The Five Boroughs: Physical Scale and Form, 1989–2001

The Configuration

Five boroughs. Four geographic conditions. Manhattan and Staten Island were islands; Brooklyn and Queens were the westernmost counties of Long Island; the Bronx was the mainland, contiguous with Westchester County to its north and separated from Manhattan only by the Harlem River, a tidal strait narrow enough to be bridged many times over and crossed by foot, car, and train. The political consolidation that produced the city in its modern form happened on January 1, 1898, when Greater New York absorbed Brooklyn — then the fourth-largest city in the United States — along with the Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island into a single municipality with Manhattan.¹ The geographic logic of the five land-pieces was not redrawn. The political envelope was.

The numbers that resulted were not intuitive. Manhattan — the borough that most visitors meant when they said “New York” — was the smallest: 22.83 square miles.² Queens was nearly five times larger, at 108.53 square miles. Brooklyn, at 70.82, was larger than Manhattan and Staten Island combined. The Bronx ran to 42.10. Staten Island, at 58.37, was the third-largest borough that almost no one from the other four thought of in those terms. Together they added up to 302.6 square miles, roughly the footprint of Berlin — a comparison that would mean something to a German reader and almost nothing to a Manhattanite who had not left the island in a month.

For a reader oriented to European cities, the proportions required adjustment. Manhattan was slightly larger than the City of London, the borough of Westminster, and the London Borough of Camden combined — but smaller than inner Berlin. The Bronx was about the size of Munich’s central districts. Brooklyn was comparable to inner Hamburg in area and considerably more populous. Queens was larger than the city of Frankfurt. Staten Island was roughly the area of Bremen. A character moving from the Bronx to Brooklyn had crossed a distance comparable to crossing Greater London; the subway flattened this into a forty-minute ride, which made the geography easier to ignore than to absorb.

By 2000, the Census counted 8,008,278.³ The city had grown by nearly 700,000 people in a decade, with every borough gaining. The physical boundaries had not moved. It was not, in the obvious sense, an island city.

Manhattan, a Strip Two Miles Wide

The working dimensions of Manhattan were simpler than the borough’s reputation suggested. The island ran roughly 13.4 miles from the Battery at its southern tip to Marble Hill at the Harlem River in the north. Its maximum width was approximately 2.3 miles, near 14th Street; north of 96th Street the island narrowed, and at the Harlem River bridges it was at its slimmest.⁴ The total land area was 22.83 square miles — less than a quarter of Brooklyn’s.

Eric W. Sanderson’s Mannahatta reconstructed the island’s pre-grid topography from the 1782 British Headquarters Map cross-referenced with the 1811 Randel survey and other historical records: dozens of streams, 573 hills, and a terrain that the grid of 1811 would cover or flatten almost entirely.⁴ By 1989, what remained of that original landscape was mostly in Central Park, which occupied a rectangle two and a half miles long by a half-mile wide between 59th and 110th Streets — a green interruption running down the spine of the upper island.

The practical geometry of a magazine office in Midtown was this: a desk at Madison Avenue and 52nd Street was six minutes’ walk west to Sixth Avenue, four minutes east to Park, two minutes east to Fifth. An editor who crossed the island at lunch and returned was back at her desk in twenty minutes. North-south distances were the ones that required a subway. The 1 train from South Ferry to 242nd Street covered the full length of the island in just over an hour.

A non-resident who learned the city from Manhattan first absorbed a wrong scale. The other four boroughs were larger, sometimes much larger. Queens alone was nearly five times Manhattan’s area. To mistake Manhattan for the city was a comprehensible error — the density of the place, the concentration of its institutions — but it was still an error. A strip, not a region.

The Grid

In 1811, three commissioners appointed by the New York State Legislature imposed a grid on the undeveloped land above Houston Street. The plan called for twelve numbered avenues running north-south and 155 numbered streets running east-west, surveyed and plotted with no particular regard for topography.⁵ Hilary Ballon’s The Greatest Grid documents the commissioners’ stated reasoning — drainage, speculative subdivision, the rectangular city as administrative form — and their indifference to the hills and streams below their lines. The hills were leveled. The streams were buried. The grid arrived.

Below Houston Street, the colonial pattern persisted. Greenwich Village, SoHo, Tribeca, and the Financial District were laid out before the commissioners acted, and they showed it. Bleecker Street crossed Sixth Avenue twice. West Fourth Street crossed West Tenth. A non-resident navigating below 14th Street without local knowledge gave up within a block.

