Thirty-two blocks of a midtown district on the 1811 grid, in which every building fills, or stays below, the envelope set by the 1916 zoning law: street walls twice the street width, tiers behind the sky-exposure plane, and towers on a quarter of the lot.
Manhattan’s plan is two laws laid one over the other. The Commissioners’ Plan of 1811 cut the island into a single grid of avenues and 200-foot blocks, turned about 29° from north to follow the island; the Building Zone Resolution of 1916 then governed what could rise on each lot. In a “2-times” district a building could stand at the street line to twice the street’s width, then had to retreat behind an inclined plane drawn from the middle of the street; over a quarter of its lot it could rise without limit.
The district shown is a composite of the years around 1930. Along the avenues, where lots are large, the envelope is filled with tiered bases and towers: types after the Empire State, the Chrysler and the New York Life buildings, and a Rockefeller Center with its slab, plaza and Channel Gardens. In the side streets older, lower buildings of the narrow through-lots still survive among newer ones that step back from both street fronts. Hugh Ferriss’s drawings had taught architects to see the envelope as a mass to be carved, and each building here is carved by the same rule to a different height.
Click any building to see which rule shaped it.