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The Physics of the Manhattan Project (Fourth Edition)
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To Kathy and Will
Contents
List of Figures ix
List of Tables xiii
Acknowledgments xv
Introduction 1
Part I: Before the Skyscraper Revolution
1. Manhattan’s Natural History 17
2. Mannahatta to Manhattan: Settlement to Grid Plan 42
3. Land Use before the Civil War 75
4. The Tenements and the Skyline 107
Part II: The Rise of the Skyline
5. The Economics of Skyscraper Height 141
6. Measuring the Skyline 184
7. The Bedrock Myth 210
8. The Birth of Midtown 238
9. Edifice Complex? The Cause of the 1920s Building Boom 271
10. What Is Manhattan Worth? One Hundred Fifty Years of Land Values 298 Epilogue: The Resilient Skyline? 324
Appendices 345 Notes 373
Bibliographic Note 401
Bibliography 403 Index 425
Figures
I.1 A, the Mannahatta skyline in 1609; B, the Manhattan skyline in 2014 2
1.1 The waterways of New York 18
1.2 Manhattan’s bedrock topography 21
1.3 Geological map of Manhattan 24
1.4 Layers of subsoil along Broadway 30
1.5 Geological conditions in Lower Manhattan west of Church Street and north of Liberty Street 31
1.6 Fertile Manhattan 34
1.7 Bodies of water and wetlands of Mannahatta 36
2.1 New Amsterdam circa 1660 50
2.2 The original land grants and patents from the Dutch West India Company 53
2.3 Viele map of 1865 56
2.4 Lot size versus distance to the fort circa 1650 59
2.5 Map of the Shoemakers’ Pasture 60
2.6 New York in 1791 61
2.7 A land value index for colonial New York 62
2.8 Average changes in elevation between 1609 and 2012 71
3.1 The Manatus map circa 1639 78
3.2 The Ratzer map of 1767 80
3.3 Manhattan’s expanding footprint 81
3.4 A, hypothetical bid rent curve; B, land-use “map” for a stylized version of Lower Manhattan 86
3.5 Neighborhoods of New York City before the American Revolution 89
3.6 Land prices versus distance to the fort in colonial New York 91
3.7 Home locations of merchants, smiths, and laborers in 1827 94
3.8 Home locations of merchants, smiths, and laborers in 1849 95
3.9 Irish and German population density by ward in 1855 97
3.10 Rents and population in Five Points from 1830 to 1860 104
3.11 Constrained Manhattan, 1865 105
4.1 Carved Manhattan, 1912 108
4.2 Height in 2013 versus population density in 1900 109
4.3 Stylized Manhattan, 1900 110
4.4 Population density in 1900 116
4.5 Ethnic enclaves in 1900 118
4.6 The evolution of tenement house design 127
4.7 Model of block circa 1900 132
4.8 Average tenement rents versus story in 1900 133
5.1 Land prices in Lower Manhattan between 1880 and 1890 143
5.2 New York’s first skyscraper 145
5.3 The location and concentration of newspaper and magazine publishers in Manhattan in 1882 150
5.4 Early skyscrapers in Newspaper Row 152
5.5 Total height and the Skyscraper Profit Index from 1963 to 2013 159
5.6 Skyscraper building types since 1960 160
5.7 Skyscrapers before zoning 161
5.8 The Art Deco Period 164
5.9 The zoning envelope and the “shape tax” 167
5.10 Before and after: The Singer Building and US Steel Building 170
5.11 The effect of zoning code incentives 172
5.12 Rise of the supertall residential building 174
5.13 Returns to skyscraper construction in 1929 and 2013 178
6.1 Total height added to the Manhattan skyline each year from 1890 to 2014 186
6.2 Total height versus predicted height from 1900 to 2014 195
7.1 Foundations for early skyscrapers 215
7.2 The first office building to use caisson foundations 221
7.3 Buildings and bedrock 225
7.4 Height and bedrock 231
7.5 Bedrock depths and the logic of the skyline 233
7.6 Bedrock depths and the probabilities 236
7.7 Local bedrock effects 237
8.1 Els and hubs 240
8.2 Skyscraper locations from 1890 to 1915 241
8.3 Manhattan population growth from 1840 to 1910 248
8.4 Maps of FIRE and corporate service workers from 1861 to 1906 256
8.5 Density graphs for employment and residences from 1861 to 1906 258
8.6 Density graphs for businesses 262
8.7 Commuting patterns in Manhattan from 1861 to 1906 266
8.8 Skyscraper hotspots in Midtown from 1900 to 1993 269
9.1 Grand Central Station and Terminal City 283
9.2 Penn Station 285
9.3 Jump of ladies garment manufacturers 287
9.4 Per capita gold bonds issuances versus overbuilding 290
9.5 Real estate profits versus skyscraper completions from 1905 to 1935 294
10.1 Land Value Index from 1867 to 2012 306
10.2 Land Value Index from 1866 to 1900 309
10.3 Land Value Index from 1900 to 1950 311
10.4 Changes in land values during three different periods from 1905 to 1929 314
10.5 Land Value Index from 1950 to 2013 315
E.1 The Sandy effect 329
A.A The number of Manhattan land grants and town lots distributed to individuals from the colonial authorities from 1637 to 1680 345
A.G Manhattan population from 1624 to 2014 350
A.H.1 Relative Densities of Three Groups, 1827 350
A.H.2 Relative Density of Three Groups, 1849 351
A.I Number of immigrants (in thousands) entering into the United States for the four largest groups from 1840 to 1930 351
A.M Percentage of tenements buildings of different stories in 1900 355
A.N Percent distribution of monthly rents per apartment in 1900 across Manhattan and on Block #291 in the Lower East Side 355
A.Q Normalized ratio of New York condo prices to Midtown asking office rents from 1995 to 2013 (1995 = 1) 358
A.V Office skyscraper construction in Midtown from 1900 to 2014 for buildings that are 295 feet or taller 362
A.Z Index of real monthly dividends and real earnings per share for the Standard & Poor’s Index from January 1919 to January 1932 366
Tables
6.1 The Top Ten Years when “Too Much” Height Was Added to the Skyline 205
6.2 Top Ten “Too Tall” Buildings in New York 205
8.1 Location Decisions for Several Industries between 1866 and 1898 264
9.1 Types of Developers during the Roaring Twenties 291
9.2 The Real Estate Professionals in the Roaring Twenties 292
A.AA Regression Results for the Natural Logarithm of Real Building Construction Costs for 109 Structures Built between 1899 and 1931 366
A.B The Total Growth of Manhattan via Landfill 345
A.BB.1 Inflation-Adjusted Land Value Index for Manhattan 367
A.BB.2 Regression used to Create the Land Value Index for 1866 to 1900 368
A.BB.3 Regression used to Create the Land Value Index for 1900 to 2013 369
A.C Regression Results for Land Value Prices from 1667 to 1773 346
A.CC Results of Granger Causality Wald Tests for Measures of Skyscraper Height and Land Values 372
A.D The Distribution of Wealth in Early New York 348
A.E Regression Results for Changes in Manhattan’s Elevation (in feet) from 1609 to 2012 348
A.F Regression Results for Lot Sizes for Skyscrapers Constructed before 1916 Above and Below the Grid Plan Demarcation Line 349
A.J.1 Top Employment Categories for New York Irish in 1855 352
A.J.2 Top Employment Categories for New York Germans in 1855 352
A.L Parks of Manhattan circa 1900 354
A.O Regression Results for Rents for Lower East Side Block #291 356
A.P Spatial Autocorrelation Regression of Natural Log of Average Real Price per Square Foot for each Sanitation District (SD) between 1885 and 1900 357
A.R Building Height Regressions, 1895 to 1932 358
A.T.1 Annual Total Height Regressions 360
A.T.2 Tallest Building Regressions 361
A.U Regression Results for the Percentage of Total Construction Costs that Were Devoted to the Foundation for Fifty-Three Buildings Completed between 1890 and 1915 362
A.W.1 Regressions for Change in Office Vacancy Rates between 1925 and 1931 363
A.W.2 Change in Vacancy Rates Above or Below Prediction 363
A.X.1 Location of All 328 Feet (100 meters) or Taller Buildings Completed from 1928 to 1931 364
A.X.2 Corporations that Built Skyscrapers between 1928 and 1931 That Were 328 Feet (100 meters) or Taller for Their Headquarters 364
A.Y.1 Regression Results for the Number of Skyscraper Completions from 1902 to 1950 365
A.Y.2 Regression Results for the Number of Skyscraper Completions from 1902 to 1950 365
Acknowledgments
The writing of a book is seemingly a solitary task, but nothing could be further from the truth. This document is only the tip of a very deep iceberg. The rest—the vast majority of it—are the family, friends, colleagues, students, and organizations who have been so kind with their assistance and support throughout the years. Without them, I could never have completed this effort.
The seeds of this book came from two sources. First was from Carol Willis’s 1995 book, Form Follows Finance: Skyscrapers and Skylines in New York and Chicago. Her masterful work suggested to me that one could apply the modern tools of economic analysis to study the skyscraper, though her work is not statistical or theoretical in nature. Economists have largely ignored this important phenomenon, most likely because the skyscraper is seen as a form of real estate, subsumable by the larger study of real estate markets (see the Bibliographic Note for references). Willis, an architectural historian, focuses on the architectural dimensions and the form of skyscrapers in New York and Chicago. In this regard, her focus is mostly on how the skyscraper looks and how its internal parts are organized, but her work carefully demonstrates that one cannot separate economics and architecture.
