ancient cities

Weber, A. 1929. Theory of the Location of Industries.
Translated by C. J. Friedrich. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Lo f t LiviNg
Loft living began in the 1970s in the United States
as an informal way for artists and others to take
old manufacturing spaces in the centers of cities
and transform them into unconventional studios
and residences. These spaces had been partly
abandoned—at least, by the building owners—
and, with the transfer of factory work to low-wage
regions of the world as well as the obsolescence of
multistory factory buildings, they became available
at low rents to those who used their “sweat
equity” (or own labor) to modernize and renovate
them.
Within a few years, favorable media coverage
and changes in local laws enabled the property
market in living lofts to expand beyond artists
communities and beyond cultural capitals like
New York and London. Many cities encouraged
both the creation of special artists’ districts and
new residential construction, which were in turn
associated with center-city revival. Although loft
living sparked a new style of chic home décor and
generated new uses for old manufacturing districts,
it raised serious questions about this type of
gentrification: specifically, where future manufacturing
would take place and whether loft neighborhoods
ultimately benefited cultural consumers
more than cultural producers.
Loft Living in New York City
New York, with its continually replenished stock
of artists and a declining number of small manufacturers,
offers an archetypal history of lofts. The
city had been a trading center since the days of the
Dutch colony in the seventeenth century, a center
of crafts production as a British colony before the
American Revolution, and a media and fashion
center from the era after the Civil War. From the
mid-nineteenth through the early twentieth century,
waves of immigrants filled the streets and
tenements, working in the factories and buying
the products—especially clothing—that were now
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ready made. Many New Yorkers worked in garment
factories, usually located in multistory buildings
with open floors, high ceilings, structural
weight-bearing columns, and cast iron facades.
These floors were called lofts, after the spaces
where sail makers plied their craft. Other New
Yorkers worked in similar spaces in the printing
industry, producing newspapers and magazines
from hot type, making silk screen prints for artists
and advertisements, and creating posters and
sheet music for Broadway or Tin Pan Alley.
As workplaces, loft buildings were an integral
part of the city’s two main cultural industries—
fashion and printing—from the 1860s. They filled
a large part of lower Manhattan, stretching from
north of the Wall Street financial district to midtown
near Times Square. Lofts were located as
well along the docks in Brooklyn and Queens—in
warehouses, sugar refineries, and other specialized
industrial buildings.
After World War II, the city’s industries
suffered structural decline. Garment manufacturers
gradually shifted production to lower-wage
towns in New Jersey, outside the urban core.
Printers confronted technological improvements
that replaced human workers with machines and
eventually with computers. Losing readers to television
and facing rising costs, most of the city’s
daily newspapers folded. By the late 1960s, employment
in the garment and printing industries was
steadily falling, and loft building owners refused to
modernize their properties if they couldn’t demand
higher rents. At the same time, a vision of the city
as a service rather than a manufacturing center
made industry seem less desirable. Under these conditions,
loft buildings seemed to be obsolete.
But, as in other postwar cities, private real-estate
developers did not rush to create new districts in
the historic core. Besides the mammoth building of
the World Trade Center, New York City and state
tried to goad developers into action by planning
new infrastructure—a cross-Manhattan expressway
along Broome Street, which would demolish
a large number of late nineteenth-century loft
buildings; a sports stadium nearby; apartment
houses for the middle class so they could walk to
work in Wall Street—but these plans aroused
unexpectedly strong community protest.
Led by Jane Jacobs and other urbanists and activists,
New Yorkers demonstrated at city planning