5 myths about New York City skyscrapers, debunked

For more than a decade, Jason M. Barr has been crunching a comprehensive data set about New York’s most famous structures. His book, Building the Skyline: The Birth and Growth of Manhattan’s Skyscrapers, is a little bit different from other skyscraper books you might have read; it’s not so much an architectural meditation on towers, but more a fact-packed economic history of the Manhattan skyline.

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Barr looks at the financial implications of Manhattan’s high-minded landscape, from the construction costs of the first skyscrapers to how supertalls impact the neighborhoods around them. What’s most fascinating about Barr’s book is how skillfully he uses all of this data to bust long-held misconceptions about New York City’s development. Here are five particularly stubborn myths that Curbed asked Barr to debunk.

Manhattan’s skyline is shorter in the middle due to a lack of bedrock

FALSE. "Perhaps one of the most puzzling aspects of the Manhattan skyline is that skyscrapers are ‘missing’ from the area north of City Hall and south of Midtown. One of the most commonly given reasons for this is that the bedrock is particularly deep in the area north of City Hall. It is believed that this deep bedrock prevented developers from building skyscrapers there. Skyscrapers, because of their weight and size, should be anchored to the bedrock to prevent them from leaning over or settling in an uneven matter.

There is no evidence that the bedrock valley was a reason why no skyscrapers [were built] north of downtown. The real reason is because the neighborhoods north of Chambers Street were where the historical tenement districts and factories were located. These were neighborhoods that were of little interest to high-rise developers because the rents there were too low to justify building tall."

Skyscrapers are just tall, skinny versions of developers’, um, egos

FALSE. "It’s true that the second half of the 1920s was a period that roared. I don’t dispute that. It was one of the city’s greatest periods of skyscraper construction. But very little research has been done to ask why that’s so. Most of the discussion focuses on the three-way race for the world’s tallest building which took place within a one-year space (1930–1931) between the Bank of Manhattan Building (40 Wall Street), the Chrysler Building, and the Empire State Building.

"While I don’t deny that from time to time there are buildings that are constructed as economically ‘too tall,’ the truth is that the vast majority of buildings are built because of profit maximization. The heights of buildings in New York City over the last 125 years consistently demonstrate a strong relationship to the underlying economic climate—as rents and real estate prices go up, so do building heights on average, when rents and prices go down, so do building heights."

Every time a new "tallest" building is finished, financial collapse follows

FALSE. "Several years ago, an economist working for a major international bank created a graphic timeline that purported to show that major financial crises happen around the time when a new world’s tallest building is coming online. This prompted him to call this the Skyscraper Curse—that we should run for the hills when we see a new world’s tallest building.

The top graph shows the total additions to the skyline each year in feet. The bottom shows the height of the tallest building completed each year (in feet). During depression years, for example, the tallest building may be only at 50 feet, while during heady times, buildings can be taller than 1000 feet. Since 1890, there have been only five major skyscraper construction cycles. Jason M. Barr

"This is an utter fiction and an example of what I call Rorschach Economics—the mind naturally creates patterns that don’t really exist, and people make the pairing between skyscraper heights and economic downturns because it ‘feels’ like it should be so. But when one actually does a series of statistical, objective tests, one can show the curse is not true."