The second seed came in December 2005 when I stumbled on the website http:// www.emporis.com/, which provides a data base of the vast majority of skyscrapers constructed throughout the world. With this data, I was able to explore my dual interests—economics and New York City. As I reviewed the building information, a series of questions emerged. Specially, what were the determinants of skyscraper height in New York, and how did these determinants change over the course of the twentieth century? Unwittingly, these data launched me on a decade-long quest to understand something about New York’s incredible history.
After I amassed a small body of academic publications that studied the economics of skyscrapers, I determined to put them together into book form. As I began to conceive of this project, it became clear that a book is not simply the sum of several articles. Academic articles have a very particular form. One that can be summarized as: (1) Research Question, (2) Related Works, (3) Theory and Model, (4) Data, (5) Results, and (6) Conclusions. Economists, as an academic breed, like to dispense with much of the historical and institutional context, and they simply want to see the question and results in as direct manner as possible. This is all well and good for a social science publication, but much of the interesting historical details had to be pushed aside. This book is thus my attempt to bridge the economics with the history. In particular, the first half of the book discusses the historical foundations for skyscrapers in New York and establishes the context for the economic analysis in the second part. It aims to fill in much of the details that were left out of my academic articles and to weave these papers into a more coherent narrative.
To this end, chapter 6 is largely drawn from my publication, “Skyscrapers and the Skyline: Manhattan, 1895‒2004,” in Real Estate Economics. Chapter 7 is from my paper, “Depth to Bedrock and the Formation of the Manhattan Skyline, 1890–1915,” published in the Journal of Economic History, and co-authored with Troy Tassier and Rossen Trendafilov. Other related publications of mine are given in the Bibliography. Several chapters are based on academic works that were written simultaneous to this manuscript. Chapter 4 is based on my paper, “Population Density across the City: The Case of 1900 Manhattan,” co-written with Teddy Ort. Chapter 8 is based on my paper, “The Dynamics of Subcenter Formation: Midtown Manhattan, 1861‒1906,” co-written with Troy Tassier. Chapter 10 is based on “What’s Manhattan Worth? A Land Values Index from 1950 to 2014,” co-written with Fred Smith and Sayali Kulkarni. The rest of the chapters contain the results of research performed specifically for this manuscript.
And now to the expressions of personal gratitude. I would first like to give a heartfelt thanks to Troy Tassier of Fordham University. If it were not for him, this book would not have been possible. As co-author, two of the chapters are based on research performed with him. No one can ask for a better collaborator and friend. I have been lucky to find someone who shares my interests in New York economic history, and working together has not only been productive but fun. He has enabled me to pursue this research agenda, and for that I am truly grateful.
I would also like that thank my other co-authors. Teddy Ort, as an undergraduate at Rutgers University‒Newark, was incalculably helpful in assisting with the collection, processing, and mapping of the immense quantity of data about life in the tenements of New York around 1900. I also thank Brian Englemann, who, at the time, was a graduate student at NJIT. Together, Brian and Teddy created a shapefile for Manhattan circa 1900; it took them nearly a year to do this. I would also like to thank Fred Smith of Davidson College. I greatly appreciate not only his collaborative efforts that led to chapter 10 but also his willingness to share his land values data from 1866 to 1900 and his comments on chapter 9. As well, Sayali Kulkarni, as a Master’s student, was very helpful in collecting and processing land values data that were used in chapter 10.
Many students at Rutgers University‒Newark have provided valuable assistance. I am especially grateful to Nancy Elias, who tirelessly aided me in many ways. She proofread all the chapters multiple times and offered great comments, and she finished and edited the bibliography, which was originally begun by Kathleen Morales (a student at George Washington University). I thank Rubaa Saleh for her efforts with collecting and creating the images for this book. Eon Kim has also been helpful in several ways. She helped with geo-processing and geocoding historical data (including creating an address locator for 1852), and she has done an excellent job producing the maps in the book.
Other students have helped me collect data over the years. Everet Rummel and Robert Utzinger have been excellent research assistants, as have Sher Singh and Froozan Makhdoom. The students in my Fall 2014 Honors Social Science Seminar were very helpful in reading and providing comments on the chapters. I am especially grateful to Katherine Claypoole and Benjamin Sherer, who went above and beyond in their efforts. Amanda Friedman provided excellent comments for chapter 5. Dimitrios Ntarlagiannis, a geologist at Rutgers University‒Newark, has been very helpful with creating the bedrock map; for ten months, his student, Jan Olechowski, diligently worked on the map as well. Together, they have, for the first time, brought a view of Manhattan’s rock floor to the public at large.
I am also grateful to many friends and colleagues. I have had the privilege to know Alex Marshall, with whom I have talked about many of the aspects of this work. His writings on cities have been very helpful. Daniel Scheer has kindly provided feedback about several of the chapters, as has Nobuyuki Hanaki, Sara Markowitz, and Polly Cleveland. I am grateful to Eric Sanderson. His Mannahatta Project is work of both staggering and sublime beauty, and I am honored that he has been so generous with sharing his data and offering comments on chapter 1. I would like to thank Cheryl Moss for all of her excellent help about New York’s geological history. Richard Shaw willingly discussed his knowledge of Manhattan soils. Donald Friedman has provided helpful information on Manhattan’s engineering and architectural history. Gideon Sorkin generously offered much helpful feedback for the research that went into chapter 8. Although they have all been so kind with sharing their wisdom, any errors in the book belong to me and me alone.
I also appreciate the comments and feedback from attendees at various seminars and conferences. I thank participants from seminars at Binghamton University, CUNY Queens, Emory University, Fordham University, Hunter College, Lafayette College, and New York University. I am especially grateful to have been able to present my work to the Columbia University Economic History Seminar, and I have appreciated the opportunity to talk with the members of the group over the years, particularly Alan Dye and Gergo Baics. My work has also benefited from presentations at several conferences including the American Economic Association Meetings, the Eastern Economic Association Meetings, and the Southern Economic Association Meetings.
Several libraries and institutions proved vital. Columbia University’s Avery Library contains a wealth of information on New York real estate. I thank Carol Willis and the Skyscraper Museum for providing valuable data. Without the Internet, I do not think I could have written this book. Several websites have been key, including http://emporis.com and http://skyscraperpage.com, which contains a wealth of information about skyscrapers.
I would also like to thank Rutgers University‒Newark. My colleagues in the Economics Department have been very supportive throughout the years, especially Peter Loeb, who, as chair, hired me as an assistant professor in 2003. Rutgers‒Newark provided a wonderful academic climate and allowed me the luxury to merge my professional and personal interests by writing this book. Much of the research in the second part of the book was partially funded by Rutgers University Research Council Grants, which have been immensely helpful and appreciated.
I also thank my colleagues Alan Sadovnik and Robert Snyder for their advice over the years. I thank my co-authors on other related works, including Jeffrey Cohen, Bruce Mizrach, and Kusum Mundra. For general moral support and friendship I thank Francesco Passarelli, Francesco Saraceno, Regan Solmo, Alexander Peterhansl, my mother, Marjorie Barr, and my sister, Stephanie Early. Bill and Ann O’Connor and Mary Jean Hughes are wonderful in-laws, and have provided encouragement throughout the years. But, of course, this work would not have been possible with the patience and love of my wife, Kathy, and my son, William, and for this reason I dedicate the book to them. For more information about the book, including color figures and data sets, please visit my website, http://www.buildingtheskyline.org/.
Jason M. Barr Hastings on Hudson, New York May 2015
Introduction
Oh music in stone, poetry in sculpture, song in architectural marble, prayer in granite, an ecstasy in steel and iron and gold, singing city of the great heart, singing city, You are Manhattan!
Edwin Curran
Manhattan has generated a shameless architecture that has been loved in direct proportion to its defiant lack of self-hatred, respected exactly to the degree that it went too far.
Rem Koolhaas
This book begins with an image—the Manhattan skyline hovering like a giant thunderbolt on a bed of water. Once a lush forest (figure I.1A), today this bolt is covered in brick, steel, and asphalt; during the work day, nearly four million people work, live, and play on it (figure I.1B).1
The island is also an icon of the modern American republic—a symbol of the trials and tribulations of the country’s economic and cultural growth and change. The buildings literally and figuratively contain the stories of countless strivers, arriving from all parts of the globe on a quest for material, political, and spiritual freedom. Its skyscrapers are the physical manifestation of this mass quest for success. Like a lightning bolt itself, the birth of skyline was a kind of spontaneous eruption: a burst of something new and electrifying made possible by the Industrial Revolution.
The skyline is greater than the sum of its parts; it is more than simply a collection of buildings on an island. It is a work of art in the same way a painting is more than the sum of shapes on a canvas, or a poem is more than the sum of words on a page. Collectively, society has created a masterpiece as great as that of Van Gogh or Picasso. But, unlike that of the sole painter shacked up in the studio, the skyline is the art of capitalism; it is the collective expression of an entire society. Yet it is not a deliberate act, but rather is an accident. There was never any master plan to build the skyline, and yet, here it is.
