One Summer: America, 1927

it was set a little low for him, expressed pleasure at being present, said a very few words of thanks, and stepped back. A moment of eerie stillness followed as it dawned on the watching throngs, most of whom had been standing in the hot sun for hours, that they were in the presence of two of the most taciturn men in America and that this ceremony was over. But then, recovering their sense of occasion, the people burst into riotous applause and ‘clapped until their hands were numb’. Many wept here, too.
    And then began Charles Lindbergh’s new life as a public figure. From now on, his every waking moment would be an endless round of banquets, speeches and shaking hands. In just over thirty-six hours in Washington, Colonel Lindbergh (as he now was) would attend three banquets, make several (short) speeches, visit sick soldiers at Walter Reed Hospital, lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and visit the Capitol. Everywhere he went people lined the streets to cheer him as he passed. It was a touching display of adulation, but it was only the faintest prelude to what awaited him in New York.
     
    In the 1920s America became a high-rise nation. By 1927, the country boasted some 5,000 tall buildings – most of the world’s stock. Even Beaumont, Texas, had six buildings of ten storeys or higher, which was more than Paris, London, Berlin or any other European city. J. L. Hudson of Detroit in 1927 opened the world’s tallest department store at more than twenty storeys, and Cleveland saw the topping out of the fifty-two-storey Union Terminal Building, the second tallest building in the world. Los Angelesinstituted strict limits on building heights – which is partly why LA sprawls so today – but still allowed the City Hall to rise to twenty-eight storeys in violation of its own ordinances. It was as if the country couldn’t stop itself from building ever upwards.
    As buildings grew taller, the number of workers pouring into city centres grew and grew. Boston by 1927 had 825,000 people a day coming into its downtown – or more than the entire population of the city. Pittsburgh absorbed 355,000 workers every day, Los Angeles and San Francisco 500,000 each, Chicago and Philadelphia over 750,000 apiece; and New York, superlative in everything, took in a whopping daily load of three million.
    In 1927, New York had just overtaken London as the world’s largest city, and it was easily the most cosmopolitan. A quarter of its eight million residents had been born abroad; it had more foreign-born residents than Philadelphia had people. Native-born Americans were flocking to it, too. Two hundred thousand southern blacks had moved to New York since the end of the First World War, and now the Mississippi flood was sending tens of thousands more.
    As well as being the headquarters of many of America’s principal service industries – banking, stockbroking, publishing, advertising, most of the arts – New York was still also the nation’s largest industrial centre. fn1 It was home to 30,000 factories. One tenth of all that America produced originated in the city. More than 40 per cent of the nation’s overseas trade went through the Port of New York, as did the overwhelming share of international passenger traffic. As many as 12,000 passengers sailed from piers on the west side of Manhattan every day, and something of the order of 25,000 went to see them off. Such was the density of people around the docks that traffic was gridlocked daily for blocks around from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m.
    Every four years the city grew by the equivalent of a Boston or St Louis. Developers couldn’t keep up. At one point in 1926, more than a thousand new office buildings were being constructed or rebuilt. To try to reduce the crowding, the City of New York enacted tough new ordinances, restricting tall buildings to big lots and forcing architects to design them with setbacks to allow more air to flow between them and more light to reach the ground. The unintended effect of this was actually to accelerate the pace of growth, since big lots required giant structures if they were to offer an economic return. It also encouraged skyscrapers to march northwards up Manhattan. By 1927, New York had half the nation’s skyscrapers, and half of those were now in midtown. The canyon-like streets and spiky skyline that we associate with New York are largely a 1920s phenomenon.
    Many of the new buildings added enormously to pressure on the city’s