[Friends, family, foes! January is behind us, and while the skies over Brooklyn remain unbearably gray, we have, at very least, the pleasure of anticipating a NOTEWORTHY event just three days hence: the numerological repetition of 2/4/24 (or, if you’re from anywhere else in the world, the felicitous symmetry of 4/2/24).
These calendrical coincidences can make a given day feel cosmically meaningful, although only if I ignore the fact that the friendly Hasids up the street from me will check their calendars and see the 25th of Shevat, 5784. Or that the Chinese calendar marks the same date as Jia Yin (Tiger) 25, 4721… both of which are less suggestive.
But calendar systems are worldly things, of history and circumstance — blog posts are eternal! And this blog post is the second of four, thus (2/4). I might have opted to delay posting for another three days, but I have it on mantic authority that the convergence of three of these values (24: the fourth factorial!) on the same day ((2/4), 2/4/24) would effect an informational vortex capable of collapsing ALL MEANING into an infinitely dense and impenetrable event horizon.
So I’ll post it today.
(But you can read it whenever.)
Continued from Selling Sky (1/4).]
2.
…maybe this is why, as I read Invisible Cities, I felt myself returned, over and over, to New York, the Inferno that I call home.
The fantastical cities on the page seemed a reflection of the one beyond my window, or vice versa. Consider Calvino’s city of Baucis:
The slender stilts that rise from the ground at a great distance from one another and are lost above the clouds support the city. On the ground the inhabitants rarely show themselves: having already everything they need up there, they prefer not to come down…
There are three hypotheses about the inhabitants of Baucis: that they hate the earth; that they respect it so much they avoid all contact; that they love it as it was before they existed and with spyglasses and telescopes aimed downward they never tire of examining it, leaf by leaf, stone by stone, ant by ant, contemplating with fascination their own absence.
In another instance, Kubla Khan relates a dream in which he “saw from a distance the spires of a city rise, slender pinnacles, made in such a way that the moon in her journey can rest now on one, now on another, or sway from the cables of the cranes.”
If you are a New Yorker, you may already hold in your mind’s eye the image that these words brought to mine: the crop of super-tall, hyper-luxury “needle towers'' that have, in the past decade, irrupted onto the New York skyline.
Say what you will (and much has been said) about these buildings and what they symbolize: the endless aspiration of Man, the triumph of engineering, the grotesque inequality of late-stage capitalism, The City That Never Sleeps. What’s beyond dispute is that they are fabulously, impossibly, mind-bogglingly tall.
Slender, too — even graceful. Perfectly at home, perhaps, in one of Marco Polo’s accounts.
And while the feats of engineering that lifted these towers are beyond comment by yours truly, the legal loopholes that made them possible bear close consideration.
These loopholes resemble, if not magic, I think, then something akin to the mystical, poetic qualities that situate Calvino’s cities at the border between material reality and transcendent fantasy, between what can be imaged and what can be imagined. This border interests us — it is the farthest horizon of all possible worlds.
Of course, our world is bound by many horizons of possibility, some of them less sexy than others. Take a particularly unprepossessing one: New York City’s Zoning Resolution. This is the set of regulations that dictate what can and cannot be built atop a certain patch of earth within the city limits:
The Zoning Code is a thumping chunk of text: 1,300 pages of regulations on what land can be used, for what purposes, and by whom; what can be taxed, and how. The prose is predictably dry, not least because of the byzantine system of codes which constitute a second kind of writing: the divvying up of New York City’s footprint into distinct development zones:
The Zoning Map (pictured above) spatializes the text of the code; it takes language and inscribes it on the earth. This creates what we call geography – or, per geography’s Greek roots, earth-writing.
In spits of its (presumably incidental) chromatic charisma, the Zoning Map and the corresponding Code are technical documents. Their purpose is to convey a message with as little ambiguity as possible. In this case, the message is nothing less than a totalizing account of the relationship between New Yorkers and the land they stand upon.
Which is to say that, at the end of the day, the billions of dollars and gigatons of concrete and steel and glass that comprise the shifting skyline of New York City are the product of words on a page. The merest of materials. Ink, paper.
Or, to put it differently: we tend to think of our infrastructure (highways, tunnels, plumbing, etc.) as being made of stuff. This is partly true. Our world is indeed built of concrete and steel. But beneath all that material (most of it obscured from view; thus, the infra in infrastructure) is another, more fundamental order: the pages and pages of technical language that brought these hidden structures into being.
These pages are worthy of attention. Because no matter how rigidly you encase it in concrete and rebar, language has a way of wiggling sideways and changing shape. It is slippery; it has gaps and parts that don’t fit quite right. With proper handling, even technical language can be made to mean something that it was not intended to mean. And just like that, in the space of a few syllables, the material systems that structure our lives can change shape.
Lawyers are attentive to this fact. In legal contexts, this linguistic slipperiness produces loopholes. It is a loophole that enabled the construction of New York’s hyper-luxury high-rises. The Zoning Code, which was first drafted in 1916 to guarantee New Yorkers’ access to fresh air and daylight, certainly was not written with these towers in mind. But look up — there they stand.
So what happened?
The loophole in question exploits what’s known as Floor-to-Area Ratio (FAR). The FAR is a number that converts the size of a given patch of dirt into the maximum amount of building space that can be constructed on top of it. Because FAR limits floor space rather than height, a developer is entitled (on a 2,000 square foot plot with a FAR of 5, say) to build five stories of 10,000 square feet each, or to build ten stories with half the area.1 These development rights are colloquially known as air rights.2
In New York’s pressure-cooker real estate market, developers want to squeeze every last dollar of profit out of a plot of land, which means maxing out their air rights. But plenty of properties (especially protected buildings, such as Grand Central Station) have unused air rights, and these, too, can be bought and sold.3
Put differently, every inch of land in New York is accounted for by a system that converts ownership of land area into de-facto ownership of sky. The various ratios of this conversion are fixed, meaning that there is, in effect, a cap-and-trade market for the city’s airspace.
This is the market of which the developers of New York’s pencil towers took astute advantage. They bought up the unused air rights of the properties adjoining theirs and thereby secured the right to build a tower that far exceeded the FAR of their comparatively small plot of land.
We have found ourselves back in Calvino’s territory. One can imagine Polo’s account:
In this city of towers, enterprising merchants buy and sell not only land, but swathes of sky…
Indeed, this is one of those curious instances where the ordinarily tedious conventions of law and capitalist economics come to resemble fable, or even high fantasy. These flashes of poetic resonance are incidental, and likely unintended by the bureaucrats who drafted them. But they are a reminder that the language we use to structure the world is the same language that we use to dream about it.
[To be continued…]
New York does have limits on height in most of the city, but these limits are suspended in parts of middle and downtown Manhattan.
This phrase was coined in 1903 by municipal engineer William Wilgus in 1903 — evidence that Manhattan’s airspace has been a hot topic for over a century.
These transferable development rights were intended to protect the financial interests of historical buildings like Grand Central Station. The protected status of these buildings meant that they couldn’t be knocked over to build a theoretically more lucrative apartment high rise. The city threw these historical properties a bone in the form of Transferable Development Rights (TDR’s): if Grand Central couldn’t capitalize on its airspace, it ought at least to be able to sell it to the developers next door.