Fermat's Library | A Long History of a Short Block: Four Centuries of Development Surprises on a Single Stretch of a New York City Street annotated/explained version.

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A Long History of a Short Block:

Four Centuries of Development Surprises on a Single Stretch of a New York

City Street

William Easterly (NYU)

Laura Freschi (NYU)

Steven Pennings (World Bank)

June 2016

Development economists usually (and understandably) evaluate effectiveness of intentional efforts to

achieve economic development. There are few opportunities empirically to appreciate the unintended and

surprising part of development outcomes portrayed by theories of creative destruction and other theories

of spontaneous general equilibrium outcomes not intended by anyone. This paper does a development

case study at an extreme micro level (one city block in New York City), but over a long period of time

(four centuries). We find that (i) development involves many changes in production as comparative

advantage evolves and (ii) most of these changes were unexpected (“surprises”). The block’s history

illustrates how difficult it is for overly prescriptive planners to anticipate changes in comparative

advantage and how such planning could instead stifle creative destruction.

I. Introduction

It is widely accepted that at least some important part of development outcomes are the spontaneous result

of a general equilibrium process, such as “creative destruction,” in which no single agent consciously

intended the final outcome. Kenneth Arrow suggested in a classic quote that "the notion that through the

workings of an entire system effects may be very different from, and even opposed to, intentions is surely

the most important intellectual contribution that economic thought has made to the general understanding

of social processes."

Yet there are few opportunities empirically to appreciate the unintended surprises that are part of

development histories. Research in economic development understandably focuses mostly on whether

intentional efforts to improve development outcomes are successful. Even historical case stud ie s of

economic development usually emphasize stories of nations in which most of the focus is on in tention al

policies by national leaders to achieve national development.

Seeking a way to appreciate spontaneous general equilibrium outcomes in development, we undertake a

drastic alternative: a case study of nearly 400 years of history of a single city block in New York City.

The block we study is 486 feet of a north-south street called Greene Street between Houston and Prince

Streets.

Today it is part of the luxury residential and retail neighborhood called SoHo in downtown

Manhattan (Figure 1). With a small unit like our block, we can see change initiated at the level of

individual households or firms that in turn make up sectors of economic activity. We see a pattern of

rapid change: new sectors replaced old ones while new households or businesses replaced their

predecessors. Most importantly, the changes were usually surprises (we list six surprises in total). For

example, from 1850 to 1890 the block suddenly went from a high-end residential neighborhood to New

York’s largest concentration of brothels, only to change just as suddenly to be part of the epicenter of

New York (and US) garment manufacturing. The surprises are not evenly spaced – there was about a

century and a half between the first and second surprise, after which they came much faster.

Figure 1: location of the block we study relative to Manhattan neighborhood s today

The small unit of analysis allows us to illustrate why surprises were prevalent. The shocks that affect the

block can vary from what is happening two blocks over to what is happening on the other side of the

world, interacting with trends that affect the world or the US or New York City, or other trends that are

specific to the neighborhood. Moreover, these shocks interact with initial conditions on the block.

Greene Street block for this study

a. Relationship to academic literature

A long development literature emphasizes Total Factor Productivity (TFP) growth driven by creative

destruction (e.g. Aghion and Howitt 1992). We can observe creative destruction most dramatically at the

level of small units that can show sudden ups and downs.

A more recent literature has also emphasized misallocation of inputs across heterogeneous units with

different TFPs, leading to lower overall TFP (Restuccia and Rogerson 2013). Examples of

heterogeneous units are farms (Adamopoulos and Restuccia 2014), manufacturing plants, Hsieh and

Klenow (2014), and cities (Hsieh and Moretti 2015). We suggest in this case study that the search for

losses from misallocation could include even misallocation across such small geographic units as city

blocks.

One response to micro-level inefficiencies is that there needs to be more development planning to move

scarce factors of production from “obsolete” inefficient units to more productive “modern” units. National

case studies such as those by Wade (1990) and Rodrik (1995, 2001) on the East Asian tigers and Rodrik

(2006) on China describe some success by national lead ers at “picking winners.”

A case study of a block forces us to consider the role of leaderless, spontaneous forces prone to surprises,

making it harder to pick winners. Previous literature (e.g. Benabou 1993) has also portrayed a city as a

complex general equilibrium in which policy and individual decisions interact to produce unanticipa ted

outcomes.

