The Dynamics of Subcenter Formation: Midtown Manhattan, 1861-1906

Midtown Manhattan is the largest business district in the country. Yet only a few miles to the south is another district centered at Wall Street. This paper aims to understand when and why midtown emerged. We have created a new data set from historical New York City directories that provide the employment location, residence and job for several thousand residents in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We supplement this with data from historical business directories. The data allow us to describe how, when and why midtown emerged as a center of commerce. We find that midtown arose because of economies of scale related to shopping, rather than congestion in lower Manhattan or wage differentials across the city. Specifically, the evidence suggests that firms moved to midtown to be near retail businesses and other commercial activity in order to be closer to customers, who had been moving north on the island throughout the 19th century. Once several industries moved from lower Manhattan it triggered a spatial equilibrium readjustment in the 1880s, which then promoted the rise of skyscrapers in midtown around the turn of the 20th century, several years before the opening of Grand Central Station in 1913.