Why did people in New York City build skyscrapers?

Answer 1

The buildings are tall in New York City because New York is a dense, or highly populated area. Think of it this way: If all the buildings in New York were short, not as many people could live and work there.

In addition, there are two reasons why Manhattan island has so many skyscrapers. Land is so expensive, it pays to buy a smaller piece of property and put up a really tall building.. And the critical point is that skyscrapers must have their foundations in solid rock, and that's just what Manhattan island is made of.

Answer 2

When you don't have enough space to expand the city outwards, you expand it upwards. Rather than building fifty 2-story buildings, which, with 4 apartments per floor, would house 400 families and take up, say, 3 square miles of space, you can build one 100-story building, which, with 4 apartments per floor, will also house 400 families, but will take up only 1/4 of a mile of space.

In densely populated areas like New York City, as soon as people had the technology, they began to build upwards, not outwards.

Answer 3

Nearly all the skyscrapers in New York City are in a single borough, Manhattan. Because Manhattan is on an island, it could not expand outwards the way cities usually do, it had to expand UPwards, and build more skyscrapers than anywhere else in the world.

Not only do about 1.6 million people live in Manhattan, but also about 1.9 million jobs are located there, because it is a world capital in dozens of areas from finance to fashion. About 300,000 jobs are held by people who live in Manhattan, so another 1.6 million people commute into Manhattan for work from other boroughs or the suburbs.

As if all those people crammed into an island of only 23 square miles were not enough, every weekday there are also hundreds of thousands of people each day on business trips to Manhattan, on recreation trips, attending school as a commuter, in the hospital, or in Manhattan for some other reason.

Urban planners estimate the total at about 3.9 million people per weekday, resulting in a density of about 170,000 people per square mile. No other city in the US, or even similarly sized portion of a city, has anything close to that density. Could some industries move elsewhere in NYC? Theoretically, yes. However, it takes much more time to travel between Manhattan and other boroughs than to get around Manhattan internally, and there's a certain prestige about being in Manhattan rather than anywhere else in the City.

Answer 4

because of all the tall buildings which reach high into the sky