Skip to main content

1916 Seventy-five Years Ago

March 2023
1min read

Uncrowding the Sky

The nation’s first zoning ordinance became law on July 25 in New York City, restricting the height and mass of skyscraper projects and challenging architects to work under new “setback” rules. Some of the regulations had been first proposed at a City Plan Conference in 1912, but the construction of the then-gargantuan Equitable Building three years later had sped up reform efforts. The Equitable, designed by Ernest Graham, of the Chicago architecture firm of Burnham and Root, rose thirty-nine stories and threw whole blocks of lower Broadway into shadow. At the time, it was the most massive office building in the world— A CITY IN ITSELF , said one newspaper headline, HOUSING 16,000 SOULS . Its 1.2 million square feet of floor space sat on less than an acre of land.

Under the 1916 setback law, a structure’s floor area could be no more than twelve times greater than the area of its building site; the Equitable’s had been thirty times as large. Skyscrapers that followed it would assume all kinds of ingenious shapes. Chicago, the birthplace of the skyscraper, never fettered its developers with anything like New York’s elaborate zoning laws, and buildings at least as massive as the Equitable continued to flourish there.

We hope you enjoy our work.

Please support this 72-year tradition of trusted historical writing and the volunteers that sustain it with a donation to American Heritage.

Donate

Stories published from "July/August 1991"

Authored by: The Editors

Tips for unearthing the history of your home

Authored by: The Editors

A Self-Portrait

Authored by: The Editors

A Journey Uptown Over Time

Authored by: The Editors

Ratifying the Fourteenth

Authored by: The Editors

Words Under Water

Authored by: The Editors

Movie Makers

Authored by: The Editors

Uncrowding the Sky

Authored by: The Editors

The Witch of Wall Street

Authored by: The Editors

The $10,000 Miss

Authored by: The Editors

Texas Tower

Featured Articles

Often thought to have been a weak president, Carter was strong-willed in doing what he thought was right, regardless of expediency or the political fallout.

Rarely has the full story been told how a famed botanist, a pioneering female journalist, and First Lady Helen Taft battled reluctant bureaucrats to bring Japanese cherry trees to Washington. 

Why have thousands of U.S. banks failed over the years? The answers are in our history and politics.

In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln embodied leading in a time of polarization, political disagreement, and differing understandings of reality.

Native American peoples and the lands they possessed loomed large for Washington, from his first trips westward as a surveyor to his years as President.

A hundred years ago, America was rocked by riots, repression, and racial violence.

During Pres. Washington’s first term, an epidemic killed one tenth of all the inhabitants of Philadelphia, then the capital of the young United States.

Now a popular state park, the unassuming geological feature along the Illinois River has served as the site of centuries of human habitation and discovery.  

The recent discovery of the hull of the battleship Nevada recalls her dramatic action at Pearl Harbor and ultimate revenge on D-Day as the first ship to fire on the Nazis.

Our research reveals that 19 artworks in the U.S. Capitol honor men who were Confederate officers or officials. What many of them said, and did, is truly despicable.

Here is probably the most wide-ranging look at Presidential misbehavior ever published in a magazine.

When Germany unleashed its blitzkreig in 1939, the U.S. Army was only the 17th largest in the world. FDR and Marshall had to build a fighting force able to take on the Nazis, against the wishes of many in Congress.