Downtown, more than thirty-five new setback buildings squeezed into the already dense quarter and several lifted slender towers sixty or more stories into the sky.
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During the building boom of the Twenties, whole ranges of masonry cliffs and mountains shaped by the zoning law sprang up in areas of intensive development such as the East Forties, and West Thirties, especially in the new Garment District where nearly eighteen full city blocks between Seventh and Eighth avenues filled in with office buildings, showrooms, and manufacturing lofts. The resulting stepped-pyramid or "wedding cake" massing typified the city’s high-rises from 1916 until 1961, when the zoning law was dramatically revised.
Balancing that new constraint was a provision that allowed for vigorous commercial development and continued New York’s essential identity as a city of towers: an unlimited height was permitted over one-quarter of the area of the lot. There were a number of different formulas, but in general terms, the law required that after a prescribed vertical height above the sidewalk (usually 90 feet for cross streets or 150 to 200 feet for avenues), a high-rise had to be stepped back within a diagonal plane projected from the center of the street. Instead of setting an absolute cap on height, encouraging flat roofs and cornice lines, New York’s law sculpted both individual buildings and the skyline in three dimensions.
The zoning envelope was something entirely different than the height limitations long imposed by many European and American cities, including, Paris, London, Boston, and Chicago. The ordinance introduced the concept of the “zoning envelope,” which limited and defined the maximum mass (or volume) allowed a building on its particular lot. This situation changed dramatically with the passage of zoning in 1916. The Commissioners' Plan of 1811 provisional map, released in 1807 Thus, a black-and-white diagram of private property versus public space cut horizontally through the city at the level of 100, 500, or 1,000 feet would look exactly the same as the Commissioners' grid. Ownership of property extended from the lot lines straight up into the stratosphere. An illustration of the 1811 grid makes clear this binary condition the white areas, which represented streets and an occasional park, were public space while the dark blocks were private. The early-nineteenth-century Commissioners' Plan was a simple blueprint for the expansion of the city that delineated a separation between two types of space: public and private.
The second – zoning – determined the city's three-dimensional form by restricting uses by district and, especially, by limiting the maximum mass of a building allowed on a given site.
The first imprinted Manhattan with a two-dimensional plan, a rectangular grid defined by broad north-south avenues and multiple east-west cross streets and by its standard units, blocks of 200 feet by 600 to 800 feet. Of the human acts that have shaped the magnificently unnatural geography of New York City and created its unique sense of place, two stand out: the Commissioners' Plan of 1811 and the zoning resolution of 1916 and its later revisions. How the 1916 Zoning Law Shaped Manhattan's Central Business Districts