The skyscraper has taken hold of the public imagination because of its great symbolic significance. Nothing demonstrates the power and success of capitalism more that the Empire State or Chrysler Buildings. Al Qaeda terrorists on September 11, 2001, chose to attack the icons of American power—the seat of political power in Washington, DC, and the seat of economic and financial power in New York. The Twin Towers were arguably America’s most important representation of the nation’s free market economic system.2 And yet, rising from its ashes is the new symbol—One
Figure I.1 A, the Mannahatta skyline in 1609; B, the Manhattan skyline in 2014
Source: I.1A: Courtesy of Markley Boyer, The Mannahatta Project, Wildlife Conservation Society. I.1B: Courtesy of Flyin’ Phil.
(B)
World Trade Center—which conveys America’s response to terrorism: though you can knock down a building, we can rebuild it just as easily.
But how did we get here? How and why was the skyline created, and what were the forces that shaped its history and growth? This book is an inquiry into what has driven and continues to drive skyscraper heights, locations, frequencies, and shapes since the late nineteenth century. Given all the attention lavished onto the skyscraper—its aesthetics, its symbolic meanings, and its engineering achievements—barely anything has been written about its economic history. But architecture, engineering, and symbolism are all moot without economics. The architect and engineer are clients of the developer, who is driven to build the skyscraper for profit. The consumer is willing to pay because of the needs it fulfills. Money creates the skyline and money sustains it.
The main argument here is that we cannot simply focus on the tall building as some isolated, soaring object, but we must focus on the context and the market. The history of the skyline is the result of the competition for access. It is a solution to an economic problem: how to house as many people as possible on the same geographic coordinates. The dilemma is that all locations are not equal, but rather some places afford the land user greater benefits than others.
Since the millions of people who live and work in the city cannot all be in the same place at the same time, the land market allocates space to the highest bidder; this market offers a nonviolent means among competing groups who are jockeying for position. The skyscraper offers a peaceful resolution to this “battle for place,” since it can house hundreds if not thousands of people, most of whom would otherwise be excluded.
Land prices are an important part of the story, as they are both the cause and effect of the skyline. Land values, at their heart, are signals to society about which locations have the greatest demand, relative to other ones. If land values are high in a particular place, it suggests that the location has a great use to the city and its residents. High land values also suggest that more people want to be there than can be comfortably accommodated, and the price soars as a result, so that only the select few who can pay to be there are able to claim the prize in the battle for place.
The price of land in Lower Manhattan was so high in the late nineteenth century that developers tried to create new building types that were larger and taller in order to hold more people. The expensive land values were a signal that there was a land shortage. Developers aimed to solve this problem by creating “land” at that location—land in the sky, floating above the street. In the process, they created the skyline and also allowed for the building to express its many meanings. Skyscrapers then drew even more people to be in the same place, increasing land values even more.
The low-rise tenement districts of the Lower East Side and Five Points, just north of Downtown, were similar responses in the battle for place—the low-income immigrants were winning the battle in these neighborhoods—they were outbidding the financial firms and the Gilded Age millionaires to live in there. The reason is because they wanted to reside in these neighborhoods. They provided benefits that other neighborhoods did not. These places were often labelled as slums, but they were successful in their purpose—they provided homes and jobs for countless immigrants forced to leave their native lands. It was the land market that created the Lower East Side, and allowed for a place where immigrants could realize the American Dream.
During the nineteenth century, Manhattan saw a tremendous rise in its population. In 1800 the island housed about 60,000 people; by 1900, it held 1.85 million. Growth on such a small island naturally produces a very intense battle for the right to occupy a piece of real estate. The millions of immigrants who came to Manhattan to start a new life had to live somewhere, and, in the process, they helped determine the market for skyscrapers. The immigrant neighborhoods were shrinking the business districts, and they were driving up the price of land in the center of the island. Next to the ethnic enclaves were the commercial enclaves, and the size of the commercial areas was determined in part by the size of the immigrant areas. While there were riots from time to time, the fact that nearly two million people could not only inhabit the same island, but transform it into one of the most productive places on planet Earth is truly a remarkable achievement.
But the decisions about where immigrants were to live and where businesses were to have their offices were based on the earlier history of the island. The skyline begins its ascent in the late 1880s. Before then, the skyscraper was a technological impossibility, as the know-how to build one just did not exist. When the first one appeared in New York in 1889, it set off a building revolution, and established, in earnest, the market for height. In the first decade of this new market, the tall building appeared only in Lower Manhattan, but at the turn of the twentieth century it also began to appear 2 to 3 miles north of City Hall, in Midtown.
This book aims to understand why they first appeared in Lower Manhattan and then why they “migrated” to Midtown a decade later, but did not appear in between (see figure I.1B). To understand this requires a review of the history of land use on Manhattan before the 1890s. What occurred after 1900 was a result of how the battle for access played itself out in the early part of the nineteenth century, which in turn, was a result of earlier decisions, which began in 1626, when the Dutch first settled on the island.
The reason for going back to the beginning is because land-use patterns are sticky—when someone erects a structure on a piece of land for a particular purpose, surrounding lots will attract related or similar uses and so neighborhoods take on a particular characteristic—be they commercial, industrial, or residential—which persist and influence the future history of the neighborhood. If we truly want to understand today’s Manhattan skyline, we must look at the key decisions made hundreds of years ago about how the land was going to be used.
MAJOR THEMES
Battle for Place
There are several major themes that unite the chapters in this book. First is that the skyline is a direct result of what I call the battle for place. In other words, millions of individuals, groups, and organizations are each trying to find a location for themselves, given that all locations are not inherently equal. Some locations, like Wall Street, are incredibly profitable for firms, but not so much for individuals. Finance-related companies have a willingness and ability to pay for these locations, and as a result, make them the exclusive province of the corporate sector. Those boxed out of those places
must go elsewhere and bid for the right to occupy another location, and the battle goes on.
In the process, space—geography—becomes allocated according to which groups can outbid the others for the right to occupy a particular location. The winner of this battle determines the land’s use and value. This is important because this battle drives the location of skyscrapers. As is illustrated in figure I.1B, the skyline is not a random jumble of skyscrapers, but rather, is a cluster of tall buildings, or two separate clusters of tall buildings, separated by about 2.5 miles of lower-rise structures. As will be discussed, the birth of the skyscraper in triangular Downtown was due, in part, to Lower Manhattan being “barricaded” by water on two sides and tenements and factories on the third. Midtown’s rise was a result of how space was being allocated after the Civil War. Its birth, around Madison Square, was a product of the socioeconomic status of the people living nearby and was not related to the bedrock depths as has been so frequently claimed.
Midtown’s subsequent migration north, from Madison Square to around 42nd Street, was also due to the evolving battle for place, since the city’s economy is always changing as a response to the decisions made by residents, and what is happening within the larger economy, be it the business cycle, technological changes, or mass migrations from within and abroad.
Skyline as System
This leads to a second, but related, theme: because of this ongoing battle for place, the rise and growth of the skyline must be viewed as a system of interrelated parts. One group’s decisions influence another group’s, whose subsequent decisions feedback and influence the rest. To put it succinctly, the battle for place leads to a land dance, a kind of multiple-partner waltz around space. Each tries to be the leader and take the dancers in a particular direction, only to get a response to go in a different direction, and so on. The location and heights of buildings and land-use types form as a response to what is being built in other parts of the city. The micro-economy of a neighborhood is a result of a kind of economic “dialogue” with other neighborhoods throughout the city. To understand the skyscraper we need to understand its opposite: the tenement.
The growth of the skyline is a product of two tensions inherent in capitalism: the centripetal forces which draw people together, and the centrifugal forces that push them apart.3 Buildings, infrastructure, transportation systems, and institutions are durable and semi-permanent. Once they are constructed they tend to draw people together and keep them there. This is often called lock-in or path dependence, and it is crucial to understanding the skyline, since the decisions that were made early in New York’s history had the effect of locking-in or restricting the historical real estate trajectory of the city.4
But the city also faces a series of centrifugal forces—those that push people away—which include the forces of creative destruction, where the old and “inferior” is supplanted by the new and improved: real estate decays, incomes rise, technology advances, and these forces push people away from the old locations to the new ones to create new centers.5 The city is a machine of constant churning, and the skyline is both cause and effect for this churning.
Myth Busting
The next theme relates to our understanding of Manhattan’s real estate history. Because aspects of this history have not been subject to rigorous analysis, there are many misconceptions or misunderstandings. One important analytical mistake is the confusion of correlation for causation. Another important error is what I call the framing problem, which is to telescope onto one particular element of a historical event, removing the important context, and therefore making a wrong or misleading conclusion.
Accounts of the city have not fully comprehended, for example, the role that the natural environment has played. In fact, the historiography takes a kind of schizophrenic view of how geology and ecology have influenced New York’s economic and social history. Sometimes geology and ecology are seemingly all-powerful, such as the effect of bedrock on the skyline, or the rise of Five Points; sometimes geology and ecology are seemingly irrelevant, such as the implementation of the Grid Plan. Because geology and early ecology are so entwined with the city’s history, a more nuanced view is in order. In short, the effects of geology and early ecology can only be understood in relation to how they affect the economic costs and benefits to land use and real estate development at a particular time and based on the city’s earlier history and current state of technology.
