The first posts looked at the three overlapping, uptown-moving waves of development that passed between City Hall and Central Park: live, play and work; and how the second wave of shops and theaters (play) are today’s incarnated “city” of Herald and Times Squares, Lincoln Center and Fifth Avenue shopping. Then we looked at how these four component “city” parts came from Madison Square following the Gilded Age.
This post looks at how a third wave of commercial business districts overran the “city;” how work ran over play.
Similar to how retail shopping and theater districts sorted into upper and middle class location-markets, commercial business space resolves into blue and white collar districts. Buildings for manufacturing and production, and those for white collar operations, arrived separately to Madison Square and left in different directions.
Arrows show the movement of blue and white collar business districts through Manhattan, toward Penn Station and Grand Central respectively.
A Lineage of Blue Collar Work
A near unbroken chain of long defunct blue collar business districts in steel frame and cast iron stretches from the Garment District down to SoHo on the west side. Intermixed among them are artifacts of earlier residential communities everywhere, buildings from the first and third waves of development make up most of what’s between City Hall and Central Park.
Development (or redevelopment) of the second wave of commercial culture (aka play, or the “city” of shops and theaters) was primarily along major thoroughfares like Broadway, Fifth and Sixth Avenues, and major select side streets like Chambers, Grand, 14th and 23rd Streets.
The wave-like development left behind architectural pairings of residential homes and commercial business buildings, usually separated by about 20-30 years, with both building types growing larger as one goes uptown. In SoHo: Federal and Greek Revival homes with cast iron buildings; Madison Square: brownstones with steel frame loft buildings; Midtown: larger brownstones and Beaux Arts mansions with skyscrapers. The Garment District was built over the old Tenderloin redlight district that abutted black and Jewish communities, and were neighborhoods of small homes and sublets.
These first posts look at development between City Hall and Central Park, but blue collar business districts go down the west side as far as Tribeca. If one considers the garment production that came out of the tenements of the Lower East Side, manufacturing, wholesaling, warehousing, and production came from every part of downtown Manhattan. Blue collar business districts passed through Madison Square, ending with the Garment District, just below Times Square.
A Leapfrog of White Collar Work
In 1893, Metropolitan Life Insurance leapfrogged from the Financial District to the southeast corner of Madison Square. Met Life’s move to Madison Square was to the Midtown Business District what the first banks were to Wall Street; it set the long-term future program for the east side of Manhattan. The Industrial and Gilded Ages merged in Met Life’s new building in Madison Square; they offered Industrial Insurance, private workplace insurance secured by individuals themselves, today’s workman’s comp. The new building was an exemplar of the white collar office type complete with electricity, elevators and telephones, of the finest architectural pedigree and appointments. It preceded the clocktower by 15 years.
Far from the Financial District, it was in the heart of what had been the most exclusive residential neighborhood in the country years prior (and where many residents still lived!). For the first time, large groups of New Yorkers, especially those who lived in nearby Murray Hill, could go back and forth to work and their shoes stayed clean. Until then, “white collar” office buildings were concentrated in the Financial District, the oldest, narrowest, dirtiest part of town. Uptown “office buildings” meanwhile, even those built and occupied by banks and insurance companies themselves were revenue producing and often included floors of manufacturing and production. Artifacts of labor invaded office space everywhere above Canal Street. The most “white collar” office blocks around Madison Square at the time were religious publishing houses on Fifth Avenue, not commercial at all.
It makes sense that an insurance firm would pioneer the Midtown Business District. Insurance pre-dates by millennia the administrative support networks of corporate headquarters, law, accounting, financial, and human resource firms spawned by the Industrial Age, and occupying so much of Midtown today. Insurance is a business of almost pure information; even banks have public lobbies and handle currency. Metropolitan Life was an operation of mailbags, express couriers, telephones, pneumatic tubes, offices, files, forms, cabinets, cashiering, research, investigation, travel and scheduling. An in-house printing and publishing plant was the closest thing to sweat labor; no pianos being moved in elevators, no whirring sewing machines, nothing physical produced but contracts and policies. It was a white collar workforce of men, and now a remarkable number of women, whose clothes, hair and hands remained clean at the end of the workday with minimal effort.
The new Met Life building closed a cultural circuit in the creation of a proto-modern lifestyle around Madison Square. A block away on 6th Avenue the department store, though not new, was at its social and cultural height. Multiple floors of block-length real estate converted to assorted self-contained fantasy worlds and “departments” of sensory overload for consumer consumption; some included theaters, babysitting, doctors, postal services and travel agencies, in the most overblown and exuberant architectural forms. Then, just up Fifth Avenue around the corner were the experimental forays into apartment-living: flats, apartment-hotels, bachelor flats, women’s hotels, French flats, and early coops in so many Neo-renaissance and historicist forms.
No one could have imagined so hyper-localized a complete transformation in every mode of life even a decade earlier. Electricity and the telephone were supplanting gas and the telegraph in new ways of “living, working and playing,” all around Madison Square with elevators, pneumatic tubes and dumbwaiters.
The greatest change agent to impact the “city” of Madison Square was likely Consolidation in 1898, when the “city” (now its legal meaning as a municipal corporation) expanded to absorb the outer boroughs. The first Madison Square Garden, a civilizational statement of a building, would only last from 1890-1925.
Within a decade of Consolidation, the Williamsburg, Manhattan, and 59th Street Bridges opened; then came cars and trucks. The Model-T Ford production rate says a lot: 1909, 18,000, 1912, 170,000; 1913, with the moving assembly line, 1,000,000. In 1917 the last horse car line was retired in Manhattan.
Patterns of growth and development that had been underway since the opening of the Erie canal in 1825 accelerated after Consolidation. Manhattan became a factory island; bridges and trucks replaced horses and ferries as a means of distribution. Madison Square was overrun with a wave of manufacturing, industry and trade, and in much bigger buildings than ever before.
While carriage trade shops, middle class department stores, fine hotels and theaters moved further uptown, Met Life stayed and expanded. New York Life Insurance soon joined them in Madison Square. In the 1920s, Art Deco office towers sprouted along the new subway line on the east side, and Fifth Avenue. Modern office buildings came into the exclusive residential blocks of Terminal City in the 1950s, north of Grand Central. Then from the 1960s-80s, the Midtown Business District developed over the mixed-use suburbs of the Gilded Age in glass and steel box buildings. One can see the Met Life Clocktower (1909) directly down Madison Avenue from the heart of Midtown today. In the 1990s, office towers moved west across Times Square to Hells Kitchen.
Blue collar manufacturing would “push” the city uptown; white collar office towers merged with it.
Different city-components fared differently. The upper class districts, by definition, moved further, and only the Metropolitan Opera house escaped commercial business development. The Fifth Avenue shopping district and Times Square would both be overtopped by the Midtown Business District, while Herald Square, the middle class shopping district, was the only one overrun by blue collar manufacturing.
The next post will look at transit and the integral role it played in development, and hopefully explain New York’s two-part skyline.
A final note. Garment manufacturing moved diagonally across Manhattan. Starting with the piece work history of the Lower East Side, the garment trade joined the wholesalers moving up Broadway, and eventually moved to steel frame “state-of-the-art manufacturing loft buildings” on Fifth Avenue. In1916, seeing the garment trade approaching, the FAA (Fifth Avenue Association) initiated a publicity campaign that threatened a boycott if the industry didn’t remove itself from the Avenue. Given Fifth Avenue’s lack of transit, its hard to know if the Garment District would not have ended up where it did anyway. Here’s the February, 1916 notice from one of the papers.
