After living in NYC for a few years now, I continue to be amazed how the skyline still manages to change year after year with the addition of new major skyscrapers. For context, I have seen three of the top five tallest towers (Central Park Tower, Steinway Tower, One Vanderbilt) finish construction. I also developed a habit in looking up the architect for any major skyscraper that I would come across.
Given this fascination, I was curious in exploring more into the history of skyscraper construction in NYC and seeing which architects played a major role in developing this city. To answer this, I luckily stumbled upon Skyscraper Page which contains all the information I was interested in about a skyscraper which includes building name, address, construction year, number of floors, and architect. After webscraping all this information for each built skyscraper in NYC and following this with some necessary data cleaning, here are some of the observations I found from the figures I generated below from the dataset:
- The construction of NYC skyscrapers (total of ~6200) follows a bimodal distribution where we see that a good majority of these buildings were constructed in the 1920s and 1960s, which coincides with the construction booms during the Roaring Twenties and post-WWII, respectively
- The average number of floors of newly built skyscrapers noticeably jumps in the 1930s, from 16.6 in the 1920s to 20.3 floors, and then decreases significantly to 14.7 in the 1940s. Guess which iconic building may have contributed to this spike?
- Emery Roth & Sons is the clear leading architect in NYC by a significant margin, measured through the number of skyscrapers they designed (some notable buildings include the Metlife building and the El Dorado building by Central Park)
- Only five of the top twenty architects I considered for this analysis have a building that has been completed in the last 10 years (Kondylis, SLCE, SOM, Davis Brody Bond, Emery Roth & Sons), and all of these firms have been designing buildings in NYC for some time
- Newer skyscrapers tend to be taller, given the negative correlation between a skyscraper’s age and its height, which can be attributed to innovations in skyscraper technology. This was also foreshadowed by the previous figure where see the shift towards constructing taller buildings starting in the 1960s
- Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) tops the list when calculating the average height of buildings in one’s porfolio, which should come as no surprise if you’re familiar with the tallest skyscrapers in the world (SOM designed One World Trade Center, the tallest building in NYC)
What other interesting observations can you see? (For interactive versions of these figures, click here)
Following the previous analysis of skyscrapers in NYC, I was also curious in the composition of apartment buildings in NYC. Therefore, I webscraped apartment details from NYBits which include the name of the apartment building, the type of apartment (condo, coop, rental), borough and neighborhood it was located in, number of floors, number of units, and a short description of the apartment. This description would usually describe the apartment as a low/mid/high-rise building, the amenities it included, as well as mentioning if the apartment building was considered a landmark by the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission.
Here are some of my key observations:
- Around 75% of apartment buildings in NYC are low-rises, which confirms my belief that the quintessential NYC apartment is the walk-up apartment
- While low-rise apartments make up the majority of apartments in each borough, I was surprised to find that the Bronx has almost an equal distribution between low-rises and mid/high-rises
- Almost half (41%) of low-rise apartments are buildings where each floor consists of one unit or the entire building constitutes as one unit! Since I live in a low-rise apartment where there are multiple units per floor, I thought this was the norm
- The neighborhoods that are usually the most desirable to live in (West Village, Brooklyn Heights, etc) happen to be the neighborhoods that have the highest percentage of apartments that are considered landmarks!
Which neighborhood/borough and type of apartment building would you want to live in?
How does the urban fabric of New York City align with its residential population?
To visualize this, I used high-resolution spatial data on built-up volume and population from the Global Human Settlement Layer (GHSL) from the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, which was overlaid with the Primary Land Use Tax Lot Output (PLUTO) map from the NYC Department of City Planning.
Based off the maps of the residential population, NYC evidently has a high population density with the possible exception of Staten Island and the outskirts of Queens towards Long Island. It is also interesting to see how Midtown (right below Central Park) can easily be located given its low population density in Manhattan despite being highly developed, as seen in the maps of the level of building construction. With this information, would this influence where you would plan to live in the city?