NOTE: The following was written for the Tenth Anniversary Edition of Street Design, The Secret To Great Cities and Towns, where it will appear in a shorter version. This version still needs a little editing for its new context. Part 1 is another essay from Street Design, “Location, Location, Location, Location, Location, Location: Affordable Housing and Urban Form in Manhattan.”
The subject of height limits is relevant in any discussion of street design and urban design. While discussing East 70th Street, let’s briefly look at the planning regulations and building laws that contributed to the design of “the most beautiful block in New York.” The towers of the New York City skyline are world famous, but few stop to think that the tall towers were mainly office buildings. Until the 19th century, practicality limited buildings of all types to six or seven stories, because climbing to the top of taller buildings was too difficult as an everyday activity. By the 1870s, increasing use of safety elevators and steel-frame construction[1]* meant that new office buildings could be as tall as eight to ten stories. New Yorkers began to worry about the effect that tall residential buildings might have in residential neighborhoods.
Common law traditions suggested that homeowners had a right to the sunlight that would “naturally” reach their land.[2] Many residents of New York feared the shadows from tall buildings: in the 1880s they commissioned studies of “the high building question” and asked the city and the state to impose a moratorium on tall buildings. The New York State Legislature responded in 1885 with a bill limiting the heights of residential buildings in New York to 70 feet on side streets and narrow streets and 80 feet on avenues and wide streets.[3]
Interestingly, 70 feet was the same number ancient Rome used in the year 64 AD,[4] while Georges-Eugène Haussmann set lower height limits in Paris in 1859. Haussmannian boulevards 20 meters wide were lined with grand apartment houses 20 meters tall (65 ½ feet). Buildings on narrower streets were limited to 57 ½ feet.
A series of Tenement House Acts, building laws, and fire laws regulated the design and construction of residential buildings with multiple dwellings after 1867. With the rise of new technology and safety elevators, New York City raised residential building heights to 1½ times the street width or 150 feet, whichever was less (as mentioned above in “Height & Density: Quality & Quantity”). But not until thirty-one years after New York first limited the height of residential buildings, did the city famously pass America’s first zoning in 1916, similarly regulating non-residential buildings.
In other words, New York City controlled the height of residential buildings long before it passed zoning regulations that controlled the height of commercial buildings, which it allowed to be larger and bulkier. The old laws and regulations for residential buildings continued to apply until New York State passed the Multiple Dwelling Law of 1929.[5]
There were three primary reasons New York wanted height limits for residential buildings and neighborhoods that were lower than the limits for office buildings in business districts: for different fire-safety conditions; for more natural light and ventilation in the apartments and on the streets; and to maintain a visible and psychological connection to the street from the apartments. The last deserves more consideration today, when developers are mounting a strong attack on height limits.[6]
The 1929 Multiple Dwelling Law allowed one-hundred-and-fifty-foot towers on top of a one-hundred-and-fifty-foot base,[7] if the building lot was thirty-thousand square feet or bigger and the adjoining street was wide enough. After the stock market crash in the same year limited the development of new buildings in New York City, however, only a handful of the three-hundred-foot towers were ever built. The Great Depression, World War II, and the move to the suburbs that followed the war meant that few new luxury buildings were built until New York’s 1961 Zoning Resolution, which favored taller buildings with plazas on the street. Tower construction costs were too high for low-income buildings until post-war Modernism introduced bare-bones construction paid for by Federal funding that dictated “towers in the parks” in projects built by the New York City Housing Authority.[8]
The Multiple Dwelling Law did not limit the 300-foot towers to one-sided streets like Riverside Drive and Central Park South that face open spaces, but with one exception, all the towers were built on Central Park West, facing Manhattan’s largest park.[9] The four buildings on Central Park West all had twin towers above podiums that maintained the streetwall.[10] A Fifth Avenue association prevented the development of equally tall towers on the other side of Central Park [TKTK to be verified]. Today we can only guess that builders thought 300-foot towers wouldn’t sell on other wide-open streets like Riverside Drive.[11]
Residential buildings on smaller lots or narrower streets could be slightly higher than before 1929, but only if they included steep setbacks above the old height limits. The new buildings maintained the street wall and the cornice line of the street established by previous regulations at the same time they provided penthouse terraces and dramatic tops. Developers built several examples on Park Avenue, a street of luxury apartments that was also extra-wide. One example is at the end of the block of East 70th Street that we are discussing (720 Park Avenue, Figure 2.TKTK).
New York’s planners wanted to keep a visual connection to the street from the apartments and also wanted to give apartment dwellers at least a glimpse of the sky. Tall buildings on residential sixty-foot-wide side streets would have made the streets feel dark and enclosed, and keeping the distance between the street and the sky small minimized the sense of peering into the neighbors’ apartments across the street. Street trees screen from view the apartments across the way.
Apartment Hotels
Part of the impetus for the Multiple Dwelling Law was a widespread belief in New York that during the building boom of the 1920s, when new buildings were in great demand, developers took advantage of a loophole for apartment-hotel buildings. Apartment hotels could be taller, but the unwritten rule before 1929 was that they would be in business districts. The best examples were built in business areas on squares and wide streets.
