Here’s (most) of the sprawling map, which is part of the new exhibit “Mastering the Metropolis: New York and Zoning, 1916–2016” at the Museum of the City of New York. Cross hatches indicate areas with overlapping industries, while flesh-colored ones were “unrestricted as to industry”.
A quick scan indicates much of 1919 New York was involved in the production of women’s wear. This market involved 8,091 factories (the most out of all the industries), employed 169,965 people, and had a yearly product value of $1.7 billion.
The Upper East Side, Midtown East, and Williamsburg had a role in “food products and tobacco”—coffee, chewing gum, pickles, poultry, cigarettes, snuff, and other toothsome items. Clinton Hill/Bedford-Stuyvesant was big on leather goods like boots, trunks, and harnesses, while neighborhoods along the riverside in Brooklyn and Queens were hubs of metal-working, churning out tin and sheet iron, calculating machines and cash registers, pins and hooks, nuts, washers, stoves, and shipbuilding doodads.
The character of New York’s varied neighborhoods is governed by a novel set of rules first envisioned by New York reformers 100 years ago – the groundbreaking Zoning Resolution of 1916. Zoning, which was designed to tame the unruly process of free-market real estate development, has continued to shape the city we know today in countless, often unseen, ways.
This landmark law gave birth to the iconic “setback” skyscraper and the modern skyline; to special neighborhoods like the Theater District; to public amenities like pedestrian plazas, and to residential neighborhoods of all shapes and sizes. On the 100th anniversary of America’s first comprehensive zoning resolution, Mastering the Metropolis: New York and Zoning, 1916-2016 will examine the effects of the evolving law and chart the history of the city’s zoning rules and debates to the current day, illuminating how the tools of zoning have reflected a century of evolving ideas about what constitutes an “ideal” city. (from the exhibition website)