Above 14th, the grid mostly worked. The walking-pace arithmetic was learnable: twenty north-south blocks to the mile, three east-west long blocks between avenues to the mile. Fifth Avenue divided East and West. The address algorithm for avenue numbers required a conversion table, which appeared on the inside front cover of every Hagstrom map and on the back of no other document in common circulation. Old New Yorkers carried the table in their heads.

The avenue renames added a layer. Sixth Avenue had been officially the Avenue of the Americas since 1945; no New Yorker used that name. Above 59th Street, Ninth Avenue became Columbus, Tenth became Amsterdam, Eleventh became West End. Above 110th Street in West Harlem, Sixth became Lenox Avenue — also Malcolm X Boulevard since 1987 — while Seventh became Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard and Eighth became Frederick Douglass Boulevard.⁵ These names were not interchangeable in the neighborhoods where they applied. A senior editor who called Lenox Avenue “Sixth” uptown was marking herself as someone who had not been there.

The grid was the achievement and the limit.

Brooklyn and Queens, the End of Long Island

Brooklyn and Queens were, geologically, part of Long Island. The same terminal moraine of the Wisconsin glaciation that formed the ridge running through the center of Long Island ran under them as well. Their bedrock was not Manhattan’s schist. Their terrain — flatter, more continuous with the land to the east — reflected the difference. When a character crossed the East River from Manhattan into Brooklyn or Queens, she crossed not merely a borough line but a geologic boundary.

Together Brooklyn and Queens occupied 179.35 square miles — more than half the city’s total land area.² In 1990 they held 4,252,262 people, against Manhattan’s 1,487,536. More than three-fifths of New Yorkers lived east of the East River, in boroughs that shared a landmass with Nassau County and Suffolk County and eventually, a hundred miles east, with the Hamptons. The city’s demographic center of gravity was not on the island most people meant when they said “the city.”

The fixed links between Manhattan and the two eastern boroughs had been built in three phases. The Brooklyn Bridge opened in 1883; the Williamsburg and Manhattan Bridges followed in 1903 and 1909 respectively, along with the Queensboro at 59th Street.⁶ The tunnels came later: the Steinway Tunnel for the 7 train, the Queens-Midtown vehicular tunnel in 1940, the Brooklyn-Battery in 1950. Each crossing reduced the friction of the East River by a small increment without eliminating it. A senior editor at a Madison Avenue magazine was nine miles in a straight line from Flushing and twelve from Howard Beach. The subway compressed those distances into fifteen-minute and fifty-minute trips respectively. The geography did not compress.

Brooklyn’s street grid ran at its own angle to Manhattan’s, oriented to the compass as Brooklyn had been oriented before the consolidation. Queens’ grid was its own, laid out by nineteenth-century speculators in several separate surveys that did not align with one another. A character navigating by Manhattan instincts into either borough found the grid offering no guidance at the moment she expected it most.

The fact that Brooklyn and Queens were geologically Long Island — and not the same kind of land as Manhattan — was the sort of thing a non-resident learned and forgot and learned again. The western terminus of an island that ran east for another hundred miles.

The Bronx, the Only Mainland Borough

The Bronx was physically attached to the continental United States. To its north lay Westchester County, with no river between them. The Harlem River, a tidal strait, separated it from Manhattan to the south; the East River put it across from Queens to the southeast; the Hudson ran along its western flank as the boundary with New Jersey. But these were all crossable water. The Bronx’s northern edge was a land border, and what lay beyond it was the commuter suburbs — Yonkers, Mount Vernon, New Rochelle, Larchmont — connected by road and rail without a river crossing.²

In 1990, the Bronx held 1,203,789 people; by 2000, the figure was 1,332,650, a percentage increase higher than Brooklyn’s or Manhattan’s during the same period.³ The decade’s recovery was visible in the numbers before it was visible on the street.

The borough’s physical continuity with the mainland had practical consequences. The Bronx received cold fronts off the continental mass before any other borough. Meteorologically, winter arrived there first. The housing stock concentrated in Bedford Park, Riverdale, and the strips of the South Bronx that had survived the 1970s — the decade of arson, disinvestment, and abandonment that had left sections of the Morrisania and Hunts Point neighborhoods with more empty lots than buildings — was, in the surviving sections, pre-war construction, dense and tenement-scaled, not entirely unlike sections of upper Manhattan.

The Cross Bronx Expressway, Robert Moses’s east-west cut through the borough, had been built section by section between 1948 and 1963, demolishing neighborhoods in its path and accelerating the disinvestment that followed.⁷ By 1989 the expressway was a fact of the borough the way the Hudson was a fact: it was there, it had produced its consequences, and those consequences were the landscape. A Riverdale doorman crossing the Henry Hudson Bridge into Manhattan in the dark before dawn was crossing a river into a different borough, which was, for most intents, a different world. Not an island. But not entirely not one.

