Manhattan's natural history -- Mannahatta to Manhattan: settlement to grid plan -- Land use before the Civil War -- The tenements and the skyline -- The economics of skyscraper height -- Measuring the skyline -- The bedrock myth -- The birth of Midtown -- Edifice complex? The ca…
"The Manhattan skyline is one of the great wonders of the modern world. But how and why did it form? Much has been written about the city's architecture and its general history, but little work has explored the economic forces that created the skyline. In Building the Skyline, J…
Manhattan, as the world's greatest vertical city, is the result of a collective striving; its skyscrapers are the physical manifestation of this mass quest for success. Despite the fact that the skyscraper is inherently an economic phenomenon, there is almost no work that chroni…