Today, the Real Estate Board of New York (REBNY) wants to build to the sky in the most profitable locations in the city. REBNY is the most powerful donor and lobbying group in New York, and some of the super-luxury, supertall towers on the recently built Billionaire’s Row below Central Park are the most profitable buildings in the history of the city. REBNY has lobbied the Governor and state legislators to remove all height restrictions across the state. Of course there is no market in most of the state or even most of the city for expensive supertall towers. Despite the arguments they make to remove all height restrictions, the reasons are almost entirely about making a profit in a few already-expensive neighborhoods, not about housing supply or making New York City a better place to live.[12]
The largest of the new towers is 1,550 feet tall. Supertall towers like that drive land prices to new levels, and only the most expensive apartments can cover the land costs and the high price of tower construction. They steal sunlight in Central Park at all hours of the day towers and are symbols of conspicuous consumption and income inequality, visible from many parts of the city and even the suburbs.
[TKTK Caption]Figure 1.27: West 74th Street, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, looking towards Central Park. The rowhouses and the apartment house on the street were limited to ninety feet by the width of the street. But the San Remo apartment house on Central Park West, seen at the end of the block, followed the 1929 regulations. [TKTK end of caption]
[1] [TKTK this is an asterisk FOOTNOTE] * Before steel frame construction, “tall” buildings had load-bearing masonry walls that held up the building and everything in it. The taller a building was, the thicker the walls needed to be on the lower levels. The thickness of the wall on the lower floors became a limiting factor in construction.
[2] See Michael R. Montgomery, “Keeping the Tenants Down: Height Restrictions and Manhattan’s Tenement House System, 1885–1930,” Cato Journal, vol. 22(3): 502-3, https://ciaotest.cc.columbia.edu/olj/cato/v22n3/cato_v22n3mom01.pdf. Montgomery, op cit, . Montgomery’s article for the Libertarian Cato Institute takes the position that all zoning is restrictive, raising costs and lowering supply. He ignores that in a normal market, tall buildings increase land costs and construction costs, the two most important factors in the cost of any new building. Montgomery also states that more apartments would have lowered costs throughout the history of New York, but he provides no proof.
[3] J. Ford, Slums and Housing (with Special Reference to New York City): History, Conditions, Policy (Harvard, 1936): 502-503.
[4] S.B. Landau and C.W. Condit, Rise of the New York Skyscraper, 1865–1913 (Yale, 1996): 112.
[5] For the New York State Multiple Dwelling Law, see https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nnc1.ar53650689&view=1up&seq=6.
[6] In 2022, New York Governor Kathy Hochul asked the New York State Legislature to remove height limits on new building across the state. See “URGENT: Hochul Plan to Lift Residential Density Limit in NYC Advances to State Budget; Write Legislators in Opposition TODAY!,” Village Preservation, February 7, 2022, https://nylandmarks.org/news/budget-victory-stops-state-from-lifting-12-far-ca/ and “Budget Victory Stops State From Lifting 12 FAR CAP,” The New York Landmarks Committee, https://nylandmarks.org/news/budget-victory-stops-state-from-lifting-12-far-ca/.
[7] In practice, there was room to modify the formula. The base of the San Remo is taller than fifteen stories, because terraces and setbacks crown the podium. The towers were ten stories tall, but elaborate, uninhabited tops made the buildings taller than 300 feet. After the 1961 Zoning Resolution, the tops were converted to penthouse apartments.
[8] Until Federal Title I funding authorized by the Slum Clearance Act required Robert Moses to build Modern towers, Moses preferred traditional low- and mid-rise buildings. But Moses embraced the Title I funding that enabled his urban renewal plans in New York City. TKTK link to Washington Square South.
[9] The only other 300-foot-tall apartment building enabled by the Multiple Dwelling Law was the River House, which stood on the East River with its own dock before Robert Moses built the Franklin D. Roosevelt East River Drive. Built in 1931, the building went into foreclosure 10 years later: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_House_(New_York_City). The River House was not an apartment hotel, even though it included the River Club in the base of the building on the river side. Two notable apartment hotels built before the Multiple Dwelling Law of 1929 were the Master Building on Riverside Drive, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_Apartments, and One Fifth Avenue, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Fifth_Avenue_(Manhattan).
[10] The twin-tower apartment houses were the Century, the Majestic, the San Remo, and the Eldorado. Architect Emery Roth designed the latter two, as well as another apartment building on Central Park West that was taller than 150 feet. That was the Beresford, completed in 1929. The history of the Beresford is murky, however. It was apparently owned by a notoriously corrupt bank that went bankrupt in 1931. It is too tall to have been built as an apartment house, and there is no record that it was approved as an apartment hotel. It is the type of 1920s residential construction that led to the Multiple Dwelling Law. For the history of the Beresford, see Christopher Gray, “Streetscapes/The San Remo; 400-Foot-High Twin Towers of Central Park West,” New York Times, December 19, 1999, https://www.nytimes.com/1999/12/19/realestate/streetscapes-the-san-remo-400-foot-high-twin-towers-of-central-park-west.html. For Emery Roth’s buildings on Centeral Park West, also see Paul Goldberger, “Design Notebook,” New York Times, February 16, 1978, https://www.nytimes.com/1978/02/16/archives/design-notebook-emery-roth-dominated-the-age-of-apartment-buildings.html.
[11] The Master Building on Riverside Drive (footnote TKTK above) was a genuine apartment hotel, built in 1926-27 by the artist Nicholas Roerich with artist studios, all with small pantries rather than kitchens. Between 1929 and 1961, however, most apartment construction consisted of rehabbing luxury buildings. Insurance companies and banks foreclosed on many buildings during the Depression. When World War 2 began, they frequently replaced large luxury apartments in existing buildings with smaller apartments that increased the housing stock in New York without increasing building size.
[12] See note TKTK in this chapter. [currently new footnote 22, which begins, “In 2022, New York Governor Kathy Hochul asked…”]
