Title: Downtown 1908
Subtitle: Downtown's Dense Blocks
Text: In 1908, the new Singer tower took the title of world's tallest building and its neighbor on the same block, the City Investing Company Building, became the largest in terms of office space. The guidebook King's Views of New York illustrated this vista of the financial district with the caption: "two billion dollars' worth of skyscrapers and other business buildings cluster on the lower end of Manhattan Island, with an office population of 250,000 and nearly a million people passing to and fro each day."
Describing the urban density in the area at the right of the image, which is the block directly behind you as you read this panel, now occupied by One Liberty Plaza, King's observed: "The block bounded by Broadway and Church Street and Cortlandt and Liberty provides office room for 20,000 people, and if the hundred small blocks below Fulton Street are similarly built up, there will be room for 2,000,000 to work daily in this financial and commercial clearing-house of the world."
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