Staten Island, the Ferry Borough

Staten Island was the most physically separate borough. At 58.37 square miles it was the third-largest by area; at 378,977 people in 1990, growing to 443,728 by 2000, it was the smallest by population and growing faster than the city average.²³ The two facts together described a borough with room to expand into — a condition no other borough shared.

From Manhattan, Staten Island was reachable only by ferry. The Staten Island Ferry departed from the Whitehall Street terminal at the southern tip of Manhattan on a regular schedule and made the crossing to the St. George terminal on the island’s north shore in roughly twenty-five minutes, through the upper bay, past the Statue of Liberty, past Governors Island. The fare was a small one through much of the period — fifty cents each way — and was eliminated in the late 1990s, after which the crossing was free. The ride was used primarily by commuters and ignored by Manhattan residents with the categorical efficiency of all good things nearby.

From Brooklyn, the island was reachable only by the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, opened November 21, 1964 — a double-deck suspension span designed by Othmar Ammann and, at the time of its opening, the longest suspension bridge in the world.⁷ Robert A. Caro’s The Power Broker traces Moses’s pursuit of the crossing across three mayoral administrations and a succession of engineering proposals, as the project that closed the last gap in the borough system. The toll was collected from Brooklyn-bound traffic only through most of the period, a directional imbalance that shaped the routing of gypsy cabs servicing the island and the daily arithmetic of commuters who crossed it.

Politically and culturally, Staten Island was the most distinct borough. It leaned Republican through the period and was described by its own residents and by everyone else as suburban in character, a word that in the context of the five boroughs was not neutral. A borough crossed by water on every side, facing the continent, and arranged around a bridge it had waited until 1964 to receive.

The Bridges

Twenty-three bridges and tunnels connected the boroughs to one another, to the mainland, and to New Jersey. The system was the engineered correction to the geographic fact that the city was mostly water — a problem that had required eighty-one years to solve completely, from the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883 to the opening of the Verrazzano-Narrows in 1964.⁶

The crossings divided along a line that was both financial and political. Tolled crossings to New Jersey and Staten Island — the George Washington Bridge (1931), the Holland Tunnel (1927), the Lincoln Tunnel (1937), the Goethals Bridge (1928), the Bayonne Bridge (1931), the Outerbridge Crossing (1928), and the Verrazzano-Narrows — generated revenues that funded the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, the agency Robert Moses had built into the most powerful public authority in the state’s history.⁷ Tolled intra-city crossings — the Triborough itself (1936), the Bronx-Whitestone (1939), the Throgs Neck (1961), the Henry Hudson (1936), the Queens-Midtown Tunnel (1940), the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel (1950) — operated on the same principle: the toll funded the agency that collected the toll.

Free intra-city crossings were the older ones. The Brooklyn Bridge (1883), the Manhattan Bridge (1909), the Williamsburg Bridge (1903), and the Queensboro at 59th Street (1909) predated Moses’s authority and had never been made to pay for themselves in cash.⁶ The Harlem River bridges that stitched Manhattan to the Bronx — the Washington Bridge (1888), the University Heights Bridge (1908), the Madison Avenue Bridge (1910), the 145th Street Bridge (1905), Macombs Dam (1895), the Third Avenue Bridge (1898), the Willis Avenue Bridge (1901) — were municipal infrastructure of an older kind, built on the logic that the Bronx was part of the same city and its residents should be able to reach the rest of it without paying. The High Bridge of 1848, the city’s oldest standing bridge, had been closed to pedestrians since 1970 and remained closed throughout the period.

The George Washington Bridge carried more vehicle traffic than any other bridge in the world.⁶ Sharon Reier’s The Bridges of New York — published originally by Quadrant Press in 1977, reprinted by Dover in 2000 — was the standard reference for engineering specifications, opening dates, and reconstruction history. It was the kind of book kept on a shelf, not carried in a coat pocket.

The free-versus-tolled distinction was character-relevant in ways that did not announce themselves. A 1991 cab from Midtown Manhattan to LaGuardia Airport could go over the Triborough Bridge and pay the toll, or it could go up to the 59th Street Bridge — free — and work out to Queens from there, along the BQE, adding minutes to avoid the dollar-fifty. The driver made the calculation at 96th Street. The passenger noticed, or did not.

The bridges were the achievement that allowed the rest of the city to be habitable from any of the rest of it. The system was so successful that the geography it corrected became, for most New Yorkers, invisible. An engineered city.