1 Wall Street, the building with four obelisks on top, in 1906.CreditOffice for Metropolitan History

Land costs for developable sites now exceed $15,000 per square foot so it’s official: at $100 per square inch, investors are probably even looking at telephone booths, if they can find one.

For its time, just as incredible was the astonishing $700,000 paid in 1905 by a St. Louis consortium for a 30-by-40-foot lot at the southeast corner of Wall and Broadway. This was a new high for land prices, and the resulting gawky 18-story building marked a trend: out-of- towners muscling in on what had been a Manhattancentric business.

The elevated lines and the development of the steel frame and the elevator upped the value of land in Lower Manhattan. Thousands of workers streamed in from Uptown and buildings climbed 20, 30, 40 floors and higher, and land prices rose accordingly.

In earlier decades the pool of buyers for New York real estate was small — New York-based developers, builders who syndicated their projects locally and the occasional large corporation that could front the money for a big transaction....Continue Reading

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