The walled-in structure was the House of Refuge, a juvenile delinquent prison/converted arsenal. At the time, the fashionable city center was two miles downtown, around City Hall. Everything in the picture sat just above a nexus of roads where Broadway and the Bowery came near each other at 14th Street, and continued uptown in different directions as the Bloomingdale Road (and the path of future Broadway), and the Boston (or Eastern) Post Road, crossing in front of the House of Refuge to eventually become Third Ave. Coming up from Wall Street, the fork in the road shows the original routes 9 and 1 respectively.

The nexus of roads was a dry, high ground path leading between the headwaters of two rivers (one, the Minetta) flowing in opposite directions to the Hudson and East Rivers. The section of the Viele Map to the right highlights Union and Madison Squares, and shows the path of Broadway connecting them while following a natural high ground path, and logical ancient passage through the island, that is today’s Broadway.  Madison Square’s high ground site between the two opposite flowing rivers was a microcosm of New York City on the island of Manhattan itself. 

But back to the vortex and the passage of time…   

Just 75 years after Madison Square looked like a village scene after a snowfall (albeit with a reform school/prison at its center), a mile further uptown at 42nd Street, New Year’s Eve was being celebrated in Times Square, and the New York Public Library was under construction further up Fifth Avenue!  In fact, a centenarian who lived when a stone bridge was required to cross Canal Street, could have witnessed the first few Times Square New Years’ Eves, a few miles uptown.

Times Square, 1904

The New York Public Library under construction, view from southeast corner, 1904 

In a matter of decades after the opening of the Erie Canal, the island was covered with miles of continuous, often contiguous buildings. Architecture became a force of nature as construction “rampaged” uptown at the glacial pace of the business cycle. The Garment District of the 1930s-1960s, and the Midtown Business District of the 1950s-1990s, completed the broad strokes of business district development, adding to earlier, downtown cast-iron and steel frame loft buildings. Altogether they made up the third wave of commercial business that washed over Manhattan, almost none of it built on virgin ground.

The city–Manhattan–was once an industrial powerhouse. Cast iron buildings in SoHo today display markers of their fabricators, all from Manhattan-based factories never more than a mile or two away. Photos of west side interiors in the 1890s show radiators, stoves, and fixtures displaying: “Made in New York,” which only meant Manhattan at that time, a few miles downtown.

The constraints of the island had a multiplier effect that amplified economic activity. Services and support industries from food and construction to conveying people and goods, and all sorts of infrastructure required armies of people, themselves requiring food, housing, transportation and access to markets.

Concentration led to consolidations and efficiencies, first downtown in things like finance and publishing with the clearinghouse and the Associated Press. Then, three largely incompatible waves of development geo-spatially expanded and shifted, architecturally over-writing one another and in the process humanity was rescaled to live and work in the third dimension in apartment buildings and office towers; the middle wave of commercial culture largely remains street level, in the lower parts of the matrix.  

It all happened remarkably fast, the difference between early suburban homes and towering loft buildings in SoHo is a mere 60 years. The “city” moved through the island like a vortex, and left behind a history that can be read much like a palimpsest.

The Palimpsest

Palimpsests were used by scribes before paper, materials like parchment, papyri, and vellum. They were scrubbed clean and reused, sometimes repeatedly, and are recognizable by the overlapping accumulation of past writings, now intermixed remnants on the surface. The palimpsest is an intuitive way to think of cities as places where layers of history are built over one another, and vestiges of the past continue in the streets in the ongoing life of the city. The palimpsest idea carries with it the authenticity (with some due diligence) of letting the built environment tell its own genuine story, leveraging the city itself as the primary source for decoding and finding meaning, especially in New York’s highly integrated, deeply interwoven built environment.

It is not a perfect metaphor, which is a good thing in this case. Unlike an actual palimpsest, Manhattan’s uptown-moving waves of history were being “written” all at once, as part of a continuous whole.  As cast iron commercial buildings went up in SoHo, theaters went up in Madison Square, and mansions went up by Central Park. But then imagine if the layers of an actual palimpsest informed one another, and made more sense when read together? For a city like New York whose most complex history has been “set in stone” for some time, attempting to reverse engineer how or why Manhattan’s thousands of buildings ended up where they did, in the combinations they did, and in the neighborhoods they are, it seems, is only even possible through the lens of the palimpsest. It is a powerful tool not just because a typical Manhattan block has buildings from four, five or more periods of development, many American cities do, but New York’s intense sections of redevelopment measure in miles, not blocks.

The versatility of the palimpsest concept will be further explored in the next post. Going forward, decoding the buildings, blocks and neighborhoods of New York will rely heavily on the concepts of the vortex and the palimpsest to make sense of the city as it changed through time and space.