¶ New York City
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Index Entry
"Its street level is not the bottom level of New York. Legal statutes adopted by early Knickerbocker burgers required that when the utility companies dug up its streets and inserted pipes, cables, and subways, they should thereafter put all the same earth back where they found it and the city would then resurface it. This the public utilities have done to the letter. The earth tucked back into the street is no more the Earth’s natural top crust than is the earth tucked into the flower pots high above in Manhattan’s skyscraper apartments. The concrete and steel intrusions, below the streets and buildings, have become so multitudinous and penetrate at so many levels that they reach hundreds of feet below the theoretical surface. Like an iceberg, structural and mechanical Manhattan is now chiefly below the surface.
“Old-time New Yorkers remember the unique commercial districts–the leather district around Gold Street; the tea and spice districts along Water, Front, and Pearl Streets; the cotton and linen district on White Street; the machinery exchanges of Lafayette Street; and the great Gansevoort, Washington, and Manhattan market districts. These districts have been almost wholly diffused into uptown invisible districts. The real”
