Midtown Manhattan is America's largest central business district with some 200 million ft2 of office space. Its first major skyscrapers grew up in the mid-1920s around Grand Central Terminal where the Jumbo (lavender) Chrysler, Graybar, and Lincoln buildings and 230 Park Avenue crowded alongside other towers with less than one million ft2 total area. Farther fom the transportation hub, the Super Jumbo (purple) Empire State with 2.7 million ft2 total area and 30 Rockefeller Center with 2.6 million ft2 were intended to create new office districts by their sheer scale.

Since 1950, midtown has added some thirty buildings of between 1-2 million ft2 total area (in beige on the map), but only five Jumbos (in red). The first major project was the Pan Am Building / 200 Park Avenue, which on completion in 1963 was the world's largest high rise. In the 1950s and 60s development concentrated on Park Avenue where, under the new 1961 zoning law, lots were generally only large enough to allow buildings of 1.5-1.7 million ft2. The other area was on the Avenue of the Americas (Sixth Avenue) west of Rockefeller Center large full-block sites and the tower-in-the plaza formula encouraged by the 1961 zoning produced a row of modernist slabs set back from the street, including the Jumbos, 1211 and 1251 Avenue of the Americas. The other midtown Jumbos are 1633 Broadway and I Penn Plaza.

The Manhattan maps and three-dimensional data were generated by Urban Data Solutions.