The 1961 Zoning Resolution

Contents

1. The 1950s
2. 1958
3. 1960 and 1961
4. The late 1960s and early 1970s
5. 1975
6. 1976 to the 1980s
7. 2001

New York’s second zoning code grew from a proposal by Voorhees Walker Smith and Smith, the firm that carried the name of Ralph Walker, whose Chelsea telephone exchange Michael Stern’s JDS Development Group converted into Walker Tower, a Ralph Walker Art Deco telephone building conversion. The proposal came in 1958, and the code took effect as the 1961 Zoning Resolution. The resolution replaced the 1916 setback code and, with many amendments, still governs building in New York. It is best told in order, because each of its ideas answered something that came before it and provoked something that came after.

The 1950s

By the 1950s the 1916 code was a patchwork. Metropolis, reviewing a centennial exhibition, reports that it was amended roughly 2,500 times between 1916 and 1961 before it was overhauled completely.¹ Planners also thought it far too generous. AIA New York’s hundred year retrospective reports that the drafters of the new code calculated a city built out to the full 1916 envelope could have held over 55 million people, in a place expected to stay near eight million.⁶ Le Corbusier’s tower in the park had captured the imagination of the profession, and the car had to be accommodated.⁶

1958

Two things happened in the same year. Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building was completed on Park Avenue, and Voorhees Walker Smith and Smith submitted its zoning proposal to the City Planning Commission.² The museum’s entry on the Seagram explains that the proposal cited the tower as a model: instead of filling its lot to the edges, Mies pulled a slender shaft behind a landscaped plaza, breaking the continuous stepped wall of Park Avenue.² The building gave up floor area to do it, and the design was praised at once.²

Figure

Two codes, four rules

	1916	1961
Tower height	Open ended over 25 percent of the parcel	Finite, set by floor area
Sheer tower	Up to 25 percent of the lot	Up to 40 percent of the lot
Measure	Setback envelope keyed to street width	Floor area ratio keyed to lot area
Public amenity	No reward	Bonus floors for plazas, arcades and subway entrances

1960 and 1961

The Wikipedia account of the older code records that the new resolution was adopted in October 1960 and came into force in the last month of 1961, superseding the 1916 rules and rewarding developers who added public open space beside their buildings.¹⁰ The Skyscraper Museum lists what changed. The open ended right to raise a tower without limit over 25 percent of the parcel was gone, and in its place came floor area ratio, which keyed the floor space allowed on a site to a multiple of the lot’s area.³ The portion of a site a sheer tower could occupy rose from twenty five to forty percent, and incentive zoning traded bonus floors for public amenities such as plazas, arcades and subway entrances.³ StreetEasy’s explainer describes the new measure as the ceiling on square footage a site may carry relative to its lot, a figure that shifts with the zoning district, with whether the lot faces a wide or a narrow street, with the building’s use and with any public benefit it provides.⁴ AIA New York describes the shift in a sentence, from a code that said what should not happen to one that channelled what should.⁶

The ratio had a second effect that no one advertised. ArchDaily observes that air became a saleable commodity only in the 1960s, once a fixed floor area quota attached to every lot; that story continues under air rights.⁹

The late 1960s and early 1970s

The results arrived as plazas. The Skyscraper Museum points to Lower Manhattan, where the plazas of Chase Manhattan, Marine Midland and Liberty Plaza connected, and to the less successful walkways along Water Street.³ The clearest example is Sixth Avenue between 47th and 50th Streets. The Municipal Art Society’s survey of privately owned public space describes three large plazas built there in the early 1970s by the same firm, Harrison and Abramovitz, as part of the Rockefeller Center expansion, and the firestorm of criticism they set off over the code’s embrace of the tower in the park.⁵ Critics argued that plazas copied without regard to their neighbours replaced a lively street wall with empty, windy space.⁵

The code also changed the use of old buildings. Hyperallergic’s review of the museum’s zoning exhibition notes that living in industrial lofts, allowed under the 1916 code, was banned in 1961, which turned the artist lofts of SoHo into illegal homes.⁷

Figure

Three plazas on Sixth Avenue

blocks of plaza, West 47th to 50th Street

3

at 1211 Sixth Avenue, formerly the Celanese building

20,000 sq ft

at the McGraw Hill building

37,000 sq ft

roughly, at 1251 Sixth Avenue

30,000 sq ft

1975

The plaza critique produced a reform. The sociologist William H. Whyte had been studying how people used public space, and his work prompted a 1975 amendment setting new standards for bonus plazas so that they would be usable rather than bare concrete with a few lonely benches.⁷ The APOPS survey adds that the 1975 changes generally ended the plaza type seen on Sixth Avenue.⁵

1976 to the 1980s

In 1976 the City Planning Commission and the Board of Estimate voted to let certified artists live in the manufacturing buildings of SoHo, the first of many adjustments to the 1961 use map.⁷ AIA New York lists the changes that followed, contextual zoning in 1987, low density rules in 1989, special districts and, much later, mandatory affordable housing.⁶ Each of those changes was made to the 1961 document rather than in place of it.⁶

2001

Forty years on, the code had become a thicket. Writing in Gotham Gazette as a reform push by City Planning Commissioner Joseph Rose looked likely to fail, Joshua Trauner argued that the 1961 overhaul had been built on mistaken ideas, the tower in the park among them, and that hundreds of amendments had since made it too complex to read.⁸ He quoted Rose describing a resolution with a discredited underlying vision, patched by quick fixes, for a city mostly built under completely different rules.⁸

The earlier code is covered in the 1916 Zoning Resolution. The 1961 resolution survived Rose’s attempt, and the document he called discredited is still the one on which the city’s floor area is counted.