180
TEST 72 READING PASSAGE 3
You should spend about 20 minutes on
Questions 36-40
which are based on
Reading Passage 3 below.
[Note: This is an extract from READING PASSAGE 3 about Building the
Skyline: The Birth and Growth of Manhattan’s Skyscrapers]
Katharine L. Shester reviews a book by Jason Barr about the development of
New York City
Barr begins chapter one by taking the reader on a ‘helicopter time-machine’ ride
– giving a fascinating account of how the New York landscape in 1609 might have
looked from the sky. He then moves on to a subterranean walking tour of the city,
indicating the location of rock
and water below the subsoil, before taking the reader
back to the surface. His love of the city comes through as he describes various
fun facts about the location of the New York residence of early 19th-century vice-
president Aaron Burr as well as a number of legends about the city.
Chapter seven tackles the ‘bedrock myth’, the assumption that the absence of
bedrock close to the surface between Downtown and Midtown New York is the
reason for skyscrapers not being built between the two urban centers. Rather, Barr
argues that while deeper bedrock
does increase foundation costs, these costs were
neither prohibitively high nor were they large compared to the overall cost of building
a skyscraper. What I enjoyed the most about this chapter was Barr’s discussion
of how foundations are actually built. He describes the use of caissons, which
enable workers to dig down for considerable distances, often below the water table,
until they reach bedrock. Barr’s thorough technological history discusses not only
how
caissons work, but also the dangers involved. While this chapter references
empirical research papers, it is a relatively easy read.
Chapters eight and nine focus on the birth of Midtown and the building boom of the
1920s. Chapter eight contains lengthy discussions of urban economic theory that
may serve as a distraction to readers primarily interested in New York. However,
they would be well-suited for undergraduates learning
about the economics of
cities. In the next chapter, Barr considers two of the primary explanations for the
building boom of the 1920s – the first being exuberance, and the second being
financing. He uses data to assess the viability of these two explanations and finds
that supply and demand factors explain much of the development of the 1920s;
though it enable the boom, cheap credit was not, he argues, the primary cause.
In the final chapter (chapter 10), Barr discusses another of his empirical papers
that estimates Manhattan land values from the mid-19th
century to the present
day. The data work that went into these estimations is particularly impressive.
Toward the end of the chapter, Barr assesses ‘whether skyscrapers are a cause
or an effect of high land values’. He finds that changes in land values predict future
building height, but the reverse is not true. The book ends with an epilogue, in
which Barr discusses the impact of climate change on the city and makes policy
suggestions for New York going forward.