Our case study of one block corrects som e biases understating the chaos of creative destruction, but it

may create new biases. The difficulty of attribution of what was happening on the block to city-wide or

nation-wide policies may understate the public planning that boosted the block. This case study can best

be seen as a reminder that development does not have to be at one extreme or the other, all planned or all

spontaneous. Our block ’s chaotic development path occurred within a framework of some flexible public

planning: street layout, water supply, sewers, fighting crime and fires, publ ic schools, and other public

services.

A longstanding deba te in planning contrasts flexible planning of public servic es and institutions with

more prescriptive planning that aims at specific neighborhood or sectoral outcomes (we will cover an

example of this in the block’s history).

This study obviously overlaps with a rich urban economics literature, even though our original intention

was to do a different kind of case study of economic development. One very relevant literature on urban

policy to address poverty contrasts the efficiency losses associated with place-bas ed subsid ies to les s

distortionary person-based subsidies (Kline and Moretti 2014). Glaeser (2011, Kindle Location 4326-

4327) provides a strong statement of case against place-based policy: “The national government does no

good by favoring particular places, just as it does no good by propping up particular firms or industries.

It’s far better for companies to compete, and it’s also far better for cities to find their own competitive

advantages.”

b. Design of the case study

We selected the block out of convenience because it was close to NYU, and because it had abundant

historical documentation. A possible selection bias was that we knew that the block is a “success story”

today. Selecting on success is not so different from the prevalence in national case studies of analyzing

“success stories” like China or the East Asian tigers. Moreover, the larger aggregates to which the block

belongs – New York City and the United States – are also “success stories” and so the block helps

visualize some of the micro successes behind these much larger aggregate successes. Still, we

acknowledge that, like “success sto ries” of nations, a case study of only one block’s success is mostly of

use to illustrate how development success hap pen s; it do es not const itute rig oro us ev iden ce for detailed

policy prescriptions.

In the first two centuries after the Dutch founding of New Amsterdam in 1625, maps and histories allow

us to track the few individuals operating on our block. Beginning in 1834, maps, city directories,

censuses, tax records, and factory inspection reports allowed a recording about every 5 years of alm ost

everyone who was on the block, their econo m ic activ ity, and real estate values.

The data is subject to

some errors and omissions, but the num bers enabled description and analysis of what was happening on

the block.

We base our links from shocks to changes on the block on the many specialized histories available (for

example, Gilfoyle (1994) and Sanger (1859) on prostitution in New York) and some contemporary press

accounts (all sources ar e detailed in the endnotes and bibliography). It is the nature of a case study,

however, that we cannot rigorously prove causal links from shocks to changes. Some of the determinants

of change were them selv es endo g enous (transportation infrastructure, for exam ple) , and we are describing

outcomes that are part of a larger general equilibrium.

The rest of the paper proceeds organized into sections corresponding to major changes in comparative

advantage of the block, describing each of the shocks that contributed to chang es – w e call them

“surprises ” when the shocks and changes were generally unanticipated.

II. The agricultural period

Before the Dutch founded New Amsterdam in 1625, the block lay in a forest just north of some wetlands

on Manhattan.

There is little knowledge about the Lenape people (later known as Delawares) who

occupied the greater New York region before Europeans arrived.

The earliest records for the block date from the 1640s, when Manhattan was the Dutch colony New

Amsterdam. The Dutch had brought slaves from Africa to New Amsterdam as early as 1626.

The Dutch

governor Wi llem Kieft gave parcels on our block and surrounding area to four slaves, Marycke (widow of

Lawrence, December 2, 1643), Anthony Portuguese (before 1644), Gratia D’Angola (December 15,

1644), and Piet er Van Cam pen (April 6, 1647).

The borders of the four parcels straddled our block.

These slaves then bec ame “half-free” – meaning that they were free, but their children would remain

slaves.

The gift was not quite as magnanimous as it appears, as Kieft had provoked a war with the Indians that

lasted from February 1643 to August 1645. The slaves formed a buffer against Indian attacks.

They

produced food for the city by paying a tax of grain and livestock. Giving this land to slaves also reflected

the low value of the land at the time, which reflected the low population of the city (only 450 people in

1644).

The gift of land to slaves also reflected the low expectations the Dutch had for New Amsterdam. During

the treaty negotiations with the British after the war that resulted in permanent transfer of the colony, the

Dutch at one point addressed the question of whether to retain Suriname or New Amsterdam, and chose

the more promising sugar-producing slave plantations of Suriname.

Surprise 1: Dutch expect New York to be less valuable than Suriname.