As a preview of some of the important subjects revisited here, first is what I call the Bedrock Myth. The conventional understanding is that skyscrapers are constructed in Downtown and Midtown because bedrock is easily accessible there. Since skyscrapers need to be attached to the rock so they do not lean or settle, the location of the rock, presumably, has determined where they are built. But, as will be discussed throughout the book, this is simply not true. It is a case of mistaking correlation for causation. It is true that the bedrock is relatively far below the surface north of City Hall in low-rise neighborhoods like Chinatown, Greenwich Village, and the Lower East Side, but bedrock was not the reason for the lack of skyscrapers there.
Related to this is the question: What drove the creation of Midtown? The common perception is that it was either caused by the bedrock valley or by Grand Central Station. The reality is that it was neither. Rather, Midtown’s development as a skyscraper district at the turn of the twentieth century is related to the interplay of Manhattan’s shape, as a long narrow island, and its demographic evolution. Starting in the 1830s, the middle and upper classes “jumped” over the working-class districts and began their movement up the northern fringes of the city. Midtown’s rise was a direct response to the commercial needs of these residents and not from the location of a railroad depot.
But what about Grand Central Station? The building boom of the Roaring Twenties created Midtown 2.0 around Grand Central Station. These skyscrapers were built to house the growing number of offices and businesses that wanted to locate in Manhattan. More broadly, contrary to the conventional wisdom, the skyscraper boom of the Roaring Twenties was largely a rational response by developers to satisfy the demand for space in the nation’s most important metropolis. Height competition was only a small part of the larger skyscraper market during this period, and building height was fundamentally rooted in the profits that were available to developers in the late 1920s. More broadly, throughout the twentieth century, skyscraper competition has, in fact, been relatively limited.
As is a common theme throughout this book, the skyscraper is a solution to an economic problem: how to house as many people as possible on the same location of the planet. The tenements of Five Points and the Lower East Side were also solutions to a similar problem: how to house as many low-income immigrants as possible, when so many of them were choosing to live in the same place. We forget or ignore the facts that, by and large, given the economic realities of tenement building, these neighborhoods were successfully, and affordably, sheltering the immigrant classes of the city.
Here we see that the framing problem has driven people to focus on the negative or problematic aspects of the tenement neighborhoods and in the process reverses cause and effect. Five Points, for example, was considered one of the world’s most notorious slums because part of the neighborhood was on top of made land, the filled-in Collect Pond. But this reverses causation. Five Points was not a “slum” because it was in an environmentally bad neighborhood, but rather, its environment was so poor because it was such a popular neighborhood, providing benefits to its low-income residents. It was the overuse of the neighborhood that made its quality so low.6
A last example has to do with land values. A frequently cited quip by America’s first millionaire, John Jacob Astor (1763‒1848), on his deathbed was that “If I could live all over again, I would buy every square inch of Manhattan.”7 But as will be shown, he was correct up to a point. Manhattan’s land values have not been on a continual upward trajectory. For nearly half a century (1932 to 1977), Manhattan experienced a slow and painful, though uneven, deflation in its land values; so much so, that the real value of Manhattan at its nadir in 1977 was at the same point it had been nearly a century before.
In the last two decades, since the early 1990s, Manhattan’s land values have not only recovered but have soared. This is actually problematic, since it indicates severe restrictions in building that would otherwise have caused land value increases to moderate. The New York City government, in an attempt to regulate the real estate market, has inadvertently given landowners a kind of monopoly power that has let them yield returns greater than if there were more competition for development. As will be discussed in the Epilogue, contrary to popular belief, Manhattan is not nearly built to capacity, but, under the right circumstances, can grow to hold many more people.
AN ECONOMICS APPROACH TO THE SKYLINE
What is an economics approach to the skyline? To answer this first requires a definition of economics. The standard definition, as recounted in textbooks, tends to be rather dull and has the magical gift of immediately alienating the would-be student from further inquiry. As given in a typical textbook, economics is the study of how a society allocates its scarce resources.8 But if we pause to reflect on what this definition really means, we see that economics is simply the study of how human beings attempt to solve the material problems created by their existence—how they manage to provide for themselves the things they need to not only survive, but to live in comfort and style. In short, economics is the study of the causes and consequences of societal problem-solving.
We are all economists, to a degree, as we wake up each morning and make decisions about what we are going to do that day to secure a reasonable quality of life. Do
we drive to work or take the bus? Do we take the day off from work and read a book in the park? Should we move to a new house or remain in the current one? Every moment of our lives we make decisions based on the weighing of the cost and benefits of our different options, in the hopes that these decisions will prove correct and will not only ensure our further survival but will also provide happiness or peace. The fact that you have chosen to read this book also suggests that, by and large, the problems of food, clothing, and shelter have been solved, so that you have ample time to read about the birth and growth of the Manhattan skyline, which was born from the need to solve problems of food, clothing, and shelter.9
As the study of societal problem-solving, economics is concerned with incentives: What are the costs and benefits of taking various actions and how do these incentives lead to decisions and outcomes? The conclusion is that the incentives for survival draw us to the marketplace, where we buy and sell the goods and services we need. Households need food, clothing, and shelter, and are drawn to supermarkets, malls, and cities to buy them. Businesses, in search of income for their employees and owners, provide these goods; and they do so in greater quantities and lower prices than we could ever do at home by ourselves. How many of us have recently milked a cow, made the clothes we wear, or constructed the computer on which we work? In the modern world, the market system is the means by which most, but certainly not all, of a society’s material problems are solved.
The role of government then is to assess whether the incentives lead to “good” or “bad” outcomes. Government policy is about altering behavior to provide a better set of outcomes than the one we got, assuming that, by and large, governments aim to achieve these things. If a factory emits harmful pollution, it suggests that the incentives of the manufacturer are not in line with maximizing the greater good. Policy aims to reduce the pollution, while allowing society to still enjoy the fruits of the factory. If farmers and manufacturers cannot get their goods to consumers, then the government builds roads to connect them. If the free market does not produce affordable housing, governments step in try to rectify this.
The point I would like to make in this book is that in order to understand the built landscape, we must first understand what I call the incentive landscape. What do people want? And how does the cost of achieving these wants affect the decisions they make? Specifically, what is the relationship between the marketplace and the skyline?
More broadly, this book takes a tripartite approach to understanding skyscrapers and the skyline—theory, data, and historical analysis. First is the use of economic theory. These are economic ideas and concepts that apply to understanding land use and real estate. Every attempt has been made to avoid the use of mathematical analysis. The economic theory is described in words and is included to suggest the underlying, logical reasons as to why something occurs. That is to say, economic theory attempts to reduce some situation to a few key components—the fundamental incentives—in order to draw some conclusions about the problem being studied. If we can isolate the key incentives facing the different members of society, we can then understand why they act and the results of their actions.10
In economics, this approach comes under the heading of rational choice theory. The basic idea is that we assume that people and businesses have a simple objective in life, which boils down to the attempt to maximize their individual well-being. On the consumption side, the unit of analysis is the household. The key assumption here
is that the household aims to choose a place to live to maximize its well-being, given a limited income to do so. Similarly, firms choose places for their offices to maximize profits. Take a minute to consider your choice of home. Clearly you weighed the costs and benefits of living in different places and chose that which seemed the best, in light of what you could afford. Or, consider the company for which you work; its chosen location was based on weighing the costs and benefits of that location versus others. This idea is then scaled up to different groups, sectors, or the city itself to see what happens collectively.
It is important to add that we do not need to make the assumption that everyone is perfectly rational in the sense that they always figure out the optimal solution to this problem; all that really matters is that we can clearly specify a set of aims or objectives for the different groups in our society, and then see what happens to the city—in this case Manhattan—when they attempt to satisfy their personal objectives.
There are two key insights that spring from these assumptions. First is that the location choices of the millions of people who work, live, and play in the city are not independent of each other. No two people can physically locate on the same exact spot on planet earth. As a result, if one person is at a particular location, then another person must move somewhere else. But, since “no man is an island,” the location choice of the second person also affects the first. Scaled-up, it means the city can be viewed as a system of interrelated parts.
But if two people both desire to be at the same location, then they must figure out a way to choose a winner in this battle for place. This leads to the second key insight about how space is carved up. Land is assigned prices, and would-be users of land make offers for how much they are willing and able to pay for the right to occupy a particular location. The right goes to the highest bidder. In other words, the “battle” to occupy space is determined, in general, by the price system and the free market. The price paid is based by what the user can do at that location, which is also determined by income and preferences.
In order to understand the why, how, where, and when of the Manhattan skyline, this book offers economic theories regarding the land allocation and use process, and why builders chose to build upward toward the skies. But theories, in and of themselves, cannot stand if they are not supported by the facts. For this reason, these theories are tested using data and statistical analysis. I have avoided as much technical discussion as possible and have focused on the nature of the data collected and the results of these analyses. For the interested reader, specific details can be found in the Appendix.
Statistical analysis is helpful because it is a means by which larger patterns can be observed. Historical accounts of skyscrapers, for example, tend to focus on the biggest or most important of the species. The Empire State Building and Burj Khalifa attract the lion’s share of attention. But we cannot draw conclusions about the skyscraper, as a building type, without investigating many skyscrapers. The skyline itself cannot fully be understood without looking at most, if not all, of the skyscrapers that constitute it.
