Here’s an odd question: where is ground level in Manhattan,
or more precisely in lower Manhattan?
I ask because I found myself the other day, in Tribeca
(which is near the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan), looking down on a
narrow space between a building and a street-level parking lot. It wouldn’t
have been odd to look down there at a stairway coming up from a basement. But
here what I was looking at, 10 or 15 feet below me, was ground, complete with a
couple of trees growing out of it. It rather looked as if the street level
where I was standing was not the true ground level at all, but rather the
result of piling who knows what – concrete, pipes, power-lines, etc., etc.,
etc. – on top of the ground to reach where I now stood.
I tried to google this, and learned that Manhattan is built
on granite that’s hard to tunnel down into. As a result, evidently, many
Manhattan subway lines aren’t very far beneath the ground. But what I’m
wondering about is roughly the opposite: how far above the ground has the city
chosen to perch itself? I’m sure the answer is different in different parts of
the city, but I begin to think that as a general matter the whole place has
been built up several feet, at least, above the actual ground. New York’s
skyscrapers are a remarkable sight, of course, but the idea that the bottom of
the city, perhaps most of an entire island, might have been built up this much is quite remarkable too.
