The Dynamics of Subcenter Formation: Midtown Manhattan, 1861–1906

Abstract

Midtown Manhattan is the largest business district in the country. Yet only a few miles to the south is another district centered at Wall Street. This paper aims to investigate when and why midtown emerged as a separate business district. We have created a new data set from historical New York City directories that provide the employment location, residence, and job type for several thousand residents in the late‐19th and early‐20th centuries. We supplement this data with additional records from historical business directories. The evidence suggests that early midtown firms appeared there in order to be closer to local residential customers who had been moving north on the island throughout the 19th century. Once several industries appeared in midtown, it triggered a spatial equilibrium readjustment in the 1880s, which then promoted the rise of skyscrapers in midtown around the turn of the 20th century. This process occurred several years before the opening of Grand Central Station in 1913.

Locating the Manhattan housing market: GIS evidence for 1880-1910

“…Another way to think about the evolving location of the housing market is to calculate some measure of the locus of our sample observations. The mean latitude and longitude of our sample in 1880 is roughly at the location of Trump Tower today in Midtown, which confirms Barr and Tassier's (2016) findings that several industries had moved to midtown by 1880, bringing residents with them. The huge number of observations located in the broad midtown district, shown in Figures 4 and 5, also bears this out.…”

“…These were manually checked and any that could not be geocoded initially were located by hand and coordinates identified using Google maps. This is similar to the manual part of the procedure outlined in Barr and Tassier (2016), Appendix 1, which also describes some of the same challenges to geocoding that we outline below.…”

“…A further determinant of residential location choice is the location of available jobs, which interacts with the transit network in that "available" may be defined as "can afford to commute to". The panels of our Figure 3 could be compared to Figure 3 in Barr and Tassier (2016), who displayed the residential and employment locations of their business directory samples for 1861, 1879, 1892 and 1905-6. The latter shows substantial residential movement towards the upper west side from 1890 on, along with the dispersal of business activity away from the southern tip.…”

City subcenter as a regional development policy: Impact on the property market

“…Our results reveal a substantial causal impact of subcenter development through the lens of the property market, as well as salient features of subcenter development, including significant population growth and spillover effects. The findings not only enrich the existing literature on polycentric urban development (e.g., Barr & Tassier, 2016; Brasington, 2001; Garcia‐López et al, 2017) by showing the result of government‐led redistribution of economic and administrative resources, but also draw new lessons from China's big step in promoting polycentric urban development.…”

“…In addition, the significant spillover effects suggest an underestimate of the baseline subcenter impact. Existing urban models justify the emergence of subcenters as a natural consequence of metropolitan area growth owing to the interplay between agglomeration economies, transportation, and population (Barr & Tassier, 2016;Brasington, 2001;Fujita et al, 1997;Garcia-López et al, 2017;Helsley & Sullivan, 1991). The role of local governments tends to be complementary, which only occurs after subcenter development has gained momentum (Bontje & Burdack, 2005).…”