COMING MAY 15, 2019
What is density? Does the word describe a condition of people or place? Is it people crowded together? Buildings too tightly spaced, or too tall? Or is it a lack of open space on ground level?
Built density, which measures the area covered by structures, and population density, which calculates the average number of people in a given area, describe two very different aspects of the urban experience.
Arguments about density have shaped and reshaped New York. Critics of tenement life and housing reformers viewed open space and sunlight as the antidote for overcrowding and created a new vision of master-planned, high-rise, residential communities. The Depression brought government funding into the business of housing, and by the 1950s “towers in the park” became the standard approach to slum clearance and urban renewal. Yet this formula for working- and middle-class projects, which were designed at extremely low density, housed far fewer residents than the tenement blocks they replaced. By the 1960s, critics led by Jane Jacobs and others denounced the modernist solutions in favor of traditional neighborhoods.
Density today remains a hyper-charged concept – a negative to many who equate it with crowding – or a positive for those who claim it creates more vibrant and affordable urban life. Whatever one believes about its relative merits, a better understanding of density is a first step to meaningful dialogue about the future of the city.
Manhattan Island today has developed an urban landscape with two distinctly different characters. One is the product of the late 19th- and early 20th-century forces of both expansion and concentration that can be seen equally in the towering skyscrapers of lower Manhattan and Midtown and in the very dense, but low-rise tenement districts that housed the city’s burgeoning immigrant and working-class population. This first pattern of private development, with high lot coverage and limited open space, was already established by the 1880s as tenements and row houses overspread Manhattan.
A second pattern of open space and isolated towers took shape in the Depression and postwar decades and represented a fundamental restructuring of the built environment. From the mid-1930s, government transformed the city according to a vision of reformed residential neighborhoods. Through a range of programs, housing advocates and federal, state, and local officials bought back the land and tenements and organized the creation of affordable housing for working-class and middle-income families. Their work created a new form of large-scale urban housing that dramatically reduced density, both of built area and of people per acre.
This exhibition illustrates and analyzes the two characters of New York’s housing stock – privately-developed or publicly- assisted – from the perspective of density and raises questions about how to house the city’s growing populations on its scarce land.
The exhibitions and programs of The Skyscraper Museum are supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
The exhibitions and programs of The Skyscraper Museum are made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.
View our past exhibitions virtual sites.