Another advantage of statistical analysis is that it allows for the creation of a type of societal “laboratory.” Unlike a scientist working directly in the lab, social scientists cannot directly manipulate the social environment to separate cause and effect. An economist cannot randomly change the income tax rates for a sample of 10,000 people to see how tax rates influence the number of hours worked. An economic historian
cannot go back in time and change a policy on land use, for example, and see how an alternate history plays out.
Statistical analysis, specifically what is called regression analysis, allows the researcher to collect data on several important variables, and, through the statistical procedure, see how changes in one variable are related to the outcome of interest, holding the other variables constant. By including several variables in the analysis, one can more likely separate out cause and effect. Again, I have made every attempt to discuss the statistics in a straightforward way, with the objective of answering questions or testing theories, and so little details about the statistical methods are given in the body of the book.
Lastly, theory and statistics cannot exist in isolation and must be held together by the context in which they occur, for which we must appeal to the historical record and other writings on the subject. Newspaper accounts, histories, and biographies, for example, help to confirm or reject the findings of theory and data analysis. If one of these components negates the others, then it suggests avenues for further research or a revision of theories.
In my view, theory, data, and historical analysis form a kind of tripod of inquiry. They each help inform the other and they each clarify things in their own way. Our collective understanding about Manhattan’s real estate is sometimes wrong, misunderstood, or misleading because one or more components of inquiry are missing. The easy road to drawing conclusions is based on simple observation; but do these conclusions hold up to the rigors of logical and statistical analysis? That is what this book aims to discover.
REVIEW OF THE CHAPTERS
The 1890s is the pivotal decade, when Manhattan enters the modern era. In these years, the technology for the skyscraper is perfected; the planning for the subway begins; the influxes of Italians and Jews are forming neighborhoods in Little Italy and the Lower East Side; the roots of Midtown have been firmly planted; and the northern Manhattan “frontier” is effectively closing, as virtually every neighborhood on the island had its main usage defined by this time. Today’s skyline is a result of Manhattan’s land use and economy in the last decade of the nineteenth century.
Because the 1890s is the crucial moment of transition, the book is divided into two parts. “Part I: Before the Skyscraper Revolution” chronicles Manhattan’s real estate history before the 1890s to establish how the early trajectory of the city set the stage for the birth of the skyline later on. Chapter 1 begins at the literal beginning, with a tour of Manhattan’s natural world as it existed before European settlement. We begin with Manhattan’s most discussed geological feature—its bedrock—so that we may see later on how the skyline was and was not shaped by its geology. After that we take the “elevator” up to the next level and explore the island’s soil. Dirt, it turns out, plays an important role in the city’s history, both as attractor for economic activity and also as a nuisance, especially when perennially wet.
From there, we tour the topography and ecology—the hills, the trees, ponds, streams, and wetlands. From the perspective of early Dutch and English settlers, the natural environment had a vital influence on the decisions they made. Manhattan was established as commercial venture by a few dozen households. In 1626, when they
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had Scotty’s impatience only admitted it. The tank was a muddy little hole with a small oasis of grass and a grove of mesquites surrounding it. Near by was the famous Camino del Diablo, the thirst-haunted road to Yuma, one hundred and thirty miles away to the west—all dry desert travel. Big John and the boys sauntered out to look at it after supper. Up through a gap in two red lava hills led the old trail, a sure-enough road, as good (or bad) as the day it was made. Looking southeast behind them, the thing lost itself in the bushes of the Tule Desert. Why or when it had been built, the boys had no idea.
Big John regarded it solemnly for a while. “Injuns, Greasers, prospectors an’ sodjers—they all had a purple time of it along this trail, boys!” he exclaimed. “More’n four hundred people hev died along this Camino del Diablo, of thirst, exhaustion, an’ jist plumb discouragement.”
Scotty shook his head ruefully. “Let’s make a break for that Cerro Colorado hill to-morrow, John,” he urged. “It’s about twenty miles northeast of Pinacate, so Red Mesa can’t be more than five miles from it and directly between it and Pinacate. Ought to be a cinch to find it, if that plaque is O. K. And, if we don’t, we’ll clear out, pronto, and waste no more time on it, eh?”
“I’ve never climbed Red Hill myself, son,” said Big John. “But as for clearin’ out—we cayn’t! Not yet awhile.”
Sid grinned delightedly. “How come?” he asked, all interest.
“What think? Ef four men goes to chowin’ man’s food, in alligatorsized doses like you boys hev been doin’ for the last four days, how long d’ye suppose three skins of pemmican will last?” asked Big John sardonically. “We’re almost out of meat, boys. We’ll try Cerro Colorado to-morrow, an’ then, Red Mesa or no Red Mesa, we rolls our freight for them Hornaday mountains whar thar’s mountain sheep an’ antelope. Shoot or starve—that’s us, old-timer!”
“Suits me!” caroled Sid. “We’ve got to stock up before we start back, eh? Well—what did we bring Ruler and Blaze along for, anyhow!” he demanded enthusiastically.
Scotty was silent as they went back to camp. He was silent, too, and anxious all through the ride to Cerro Colorado next morning. Face to face with the reality, with these vast fields of scowling lava, with the dry and level plains of endless creosote bushes, with these parched and stunted bisangas, choyas, and saguarros, his dream shriveled and faded. A mine! Here, in all this five hundred square miles of barren lava! A railroad to it! How cross the grim ranges of Pinacate, looming up now not twenty miles away to the west? It all seemed so hopeless! It would take a far sterner and more determined man than he to push through such a project!
But Sid sang happily as they rode toward Cerro Colorado. This wild, free land struck a response in the deepest notes in his being, the love and enjoyment of that freedom that every explorer, every pioneer, every adventurer feels to be his most precious birthright; for which he will sacrifice ease, comfort, wealth, civilization itself. New species of this marvelous desert life constantly claimed his attention. White trees, fluffy in foliage as cotton, appeared. “Smoke Trees,” Big John named them. A new bush, all frosty white, met them along the march, securing a roothold even in crevices between red and sterile lava chunks as large as a ragged rock boulder. He recognized the species as the Brittle Bush and would have tried breaking its twigs except for the formidable and glistening thorns with which it was armed. Then came a vast carpet of lowly little plants that seemed made of frosted silver and Big John drew rein. He inspected them closely and then scanned the neighboring craters and all the vast plain about him with keen eyes.
“Antelope fodder, fellers!” he announced. “Whar ye see thet leetle plant, thar’ll be pronghorns. They love it better than grass.”
No antelope were in sight, however. Even if so, they would be quite invisible under that burning sun. The horses loped on. Gradually there rose out of the desert a low hill, sheered off flat at its summit and covered with the dense lacery of creosote bushes. Cerro Colorado it was, and they picketed the animals out and began to climb its rocky slopes. Rough, sharp lava, in boulders of all sizes, marked the lava flow of geologic times from this hill; indeed the whole plain below was made entirely of the outpourings of this one
crater Once on its top they looked out over the country between them and Pinacate, who loomed up grim and imposing in the west and surrounded by his wide and desolate lava fields. Twenty dreary miles away was he!
Sid had carried with him the Red Mesa plaque, bearing its enigmatical message in Latin which Fate had not permitted them yet to have translated and he now produced it for that last reading. The words they knew were still there, staring up at them from its red pottery surface.
“XXI Milia S-O ab Pinacate—Minem aurum et argentum—In Mesam Rubram”—there was no mistaking that!
But the more they pored over the words the more unbelievable they became! It was surely a cruel joke, a wild tale that the Papagoes had brought to that old priest, Fra Pedro. It must be—now! For, below them stretched a vast plain, stippled all over with creosote bushes, clear to the base of Pinacate itself, twenty miles away! There was no Red Mesa, no hill of any sort on that plain! If those bearings on the plaque were true, Red Mesa ought to be in plain sight, right now, and not over five miles away! But there was nothing of the kind, anywhere in sight!
Scotty finally turned to look at Sid, silent misery in his eyes. His dream had vanished. Already his thoughts were turning to the future. His next letter to his mother would not be the triumphant announcement of a valuable claim staked out, a triumphant return east to organize a company, but—well, nothing much; nothing but perhaps a brief note, saying that he had got a job somewhere.
Sid gripped his hand sympathetically. There was nothing to say. If Red Mesa existed it certainly was not here.
“Cheer up, old top; le’s forget it and go hunting!” he grinned.
But Scotty’s tenacious persistence now came to his rescue. He turned to Big John. “There’s a mine around Pinacate somewhere, John, sure as we stand here!” he gritted. “I doubt if the Papagoes of that day knew how to tell that friar east or west in Spanish very clearly And a mine wouldn’t be found in this lava but in granite
outcroppings if I know anything about mining. I’m game to stay here and look for it, boys, while you’re hunting sheep.”
“Yaas, you pore lamb!” said Big John soothingly “I’ll tell ye: Them Hornaday mountains is granite. An’ they’re twenty miles northwest of Pinacate! Put that in yore face an’ chaw it, if it’s any comfort to ye.”
CHAPTER V RED MESA
ACROSS a bare and sandy divide wallowed and crunched a weary party of horses, men, and dogs. Bare and desolate mountains surrounded them, and one rose in sheer gray granite, capped by a black stratum of lava, apparently two hundred feet thick. Of even desert vegetation there was not a trace here. The sand buried everything, even the mountain sides. One could hear the faint lisplisp of it, moving stealthily along, grain by grain, under the flow of the southwesterly winds rolling up from the Gulf of California.