The Dutch did not anticipate the extent to which New York would later prosper through triangular trade

with Caribbean sugar plantations and Britain. As one historian put it, “New York now lived by feeding

the slaves who made the sugar that fed the workers who made the clothes and other finished wares that

New Yorkers didn’t make for themselves.”

This trade meant the value of the farmland on Greene Street

increased and the British would not allow slaves to continue ownership. The combination of high

transport costs on land and low transport costs at sea made farmland adjacent to ports especially valuable.

After Dutch New Amsterdam became British New York in 1664, increasingly repressive British laws

against slaves and blacks made it impossible for the ownership of Greene Street by “half-free” slaves to

continue.

Figure 2: Lower Manhattan in 1767 Ratzer Map

Nicholas Bayard (1644-1707) acquired enough land by 1700 to assemble a large farm, which went from

the northern edge of what is now Chinatown to the southern part of Greenwich Village.

Bayard was a

nephew of the last Dutch governor of New Amsterdam, Peter Stuyvesant, whom he served as private

secretary.

After the British takeover, Bayard served as both mayor and alderman of New York. The

Bayard family passed the farm to descendan ts for sev er al gener ation s, reflecting a slower pace of change

for the block com pared to what would happen later. There was no conflict with city growth. The city in

Bayard Farm

Headquarters

Greene Street

Block

Lispenard

Creek and

salt marsh

End of

Broadway

1695 only extended to Wall Street. As of 1728, the city had only grown 3 blocks further north of Wall

Street along the west side of Broadway.

In 1767, the farm belonged to Nicholas Bayard III (1736–1802), the great-grandson of the first Nicholas

Bayard. The headquarters of the Bayard farm were at t he southeastern corner of SoHo -- what is today

Broome Street just east of Broadway (Figure 2). The Greene Street block was th r ee block s west and two

blocks north of the farm headquarters. Lispenard Creek and its surrounding salt marsh blocked the

northern extension of Broadway (Figure 2) at Duane Street, 14 blocks south of the Greene Street block.

The block itself w a s just two blocks north of the marsh, on a small hill 30 feet above sea level, part of

what the British called the Sand Hills.

Nicholas Bayard III went bankrupt and had to sell the Bayard farm on November 1, 1789 to pay his

creditors.

The land was split up among 15 separate buyers.

III. The residential period

The block had previously been ideal as a food supplier for the city and foreign markets. After enough city

growth, the block would be well-placed for residences on the upper edge of the city for more affluent

citizens to escape the congestion, poor sanitation, and disease downtown. This change was more

predictable than other changes in the block’s history (although the timing was still hard to predict).

The disease downtown included chronic Yellow Fever epidemics-- 1795, 1796, 1802, 1803, 1805, 1819,

and 1822.

Contemporary accounts gave the 1822 Yellow Fever epidemic some credit for spurring the

exodus from downtown to Greenwi ch Vi llag e.

More affluent residents fled the city in the summer of

1822 for the area near the Greene Street block: “Temporary stores and offices were erecting ... Within a

few days, the Customs House, the Post Office, the Banks, the Insurance office and the printers of

Newspape rs loca ted them se lv es in [Gre enwic h] vil lag e or the upper part of the Broadway [a block from

Greene St], where they were free from the impending danger, and these places almost instantaneously

became the seat of the immense business usually carried on…”

(Hardie 1822 p 42).

The completion of the Erie Canal in 1825 also contributed to New York’s northward extension because of

population growth.

The city population had been only 33,131 in 1789 when Nicholas Bayard III went

bankrupt; it reached 202,589 by 1830.

For the block to be settled as part of the city, the street itself first had to be created as part of a network of

city streets. Centralized planners did lay out many of Manhattan’s streets in the famous Commissioners’

Map of 1811. The Commissioner’s planning only applied to the unsettled parts of the city, north of

Greenwich Village on the west and Houston Street on the east, and hence excluded our block. Nicholas

Bayard III had already hired in 1788 a surveyor named Casimir Goerck to lay out our block and much of

modern SoHo as he was preparing to sell off the Bayard farm as part of bankruptcy proceedings.

Although this was a private proposal for street layout, subsequent maps and planners kept reproducing it

(including the 1811Com missioners’ Map), and the modern streets correspond exactly to the 1788 Goerck

survey.

Based on contemporary maps, we infer the first urban housing around 1810.

In 1820, city tax

assessment records showed that nine different men owned the 32 lots on our block, though most were still

undeveloped. Only 3 houses and a foundry were recorded. In this same period, the city drained the

wetlands that had obstructed northern city growth along Broadway. The city built a canal along what is

now Canal Street, and leveled the Sand Hills around our block (which provided fill for the wetlands).

