high rise luxury residential towers, commercial space and a new arena in the planning stages. The building boom in Brooklyn has had a great deal of opposition from local civic and environmental groups which contend that Brooklyn needs to maintain its human scale. The borough of Queens has also been developing its own skyline in recent years with One Court Square (the tallest building in the city outside Manhattan), and the Queens West development of several residential towers along the East River waterfront.
The 1916 Zoning Resolution required setback in new buildings, and restricted towers to a percentage of the lot size, to allow sunlight to reach the streets below.
History The skyscraper, which has shaped Manhattan's distinctive skyline, has been closely associated with New York City's identity since the end of the 19th century. From 1890 to 1973, the title of world's tallest building resided continually in Manhattan (except for a gap between 1894 and 1908, when the title was held by Philadelphia City Hall), with eight different buildings holding the title. The New York World Building on Park Row, was the first to take the title in 1890, standing until 1955, when it was demolished to construct a new ramp to the Brooklyn Bridge. The nearby Park Row Building, with its 29 stories standing high, became the world's tallest office building when it opened in 1899.
Early 20th century
The 41-story Singer Building, constructed in 1908 as the headquarters of the eponymous sewing machine manufacturer, stood high until 1967, when it became the tallest building ever demolished. The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower, standing at the foot of Madison Avenue, wrested the title of world's tallest building in 1909, with a tower reminiscent of St Mark's Campanile in Venice. The Woolworth Building, and its distinctive Gothic architecture, took the title in 1913, topping off at . Structures such as the Equitable Building of 1915, which rises vertically forty stories from the sidewalk, prompted the passage of the 1916 Zoning Resolution, requiring new buildings to contain setbacks withdrawing progressively at a defined angle from the street as they rose, in order to preserve a view of the sky at street level.
Grand Central Terminal is located in East Midtown close to the Chrysler Building. The railroad terminal, completed in 1913, is the third on its site. It was built in the Beaux-Arts style by the firms Reed and Stem and Warren and Wetmore. It became a National Historic Landmark in 1976.
The Roaring Twenties saw a race to the sky, with three separate buildings pursuing the world's tallest title in the span of a year. As the stock market soared in the days before the Wall Street Crash of 1929, two developers publicly competed for the crown. At , 40 Wall Street, completed in May 1930 in only eleven months as the headquarters of the Bank of Manhattan, seemed to have secured the title. At Lexington Avenue and 42nd Street, auto executive Walter Chrysler and his architect William Van Alen developed plans to build the structure's trademark spire in secret, pushing the Chrysler Building to and making it the tallest in the world when it was completed in 1929. Completed in 1930, the Chrysler Building is a distinctive symbol of New York. Originally built for the Chrysler Corporation, the building is presently co-owned by Aby Rosen's RFR Holding LLC, in a joint venture with the Austrian SIGNA Group. The Chrysler Building was the first structure in the world to surpass the 1,000 foot threshold.
Both buildings were soon surpassed with the May 1931 completion of the 102-story Empire State Building with its tower reaching at the top of the building. The high pinnacle was later added bringing the total height of the building to . The Empire State Building, a contemporary Art Deco style building in Midtown Manhattan, was designed by Shreve, Lamb and Harmon and takes its name from the nickname of New York State. It was the first building to go beyond the 100-story mark, and has one of the world's most visited observation decks, which sees about 4 million visitors a year. The building was built in just 14 months. 30 Rockefeller Plaza is a slim Art Deco skyscraper and the focal point of Rockefeller Center. It stands 850 ft (259 m) with 70 floors. Built in 1933 and originally called the RCA Building, it was later called the Comcast Building. The frieze above the main entrance was executed by Lee Lawrie and depicts Wisdom, along with a phrase from scripture that reads "Wisdom and Knowledge shall be the stability of thy times", originally found in the Book of Isaiah, 33:6.
330 West 42nd Street (1931) was the only skyscraper in New York City displayed in Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson's influential International Style exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1932, and the only other U.S. skyscraper at that exhibition, besides the PSFS Building. Johnson, along with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, later helped build the Seagram Building (1959) on Park Avenue between 52nd and 53rd Streets, with extruded bronze mullions on the facade. Paul Goldberger wrote in The New York Times in 1976 that the Seagram Building was one of "New York's most copied buildings", its design having been copied in several structures worldwide.
Late 20th century
In 1961, the Pennsylvania Railroad unveiled plans to tear down the old Penn Station and replace it with a new Madison Square Garden and office building complex. Organized protests were aimed at preserving the McKim, Mead & White-designed structure completed in 1910, widely considered a masterpiece of the Beaux-Arts style and one of the architectural jewels of New York City. Despite these efforts, demolition of the structure began in October 1963. The loss of Penn Station—called "an act of irresponsible public vandalism" by historian Lewis Mumford—led directly to the enactment in 1965 of a local law establishing the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, which is responsible for preserving the "city's historic, aesthetic, and cultural heritage".About the Landmarks Preservation Commission , New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission. Accessed November 20, 2016. The historic preservation movement triggered by Penn Station's demise has been credited with the retention of some one million structures nationwide, including over 1,000 in New York City."Requiem For Penn Station", CBS News, October 13, 2002. Accessed May 17, 2007. In 2017, a multibillion-dollar rebuilding plan was unveiled to restore the historic grandeur of Penn Station, in the process of upgrading the landmark's status as a critical transportation hub.
The MetLife Building, formerly the Pan Am Building, was the largest commercial office building in the world when it opened on March 7, 1963.Horsley, Carter C. The MetLife Building, The Midtown Book. Accessed September 30, 2007. "When it was completed, the building became the world's largest office building in bulk, a title it would lose a few years later to 55 Water Street downtown." It stands directly north of Grand Central Terminal.