“Shore this is the country that Gawd jest didn’t know what to do with!” ejaculated Big John, mopping his sweating forehead and getting a new bite on the corner of his bandanna with his teeth. “Whar’s yore desert gyarden, hyarabouts, Sid?”
“We’ll come to it, just over the ridge—according to the map made by the Hornaday expedition,” replied Sid cheerily. For perhaps the twentieth time since they had left Represa Tank early that morning, that little book-page map was taken out and scanned by the whole party. Big John always liked to convince himself, by standing on the map as it were, that they were really following it. In these endless dunes it would be easy to take the wrong gap and miss MacDougal Pass altogether.
“See?” said Sid, pointing out the landmarks, “that range ahead of us they named the Hornaday mountains. They abut on the Pass in a right angle. I’d give a lot to know what’s in that angle behind them! No one knows. There’s a little piece of the earth for you, Scotty, as unexplored as the North Pole!”
Scotty said nothing. He had not yet recovered from the disappointment of finding Red Mesa apparently a myth. The whole business looked worse than ever now Even assuming that the
Papagoes might have been confused in translating east and west and so have given Fra Pedro the wrong compass bearing, twentyone miles northwest of Pinacate would be right here, where they were now riding—and there was no such thing as a mesa in sight anywhere! The mountains here were all of rugged gray granite, tumbled and saw-toothed, with faint tinges of green showing where some hardy desert vegetation had got a roothold. Mesa! This was volcanic country, all cones or jagged outcroppings of granite! thought Scotty, disconsolately.
He rode on dejectedly after Niltci and the dogs, who were scouring the sand for game tracks. A short way from here the first tracks of sheep had been seen by the Hornaday party, and further south antelope had been shot by John Phillips in the craters of the extinct volcanoes which dotted this country.
“There she is—there’s the Pass!” cried Sid triumphantly, as they topped the last of the awful sand ridges. His pointing finger showed them a river of desert vegetation below, a broad and rolling green river that flowed through the flat sandy plain of the Pass in masses of rich, living color Tall green saguarros, like telegraph poles, rose in monumental spikes along the granite bases of the mountains on both sides. White fields of Bigelow’s choya barred their way, in big patches of them flung broadcast across the sands. Here and there the bright green puffball of a palo verde made a note of vivid color against the prevailing dark shiny green of the creosotes. At sight of all that verdure the horses broke into a run, twisting and threading through the flat bare sand lanes. The dogs, now desert-wise, galloped along beside them, barking excitedly and hardly noticing the choyas, avoiding them instinctively
And then Ruler gave tongue. Ow-ow-ow! he sang, the first blessed musical notes of the chase that had come from his throat since they had left the Catalinas! Niltci whooped a shrill challenge and lashed his mustang to full speed. After him put out Big John, and then Scotty, glad of any excitement to take his mind off his troubles. Sid rode leisurely after them, merely glancing down at the tracks the dog had discovered in the sand.
“Buck mule deer—a small one. Here, Blaze!—Heel!” he called sternly to the Airedale, who had started bounding after Ruler. Sid halted his horse and watched the three riders racing down the Pass. The frantic bellows of Ruler now told him that the deer had been sighted, and presently Sid got a distant glimpse of him, a tiny gray shape bouncing stiff-legged as he dodged through the desert cactus garden.
“Mule deer all right! Guess we’ll stay out, Blazie,” he told the dog. “There are enough after him now to catch him with their bare hands! Let us try for mountain sheep, meanwhile.”
He turned the pinto toward the base of the Hornaday Mountains which rose in rugged gray-green masses abruptly from the sand floor of the Pass. Their summits were ridged with rough pinnacles of gray granite. What might be on the other side of those ridges at once intrigued the exploring instincts in the boy. He was rather glad of this chance for a lone investigating hike—with good old Blaze his sole companion!
At the base of the mountain, where rock sloped up steeply from sand, he checked his horse and a joyful exclamation burst from him. An eager whine came from Blaze, as he, too, snuffed in the sand. Here they had discovered a regular mountain sheep runway! The big cloven tracks, like pairs of roll biscuit prints, were plentiful and deeply graven in the sand. They ran both ways, but a vague impulse, coupled with a decided penchant for climbing up and exploring these mountains, led Sid to halt at the first lone track that led off upward from the main game trail. It was now nearly noon, and he knew that the sheep would be high in the mountains at this time of day.
He picketed Pinto out on a patch of grass and started up on foot. Helped by Blaze’s nose it would not be very hard to follow that track. Where a print lacked in the rocky soil, eager barks from the Airedale now led Sid on. They were climbing fast and furiously before they knew it, the impetuous dog leading Sid up and up the immense craggy slopes. Below him the garden of the Pass rolled out in a great gray plain. A mile down it the faint belling of Ruler told him that the mule deer was still leading them a busy chase. His own sheep tracks
were rising toward the ridge in a series of steep bounds, climbing with ease where Sid had to haul himself up or make toilsome detours to avoid formidable white choya bushes. Sid hoped it was a ram. Since the Montana hunt for the Ring-Necked Grizzly he had not shot a single specimen of that king of American game animals, the BigHorn. A Pinacate head, to match his Montana one, would look mightly well in the Colvin trophy den now located at their new ranch up in the Gila Cañon.
Presently Blaze let out a volleying bray and raced on up the rocks toward the ridge. There came a clatter of rolling stones, and Sid looked up to see a huge ram, followed by two ewes, silhouetted for an instant against the blue skyline. Immense curled horns encircled the big sheep’s head. For a moment he stopped and looked back, his superb head poised grandly, his horns branching out in regular symmetrical spirals, his white ears standing out like thumbs in front of the horns and his white nose, cleft with the black mouth and nostril lines, a circle of white against his brown neck.
Sid shouted to the dog sharply and raised his rifle, but before he could steady the sights the ram wheeled and was gone like a silent shadow. Blaze yelped and roared out his ferocious challenge, then at Sid’s repeated yells he turned and came back whining with impatience. The youth began to feel that Blaze would be a mere nuisance in this sheep hunting because of his lack of experience. Ruler would have circled craftily to head off the Big-Horn and drive him back on the hunter, but Blaze was always for the stern chase and the pitched battle!
Sternly ordering the dog to heel, Sid climbed on up cautiously and reconnoitered through the rocks over the ridge. A shallow arroyo lay between him and the next ridge, and beyond that he saw over the mountain back, beyond a void of purple distance, a flat red table of rock, etched sharply by the ragged saw-tooth of the ridge between him and it. Sid glanced curiously at that odd rock formation for an instant, then his eyes swept the hollow below for sight of that band of sheep. Blaze whined and tugged frantically at his collar. He had seen them already, long before Sid’s slower eyes could pick them out in that mass of rocks and sparse vegetation below.
“Gorry!—There they go! Steady, Blaze!” he gritted through his clenched teeth and then raised the rifle. The army carbine’s sights sought out the game swiftly. Sid had filed a forty-five degree cut on the front sight, so that it showed up as a little white mirror over the flat bar of his rear sight. Cutting the mirror square in two with the rear bar, he found the galloping ram and raised it up to just under the distant shoulder of the Big-Horn.
Sid was just on the point of pressing the trigger—indeed had already felt the first movement of the creep of its bolt action—when a bright, shiny, horizontal flash,—the flash of an arrow—shot across the gray slopes of the ridge opposite! The ram staggered, stumbled, and struggled up a ledge, pawing convulsively with his hoofs. A second and a third arrow flash swept across the hillside and stopped in the ram’s flank. Sid gasped with astonishment. Those flashes were arrows! Then he grabbed Blaze’s collar instinctively, put down the rifle hurriedly, and closed his fingers around the dog’s muzzle so that he could not bark.
Sid was too nonplussed for a moment to speak. Arrows! It could not be Niltci, for the Navaho boy had long since abandoned his bow, now that his white friends kept him in unlimited cartridges. Sid watched the ram in his death struggles, not daring to move so much as his head. Those arrows had been shot by some unknown Indian. These mountains were inhabited then. He could see the two ewes tearing wildly down the arroyo toward a grim and scowling lava field that lay far below. They disappeared around a corner of granite, some distance down, but still the Indian who had fired the arrows did not come out of his hiding place.
Who could he be? Sid knew that the Papagoes had long since abandoned this hunting ground. Their tank still remained, filled eternally from season to season with rainfall, the sole reminder of that time when the tribe used to gather here to drive the sheep and antelope into the craters and slaughter them wholesale in the trap thus set. Now the Papagoes had become a pastoral people, raising corn, selling baskets, receiving their beef rations from a beneficent government, which, however, kept them virtually prisoners on two small reservations. This Indian arrow-shooter might be a wandering
Yaqui from Mexico, but that was hardly possible. It would go hard with him if caught on this side of the border by any of our rangers!
Why did he not come out? Sid was sure that it was because he had heard Blaze’s bark coming up the mountain, followed by the appearance of those hunted sheep. He was lying low.
For what? To shoot down the hunter the same way that he had laid low the ram? Well, if he had to wait all day, he would not be that victim, Sid decided, then and there!