Over the decade 1820-1830, the block had a construction boom. By 1830, the Greene Street block

contained twenty-six houses, a shop, and a Dutch Reformed Church. The block at that time still lay just

inside the northern edge of settlement.

An 1835 map shows a public school just northwest of our

block.

A private company started operating a horse-drawn omnibus in 1827 along Broadway, to be replaced in

the 1830s and 1840s by many private companies and routes offering horse-drawn streetca rs on rail s. This

facilitated the 1.5 mile commute of residents on the block to jobs downtown.

Our first comprehensive records in 1834 show 40 percent of the occupants of the block were merchants or

pursued educated professions such as doctors, lawyers, reverends, or teachers. The other 60 percent

pursued a large variety of crafts characteristic of a pre-industrial economy, such as carpenters,

cabinetmakers, brass-found ers, blacksmiths, bookbinders, and trunk-makers. Figure 3 shows the

combined share of these 3 groups – merchants, educated professions, and craftsmen – accoun ted for

almost all residents of the block until the 1850s.

Figure 3: Occup at iona l shares of occupants on the block during its rise and fall as a residential

neighborhood, 1834-1881 (source: primary data collected for this project)

Block residents were relatively well-off. For those residents th at report ed the valu e of real esta te in the

1850 census, average real estate assets were about $30,000 per household or 260 times contemporary

GDP per capita (for comparison, 260 times GDP per capita today is about $14 million). Mo re than half of

the families in the 1850 census had one or more live-in domestic servants (usually young women born in

Ireland). Our data shows average real estate values on the block doubling from 1830 to 1850.

After the 1850s, however, the merchants, professionals, and craftsmen moved further uptown, with the

first two almost disappearing on the block (Figure 3). A new occupation appeared on the block that upper

and middle class res iden ts were un likely to see as acceptab le neig hb or s—sex workers. The first

documented appearances of brothels on the block date from 1859 at 122 Greene Street and 133 Greene

Street.

Further improvements and extensions in privately-owned streetcar lines made it feasible for

residents to flee further north in the city while commuting downtown (transportation is endogenous, both

cause and effect of the city’s northward extension).

Since we have the names of individuals and businesses on the block (with some omissions) at intervals

between 3 and 5 years, we can estimate turnover from one period to the next.

Turnover is often high in

urban neighborhoods, even during “stable” periods. However, the implied rapid change at the block level

is another feature of spontaneous behavior that is often neglected in analyzing larger aggregates. We

calculated turnover for the entire period after 1834 in which we have information on names of residents,

businesses, or business owners. The average annualized probability of staying from one year to the next

for the entire period 1834-2013 is 0.785, which translates to a 30 percent chance of staying in the

neighborhood for 5 years. We will periodically check whether the turnover rate increases dur ing m ajor

shifts in comparative advantage of the block. Indeed, we find at the end of the residential period that the

probability of any one household staying on the block for the next 5 years fell from 30 to 17 percent.

IV. Prostitution

Surprise 2: Greene street becomes ones of New York City’s largest sex-work districts.

By 1870, the Greene Street Block contained 14 brothels, the highest concentration in the City (Figure 4).

Figure 4: Brothels on Greene in 1870 (Source: Gentleman’s Companion; picture reproduced from

New York Times)

Information on brothels understandably does not appear in city directories, but is available from The

Gentleman’s Companion (1870), a pocket guidebook (anonymously published) of brothels in New York;

there was an earlier such guidebook from 1859. More sporadic data comes from police and court

records.

We cross-referenced this data against the 1870 and 1880 censuses, which show a distinctive

profile for brothels of an older woman (or sometimes a woman and a man) and a number of young, single

women. Brothels are usually identified in the Census as boarding houses, with the profession of the single

Greene Street Block

young women not listed. Most residences have many prostitutes (up to 12), and they are generally in their

early 20s.

The block’s new comparative advantage in sex work reflected in part its proximity to large hotels and

music halls on Broadway, its housing stock of townho uses with multiple small bedrooms left over from

the residenti al per iod, and an overall increase in prostitution in New York.

In the 1840s, both entertainment and prostitution were still downtown and not near the block. But then

two large hotels called the Metropolitan (1852) and St. Nicholas (1853), and a theatre called Niblos

Garden (1849) opened two blocks over on Broadway.

