Nathan Lewis and the 19th century Hypertrophic City

After a snapshot of London during its transformation from 1666-1730, let’s take a look at what was happening in the United States not long after … around the late 1700s-mid-1800s. Remember, in particular when you look at the historical illustrations of American streets compared to London city landscapes of a similar period, that at that time London, with a population in 1800 of 1 million, was overwhelmingly the largest city in Europe and one of the largest in the world. (The pictures I showed were from some of the main avenues and spaces of London – Cheapside, The Strand and Trafalgar Square.) New York (population 60 thousand) and Philadelphia (40 thousand) were provincial towns by comparison.

Let’s turn to Nathan Lewis’ blog commentaries dealing with Traditional Cities/Heroic Materialism. I strongly recommend the blog in general, in particular his use of photographs to illustrate his arguments, his humour and bluntness.

http://www.newworldeconomics.com/archives/tradcityarchive.html

I’ll hand the microphone over to Lewis for a long-ish illustrated quote:

“The second Hypertrophic thing you should notice, from … Manhattan, is that the buildings are much taller. The buildings are about fifteen stories high. That is much taller than the Traditional City, which tends to top out around six stories, the limits of practical use without elevators. Look at the buildings in Siena again. They are about 4-5 stories tall. So, along with a street that is about three times wider, we have buildings that are about three times taller. Everything is three times bigger! That's why the Manhattan photo and the Siena photo looked similar at first glance. The relationship between width and height was about the same. In the case of Madison Avenue, the street is more like five times wider, and the buildings more like five or eight times taller.

Of course, nobody started with the idea of "let's make a city, but, just for fun, let's make everything three times bigger." It didn't work like that at all. Actually, they made the Hypertrophic Streets first. Only much later did they get around to making some Really Tall Buildings to go with the Really Wide Streets. The first "skyscraper" in Manhattan was of course the Flatiron Building:

 

See the 3-7 story Traditional City style buildings all around the base? Also, we can see what the streets of Manhattan looked like in 1902, before cars.

Real empty.

See the guy walking right in the middle of the street? He doesn't even have to wait for a traffic light (not yet invented) because there's no traffic.

No murderous machinery in the middle of people's living spaces. Yet.

There are some more people in the middle of the street on the left.

The Flatiron building was completed in 1902. It is 22 stories high.

 

This period image gives an idea of what kind of impression the Flatiron Building made when it was completed.

Woo hoo! Finally, after a hundred years, we now have some super-big buildings to go with our super-big streets!”

Here’s another view of the Flatiron building – yes, the traffic is indeed pretty thin.

Lewis is making a number of points about the obvious gulf between the urban landscape/streetscape of American 19^th century cities (in particular New York and Chicago) and the “Traditional” cities of Europe. First, the streets are much wider. Second, the decision to build urban landscapes (both in cities and in towns) based on much wider streets emerged fairly early on in American history – Lewis suggests the very early 1800s. Third, that at the time the grid plans for American cities were drawn up, mobility within the city was pedestrian or by horse (carriage or wagon), whether that city was in Europe or America. Fourth, that from the perspective of today, the proportions of New York streets looks “right” from a European perspective, but only because the buildings are so large that a similar ratio to street width has been restored. Therefore, at the time the street plans were laid out and the city begun to expand on the grid pattern, the ratio between street width and the 3-5 story buildings that lined them would have been wildly disproportionate from a European perspective. In essence the balance between building height and street has been achieved retrospectively and on a different scale, making it appear to us that in some way the urban pattern was “designed” in anticipation of the skyscraper and automobile.

Let’s look at some more illustrations and background to this.

Here are a couple of photos of historic Philadelphia, which in the 1750s had overtaken

Boston as the largest city in America, as well as a link to a map of the original city centre. It seems pretty clear that – as one would expect - both the layout of the city and the form and size of buildings were, at this stage, indistinguishable from those of a port city in Holland or England at the time.

 

http://teachingamericanhistory.org/convention/map/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now turning to New York, the grid pattern for which was laid out in 1811.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commissioners%27_Plan_of_1811

Here are two views of 2nd Avenue taken looking north from 42nd Street, one from 1861 and the other contemporary:

 

 

 

A final shot (this one from Lewis’ blog) showing the same approach in a small-town context – Main Street in Norwich, NY, established in 1793, current population 7,000: 

A road large enough for six traffic lanes now, in the 19th century it would have been unpaved, a relative sea of mud in winter and dust in summer. All in all, a fairly clear confirmation of Lewis’ argument. So the question then arises: what instincts in a society of recent immigrants which remained ethnically and culturally English, Dutch and German could have generated this approach to the urban environment, an approach which diverged so profoundly and suddenly from the contemporary urban formats of their homelands?