And meanwhile the ram lay a silent, pathetic heap of horns and hoofs, lonely under the hot sun, surrounded by the gray crags and green acacias that had been his home—while the enigma of his death remained still inscrutable. A stunted green saguarro rose near where he had fallen, a marking-post of the desert; the approach below him was guarded by a sturdy choya, to stumble into which would be agony.
For a long time Sid stood watching the place where the arrows had seemed to come from, undecided what to do next. There was a craggy boulder over there, jutting out from the hillside, and behind it strung out cover in the shape of creosote bushes and rocky fastnesses of jumbled granite. But nothing moved. The unknown Indian still lay hidden, watching that ram carcass, too, like a trap set ready to spring. Sid lowered his head slowly, inch by inch, determined to play this waiting game to a finish himself. His muscles were trembling from holding his fixed poise so long and the under tendon of his right knee ached.
It had never occurred to him that he was in any danger himself— when suddenly a savage growl rumbling in Blaze’s throat caused him to turn halfway to the right. Instantly came the twang of a bow and the sharp hiss of an arrow. Blaze bawled out in pain, then sprawled out flat, with all four of his furry paws spread out like woolly broom handles, while his pained eyes looked up piteously to Sid. An arrow transfixed him above his shoulders. The dog seemed paralyzed as Sid dropped beside him, hot anger welling up in his heart. A hurt to one’s own person does not cause a whiter rage than one done to a dumb pet! Sid peered about him, seeking with
glittering eye for something to fire at. Beside him Blaze moaned, sighed deeply, and then fell over stiffly, the arrow sticking in the rock and partly supporting him. Sid hesitated to pull it out. To start the blood spurting free now would kill whatever chance he had yet for life —if he were not already gone.
It seemed a most cruel shot, to Sid. Why had the Indian spared him and shot his dumb and faithful companion instead? Then he began to glimpse signs of wily red strategy in all this. The unknown enemy intended to capture him alive if possible! With Blaze at his side it could not be done by any creeping attack, for the dog’s keen nose would immediately detect the near presence of any person whatever.
Sid looked cautiously all about him, finger on trigger and rifle ready. To the south the saw-tooth ridge rose high above him to yet loftier levels. All about him were jagged pinnacles, rough and craggy and full of hollows and rocky points which could not be seen around. To creep back down the mountains, somehow, and then fire three shots for help as soon as possible seemed to him the best plan. He hated to abandon Blaze while there was a spark of life left, but would it not be better for them to be separated anyhow, now? The dog might get away if he recovered even if Sid should be captured.
That arrow that had pierced Blaze had come from a rocky lair to the north of their position, just how far away he could not tell. The hiss of it had really been Sid’s first warning. Never again could he forget that sharp, ghostly whew! Making for a sheltering hollow which would be out of sight of the rocky lair, yet be open enough for him to see around him a short distance, Sid began to crawl down from the ridge. As yet he had hardly moved, but his heart was beating wildly. It seemed to him absolutely hopeless to get away from this mountain with he knew not how many hostile Indians all around him. The very idea that this desolate land was inhabited by even a small tribe seemed weird, uncanny. Not a track save their own had they seen so far. Even the old wagon ruts of the Hornaday expedition had long since been buried in the sands or washed out by the rains. It had been all new country, all virgin. If an Indian band lived here they could not be Papagoes, for the first one missing from the reservation
would call out a troop of soldiers after him. Had Vasquez, then, already gotten up from Mexico with some Yaquis?
Sid thought of all possible solutions as he crept warily downhill, pausing before each craggy outcropping in his path before daring to pass it. Then a glimpse of something red which moved behind a bush below to the left caused him to stop and raise his rifle, and, while poised in the tense set of the aim, a sudden, almost noiseless, rush of feet behind him sent electric shocks all through him! There was no time to even lower the rifle and turn around. Subconsciously his leg muscles leapt out wildly. He had an expectant sensation of a knife entering his back—and then a thin band like a strap swept down and across his eyes and something tight gripped around his throat. Knees, and the heavy weight of a man on his back, bore him to earth. His arms sprawled out, dropping the rifle; his tongue shot out and out, gagging fiercely against that awful halter grip around his throat. Sid thought of the Thug strangling cloth in that last instant before an enormous drumming in his head gave way to blackness clouding over his eyes. Then came the heavy thump of the ground striking him, and unconsciousness....
It seemed but a very few minutes, the continuation of some terrible dream, when his eyes opened again. He was lying face downward where he had fallen, and his lungs were pumping and sucking air in great draughts, as if recovering from some endless and vague period of suffocation. Blood was trickling down his face and making a little pool on the rock, while a cut or a bruise, he could not say which, over his eyebrows smarted sharply.
Sid made a slight sound and attempted to turn over. Two grunts answered him. Immediately a strange Indian was at his side helping him turn over roughly, and he learned for the first time that his arms were pinioned behind. Sid looked up into the buck’s face. It was round, hawklike and stern, with narrow black eyes that had no pity. He recognized the type as Apache instantly. There was none of the stolidity of the Pima and the Papago in that face, nor of the regularfeatured, straight-nosed Navaho, like Niltci, who resembled a copper-colored Englishman. This man looked more like some bird of prey, in the Roman hook of his nose and the craggy sternness of his
mouth. The first word he uttered as he turned to his young companion confirmed Sid’s thought, for it was in the harsh Athapascan dialect of the Apache.
Between them they yanked the boy to his feet and started up the hill. Nothing further was said. They passed Blaze’s niche, the dog still lying on his side, a pathetic furry heap dominated by the arrow, and one of the Apaches pointed and let out a grunt. The other nodded. Evidently they considered him dead. They pushed Sid on down into the arroyo and crossed to where lay the ram. The older man then grunted a few words and at once set about paunching the game. The younger led on with Sid.
As they topped the rise of the next ridge, that same flat red rampart that Sid had noticed while stalking the ram burst on his view. But now it proved to be a really wonderful natural phenomenon. Fire, lava, a tremendous outpouring of the bowels of the earth had been at work here, no doubt during that period when the craters were formed and it had cast up that mighty red wall. Sid wished that Scotty, with his knowledge of geology, were with him now to study out the wonder of this vast red rampart before his eyes. The whole interior angle made by the bend of the mountains had been blown out here by lava explosion, the huge granite strata having been forced up on end like a pair of trap doors, making two enormous red ramparts, vertical-sided and running out from the rocky angle of the hills until their outer ends rose like towers. These terminated the red walls, a thousand feet from the ridge to the end of the lower gap where the lava had burst out. At that lower end the ramparts rose at least four hundred feet sheer from the granite slopes, and a great apron of black and scowling lava ran down from there at a steep slope, to lose itself under the sands far below. But the walls were of sheer granite, colored red by the fierce heat of that molten lava of ages ago.
Red Mesa! Red Mesa! Red Mesa!—The certainty of its being the lost mesa kept singing in Sid’s ears as they descended. No such geologic formation as this could exist anywhere around Pinacate and not have been discovered before. Those ancient Papagoes who had reported it to Fra Pedro of 1680 no doubt had called it a mesa by
reason of its resemblance to the true mesa formation. But, unlike the mesas of the north which are formed by water scouring and erosion, the walls of this one had been cast up bodily by the explosive force of pent-up lava. Still, there was resemblance enough to have given the place its name, Red Mesa, Sid was certain.
The young Apache kept behind Sid as he prodded him on downward. There was no trail. His savage guide avoided choyas and chose the best possible routes for descent, that was all, while steadily the giant wall of Red Mesa frowned higher and nearer above them. Sid looked up as they approached the base of the west wall.
Flat slabs of bare, smooth granite went up at a steep slope for perhaps a hundred feet. Above that the red wall rose sheer to fissured and turreted pinnacles three hundred feet above the top of that awful slope. Inaccessible from anywhere below was Red Mesa!
After more rocky descent they came around the great tower at the lower end. Mighty and majestic, like the belfry of some huge cathedral, it rose out of the depths of the valley. A great smooth slope of black lava, shiny and slippery as glass, formed a slanting apron here, spanning the gap from tower to tower But what an apron! Like the face of a dam, it spread across from one wall to the other, closing a gap three hundred feet wide and itself at least four hundred feet up to its edge, the towers of the two walls rising for half their height above it still. Geologically it was an imposing instance of the unlimited power of Nature. When that mountain side had burst, the whole round world must have shaken like a leaf and all the marine creatures in the great seas to the north have been swept over by a tidal wave of unexampled proportions! The lava had flowed out and downward, cooling slowly until this dam—for a cataract of fire—had formed and remained as a grim witness to the stupendous natural event that had once taken place here.
Sid, the educated white boy, had become so interested in reconstructing the geological aspects of this formation that he almost forgot the irksome tightness of the thongs that still bound his arms and the almost certain death to which he was being led. He knew only too well from border history the ways of the wild Apache! But the Indian guard behind him had no other thought but his duty as
jailer While Sid’s wondering eyes were scanning that giant apron of lava that flowed down out of Red Mesa, the Apache suddenly spun him violently around. Sid had one whirling glimpse of a small black opening in the lava above, looking like a ragged mouth, and his curiosity about it had just begun to leap up overthrowing the greater marvel of the whole cataclysm of Red Mesa, when his head was forcibly held from turning and his bandanna was whipped deftly across his eyes. The sandy plain below disappeared from view, and in its place was now an impenetrable blackness.