Hotels and theaters kept arriving in the

neighborhood;

Figure 5 shows those closest to our block in 1879.

Why did the hotels and theatres conglomerate in this part of the city in particular? First, hotels and

theatres wanted to be in the geographic center of town, which was near the Greene St block during the

brothel era – the northern edge of town had reached 23

Street by 1853.

Second, there are

agglomeration externalities. Large hotels like the St Nicholas meant that en terta in ment centers and other

hotels all wanted to cluster nearby, attracting more hotels and theatres.

The city-wide factor is the rising demand for both hotels and prostitution. From the 1820s to the 1860s, as

already noted, New York became America’s largest port, an intermediary between domestic and foreign

markets that broug ht travelling business people from all over America, and trader s and seamen from all

over the world. One writer desc rib ed New York’s population in 1861 as “strangers in a strange land,”

making traditional moral norms harder to enforce.

Entertainment venues attracted men seeking nightlife to the area near Greene Street and provided a way

for prostitutes to meet them. Many of the shows at the theatres were designed to be titillating: an 1866

production at Niblo’s featured a hundred “semi-nude” women.

The 1870 and 1880 Censuses show many

Greene Street brothels had bartenders, musicians and cooks, suggesting that they offered a range of

nighttime entertainment. The brothels apparently were profitable, as our data shows real estate values on

the block doubling from 1860 to 1880.

Figure 5: 1879 Bromley map with Greene Street block brothels and nearby hotels and theatres (B

indicates brothel on Greene Street block in 1870 or 1880 or both)

In 1880 the Greene Street was still full of brothels (as documented by the 1880 census), but they then

disappeared. The entertainment area moved further uptown with the continued spread northward of the

city with high population growth. During the late 1870s and early 1880s, eight new theatres opened

around Herald Square (Broadway, 6

Avenue and 34

Street).

The brothels moved too, so later in the

1880s there were few brothels in or around the Greene Street block.

Greene Street

Block

V. The Rise and Fall of the Garment Industry on Greene Street

Surprise 3: brothels are replaced by a thriving garment business.

The disappearance of the brothels also reflected a new comparative advantage for the block.

Entrepreneurs demolished all bu t two of the small brick houses on the block , and erected new five- and

six-story cast-iron buildings (mostly in 1881-1883, completed by 1889). These buildings were for three

decades near the epicenter of New York City’s huge and profitable garment trade.

Real estate values

tripled from 1880 to 1890, then increased further until 1910.

The lowest trough in probabil ity of stay ing on the block in the whole series 1834-2013 corresponds to this

changeover of the building stock. The turnover rate was 98 percent between 1881 and 1886.

A new cast iron technology, invented in late 18

century Britain, came to dominate New York

commercial architecture from 1850 to 1880.

It relied on mass-produced interchangeable parts so

buildings could be built more quickly and more cheaply than in the past. Recent innovations in elevator

technology allowed these buildings to be taller, while the thin but strong cast-iron columns allowed for

large windows and large open internal spaces.

Elias Howe’s upgrade of Singer’s sewing machine helped

manufacturers produce greater volumes of clothing in these factories.

New York City was already the national leader in garment production. Garment production began in the

tenements of the Lower East Side, but moved as regulation and increasing demand for space forced

owners to move out of residential buildings and into purpose-built lofts and warehouses. Between 1860

and 1910, the number of garment plants in New York increased by a factor of 17 (from 600 to 10,000)

while the number of people employed increased by a factor of 8 (from 30,000 to 236,000). In 1905, New

York accounted for 51 percent of the value of clothing manufactured in the United States.

The garment industry benefited from new waves of supply of immigrant labor, such as Russian Jews.

Many Russians blamed on Jews the assassination on March 13, 1881 of Tsar Alexander II, and a series of

pogroms followed; then the next Tsar Alexander III issued in May 1882 punitive laws against Jews. So

many Russian Jews immigrated to New York in succeeding years that by 1910 they made up 10 percent

of New York City’s population.

In 1890, 90 percent of garment factory owners below 14

street were German Jews, who had arrived

during an earlier wave of immigration and had first established businesses in the Lower East Side

tenements before moving to the factories of Greene Street and surrounding blocks. Many Russian Jewish

immigrants had tailoring experienc e, and they lived near the Greene Street block on the Lower East

Side.

Massive I talian im mig ration to New York from 1880 to 1910 a lso contributed (by 1910, 7 percent of New

York’s population was Italian-born).

