City of skyscrapers: why skyscrapers in New York are placed in groups

New York is a city of skyscrapers. But why are the skyscrapers in America's largest city so crowded? How were large high-altitude clusters formed? These and other questions were answered by the author of the Strundel column on the website Yandex Zen.

If you look at New York from a bird's eye view, you will notice that the city's skyscrapers make up two large clusters. The first is located in the very south of Manhattan (Downtown), where the famous Wall Street is located. The second is in the center of the island (Midtown), near the Central Station.

But why were these places chosen for construction? “Since the 1960s, it has been believed that the reason for such an uneven arrangement of high-rise buildings is the bedrock (stony layer of soil), more precisely, the depth of its occurrence,” the author writes. - The piles of high-rise buildings must be driven into the stone, otherwise the skyscraper will simply collapse. The more you need to dig to the hard layers, the more expensive the construction costs - it is logical to assume that they will build where the least digging to rocky soil is. "

However, such an "elegant, scientifically beautiful" hypothesis turned out to be wrong. Several studies were conducted in 2009. As a result, it turned out that the bedrock depth insignificantly affects the choice of the location for the construction of the skyscraper. “The additional costs did not exceed 7% of the cost of the building - much more could have been saved on buying land in another area. The factors that really influenced the formation of the two high-rise clusters are economic and social, ”the author noted.

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Also, looking at the picture of Manhattan, you can see that the southern coast of the island is closest to the ocean. It was here that the city's trade center arose, which eventually turned into the financial center of the entire country.

Immigrants who came to America worked in factories a little further north. Nowadays, low-rise buildings prevail in these areas. White-collar workers and other wealthier people began to settle even further north, closer to Central Park (which they also created), jumping over poor working-class areas. When the south of the city had already ceased to accommodate all businessmen and traders, they jumped over the industrial districts in the same way, so the new business center of the city arose exactly in midtown, next to the Central Station and the East Coast, ”the author explained.

However, skyscrapers are not just an indicator of prestige or respectability. They play an important role, allowing you to get the maximum amount of space in the extremely crowded business quarters. For this reason, they are built where it is profitable and where there is the greatest demand for real estate.

Plus, regular factory workers don't need high-rise buildings. The factories in which they work are also impossible to place in skyscrapers.

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So it is mainly investors and wealthy people who rent premises for offices and buy apartments in skyscrapers. It is for this reason that skyscrapers were built in those areas where the listed market entities were the most.

“A metropolis is a complex, confusing and chaotic living organism that does not always obey rational laws,” the author summed up.

If you didn't know, the USA is the birthplace and capital of skyscrapers. Homeland, because here they began to build. And the capital - because of the number of high-rise buildings that continue to be built in large cities of the country, considering that it is more profitable to use expensive land in megalopolises. By the way, 3 of the 5 tallest buildings in America are in New York.