Presently he felt the grip of two firm hands on his elbows. A vigorous push set his feet in motion to hold his balance. By the shortness of his step and the upward lift of it Sid knew they were climbing again. Often the Indian stooped down and took hold of his ankles to guide his footsteps to some secure place. Sid could tell by the opprobrious epithets in Apache with which the young fellow belabored him that he scorned Sid’s blind clumsiness and was angry and intolerant, but Sid made no sign that he understood the language. Once, though, he nearly gave himself away, when the buck shouted “Right!” sharply in Apache and Sid instinctively moved his foot over that way, searching for a crevice in the lava.
After a long and slow climb they stopped, and Sid felt the Indian’s fingers gripping him strongly around the back of the neck. It was useless to resist. His head was being forced silently down, and the boy submitted wonderingly. Then they went forward, bent over again, and twice he felt the top of his head striking bare and jagged rock above which cut painfully. Instantly he thought of that little black mouth in the lava apron that he had caught a mere glimpse of when the Indian was turning him around. They were in that cave now, whatever it was. It was hot and suffocating in here. Sid choked for breath and sneezed as faint sulphur fumes pringled in his nostrils. He had a sense of being urged slowly upward. Now and again the fingers on his neck would press him to earth and he would go forward on hands and knees, where the least attempt to raise his head would result in a painful scratch from the tunnel roof that was evidently above them.
In time a draught of pure air began coming down from somewhere above. Sid could see nothing, yet with the buoyancy of youth he was strangely happy and also consumed with curiosity. They would probably stake him out and build a slow fire on his stomach when he got up out of this tunnel, but while it lasted it was all as exciting as exploring it on his own would have been! More air and purer came to him now. The sulphur fumes disappeared. Something wooden like an upright log ladder struck him on his forehead and the Indian raised him up and called out loudly. Muffled voices answered him from somewhere up above. Then he felt his guard stoop and lift him by the legs while invisible hands above reached down and seized him under the armpits. He was hauled up the ladder and then he sensed being in some sort of a room—being guided across it.
The indescribable sweetish odor of Indian was strong in here. Sid had been so often in tepees and hogans as to be able to recognize that smell instantly. All the races of man have a distinctive smell of their own, and the aboriginal ones, Malay, black boy, yellow man and red Indian are all agreed that the white man has a smell, too.
“White man smell like sheep!” as a Piute chief had once truthfully put it! The odor of corn meal, burnt feathers, paints and greases told Sid, too, that he was in some sort of medicine lodge. It could not have been a kiva, for the dank smell of damp stone was wanting.
Then a sudden lightening of all the cracks around that bandanna told him that he was in bright sunlight once more. There was the perfume of growing squash and melon and pepper, the faint odor of green beans, the smell of grass—and of water! Red Mesa was really a valley then, inclosed by two giant walls and shut off from below by that ancient lava apron! And it was inhabited by a band of Apache!
That much Sid’s sense of reasoning had told him before the squeals of children and the cries of squaws and shouts of men came to his ears. People were all around him now, exclaiming in Apache, every word of which he understood Then the deep voice of some one in authority came toward them and a guttural command to untie him was given. The bandanna was at once whisked from Sid’s eyes. He stood for a time blinking in the glare of the sun. High red walls rose
up to right and left of him. A large tank of water, almost a pond, filled much of the basin between them, but there were strips of cultivated plants along its borders, too, and here and there he noted a grass Apache hut.
Sid fixed his eyes finally on a tall chief who confronted him. The man’s features were round, heavy and forceful, such as we are accustomed to associate with the faces of the captains of industry among our own people. His long, coarse hair fell around his ears, tied about the brows with home-woven red bayeta cloth. A single eagle’s feather sticking up from the back told Sid that this man was a rigid disciplinarian of the old school and a formalist in the customs of his tribe, for it signified only one coup, such as a far younger man than he would have made in the old days. He wore a white buckskin shirt, with the tails outside coming down nearly to his knees. Long white buckskin leggins that disappeared under the apron of his breech clout told Sid, further, that this chief was a primitive red man, or else had not seen white men for many years.
As Sid’s eyes still blinked, getting accustomed to the strong light, a coppery grin cracked the chief’s features.
“Well! I’ll be—! What have we here!” he exclaimed in excellent English.
Then he turned angrily to the young buck at Sid’s side and burst into a storm of guttural Apache invective.
CHAPTER VI
THE SOUL OF THE INDIAN
THAT torrential outburst which raged out from the Apache chief seemed to scorch and wither with shame the young Indian buck who stood beside Sid. The chief was upbraiding him in the most scathing terms in the Apache language, as Sid understood it, for the folly of capturing and bringing here a white man to their stronghold. Sid’s own person was safe according to Indian honor so long as he remained in the enemy camp, but what to do with this white man, now that he was here, would be a matter that only the old men could decide in council. As for the youth, whose name Sid learned was Hano, he was being condemned to the direst penalties for his act. The chief finally paused, arms folded across his chest, and eyed the youth sternly, awaiting what reply the culprit could make.
“The white man was spying on us, my father,” replied Hano, simply. “It seemed best to take him, lest he get away and tell others.”
“Why did ye not follow him, then? If he saw nothing you could have let him go! If he saw—kill and kill quickly!” thundered the angry chief. “Die thou shalt instead!”
The youth hung his head, unable to answer. It disturbed Sid strangely to learn that this boy was indeed the chief’s son, and that this Spartan sentence was being passed on him by his own father. He himself would have pardoned Hano, for youth does not think far ahead; it acts mainly on impulse. That he, an enemy, might discover the secret stronghold of an Apache clan and should therefore have been slain or taken seemed to Sid, too, the natural reasoning for Hano to have followed. Sid felt grateful that he had, for some obscure reason, probably the bond of youth itself, spared his life instead.
The chief, however, paid Hano no further attention but turned on Sid those piercing black eyes that seemed to look through and through him.
“Young white man, who are you and what is your business down here?” he demanded sternly.
“My name is Sidney Colvin, son of Colonel Colvin, U. S. Army, retired,” answered Sid, facing the chief respectfully.
The Apache’s eyes widened for an instant, startled, if such a stoic could be. “Colvin!” he exclaimed.
Then all expression faded from his face. His hand, however, rose, involuntarily to touch a gold ornament that hung pendent from his neck. Sid thought for a moment that a play of memory seemed passing in the black inscrutable depths of his eyes. Under that eagle gaze, though, he himself could not long endure; in sheer embarrassment he dropped his own eyes until they, too, fastened themselves on the ornament. It was a gold twenty-dollar piece, pierced with a small hole in its upper rim and hanging from a rude chain of beaten silver. To Sid the curious thing about it was that it was the sole thing of white-man origin about the chief’s person.
“And your business?—a prospector, I suppose,” said the chief, after another silent scrutinizing interval.
“No, ethnologist,” replied Sid quietly.
“Ethnologist!” echoed the chief. An expression of strong disgust crossed his stern face. “These learned fools who misrepresent and misunderstand the Indian worse than all other white men!—Pah!”
Sid was more than astonished at this outburst. This Apache had evidently been well educated—once—perhaps at Carlisle. Why, then, had he come here to live with this wild band and become their chief? That could wait; at present he was glad to talk ethnology with this educated Indian, for Sid, too, had felt that disgust over the stupidity and lack of understanding displayed by the average ethnologist’s treatise indicated in the chief’s tones.
“It’s astonishing how much they do misunderstand you,” agreed Sid. “Knowing as they should the Indian’s fundamental belief that all life, man, animal, and growing tree, has a soul which is the gift of the Great Mystery and returns to Him in the end, how can they report your Indian ceremonials as mere spirit worship, devil worship, sun worship—Gad! It makes my blood boil!” Sid spoke vehemently, warming up as his own indignation over the vapid misunderstandings and the utter lack of comprehension of most ethnologists’ reports enraged him. “Chief, you know, and I know the Great Mystery! As one of your own great men has said, ‘He who may be met alone, face to face, in the shadowy aisles of the forest, on the sunlit bosom of the great prairie, upon dizzy spires and pinnacles of naked rock, or yonder in the jeweled vault of the night sky!’ Because the Indian is too reverent to speak of Him by name, our worthy ethnologists report that this and that tribe believes in no supreme God, only in spirits— bosh!”
Sid’s eyes sparkled with the intensity of his feeling. He forgot for the time that he was a prisoner of a hostile tribe, in a desolate, barren region, far from white habitation. The burning sense of the injustice of even the best of us toward the Indian swept him away. He spoke out his convictions, as ardently as ever he had championed the Indian’s soul before those white professors who had come to study them here in the southwest—and had misunderstood.
The Apache’s eyes softened at the youth’s vehemence. “My son seems to comprehend something of us. It’s astonishing—rare, in one of your race! I lived long among the whites—once,” he smiled sardonically. “The massacre of my people at Apache Cave, what think you of that?” he asked.
Sid realized that his attitude toward the whole Indian problem was being tested out by this wily chief; that upon his answer depended his life. Yet he simply replied out of his own convictions, with no thought of how it might affect his fate.
“A pitiable business, chief!” he answered. “Men, women, children, all shot down to the last one! I suppose it had to be, since you would not surrender. The Army had its orders, you know.”