Italian immigrants to New York tended to settle in one of four

separate “Little Italys” south of 14

street, the most famous of which was a few blocks east and south of

the Greene Street block around Mulberry north of Canal (see figure 6 below). Another Little Italy was

even closer, from West Broadway to Hudson Street, between Canal and West 4

street, just two blocks to

the west of the new buildings on Greene Street block.

Italian women in particular specialized in the

‘needle trades .’

Together, Russian Jews and Italians made up 90 percent of the garment industry’s labor

force in New York City.

Greene Street was in a good location within New York City to take advantage of broader developments in

infrastructure an d im mig ra tion . Figure 6 shows the Greene Street block and nearby Hudson River piers in

1890 (0.7 miles away). For example, from the 1870s the White Star line (pier 45) traveled from Liverpool

(UK) to New York, with a stop in Ireland. Although immigrants were one of the main cargos, the ships

also carried goods, especially on the route back to Europe.

Com pag nie Généra le Tr ansa tla ntiqu e (p ier

42) travelled to Le Havre in France. The Pacific Mail Steamship Company (pier 34) shipped to Panama,

to the West Coast of the US (mostly San Francisco), and to Ch ina and Jap an. The block was also 0.7

miles from the large freight depot for Cornelius Vanderbilt’s Hudson River Railroad, connected to his

New York Central Railroad, which gave the block connections to the markets of the American interior.

Within the city, the continuing development of an ever-improving network of elevated railroads,

Broadway cable cars,

and street car lines

made transportation faster between Greene Street block and

these other points, good for the commute of the owners, managers, workers,

and customers to the block

(see Figure 6). Freight moved by horse-drawn trucks (later gasoline-powered),

in which proximity to the

railroad depots and piers was also important.

The other local fac tor was t hat the Greene Street block was close to Broadway, the most prestigious retail

avenue. Increasing demand for the limited commercial space and consistently high rents on Broadway

pushed many firms into the side streets.

The garment firms that moved to the area around Greene Street

used the ground floor with its large windows and light-fille d spaces to disp lay m erchand ise and tak e

orders from customers. Firms used upper floors for manufacturing and storage.

New York real estate agent Leon Tanenbaum testified that in 1880 Broadway had held all manner of

“clothiers, dealers in gents’ furnishing goods, jobbers, furriers, and tailors’ and clothiers’ trimming

dealers, suit and cloak manufacturers” but had witnessed at the end of the decade a “comparatively large

influx to the cross streets.” These firms abandoned Broadway because the new buildings were “superior

to most of the old-time buildings on Broadway as they have passenger and freight elevators, steam heat,

sanitary plumbing, good light and ventilation, and other attractive features all of which are essential to the

health, comfort and convenience of those who transact their business in them.”

In 1886, business

directories show a total of 66 business listings on the block, of which 82% are garment-related.

The garment industry was prone to clustering, as the maps from the Factory Inspector’s Department show

(Figure 7 below). Agglomeration economies in this context reduced garment firms’ costs of transporting

goods (raw materials and finished clothing), people (the labor force and customers) and ideas (new styles

and trends for each new season, as well as improvements in manufacturing and marketing technologies.)

Figure 6: Transport and Neighborhoods around Greene [1890 Broadway Central Hotel Map, dotted

red lines show stree tcar lin e s, solid red li nes show cabl e cars]

By 1890 the transformation to a commercial and industrial zone on our Greene Street block was

complete. The Real Estate Record and Builder’s Guide of 1890 declared the block now thriving and

respectable, though they alluded to the block’s dissolute recent past:

During the last few years the wholesale trade has invaded…in considerable force. Mercer street,

Greene street, and measurably Wooster street, have become business streets in sympathy with the

movement on Broadway; and they have been lined with some very respectable wholesale

warehouses as far northward as Houston street. A man can walk though those streets now without

hearing himself too frequently accosted through closed window shutters.

About the development of the cast-iron business district, the same writer opined: “it is doubtful whether

the reconstruction of a long-improved district by individual enterprise ever went so far in so short a

time.”

Surprise 4: the garment industry moves uptown and Greene Street enters a long decline

The same technological advances that began the boom on the block ended the boom after 1910. Further

advances in building technology and demand for new, bigger, more modern spaces pushed the garment

industry’s cen ter of agg lomera tion further uptown.

Figure 7 shows the Greene Street block (marked in red) in 1900 still in the c enter o f the city’s la rg e st

cluster of women’s clothing firms. By 1922, the Greene Street block had only a few women’s garment

businesses left compared to the large uptown clusters.

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