How Old Is Your Tallest?
An interesting way to think about dynamism in our cities
In what year was each major American city’s tallest building built? Does this tell you anything about a place’s attitudes towards growth?
I’m not sure how meaningful a measure it is, but I thought of this in the observation deck of the Columbia Center tower in Seattle, looking out over the city. That building, the city’s tallest, was finished in 1985. That number kind of surprised me. Wow, it’s been 39 years since Seattle built a “new” tallest building, I thought.
Obviously most of these towers are office space, and they may not correlate with housing production or with anything else, really. But I thought this was a fun bit of trivia, at least, so I picked 10 major American cities and looked at what year their tallest building was built (completed).
Boston: 1976, John Hancock Tower
New York City: 2014, One World Trade Center
Philadelphia: 2018, Comcast Technology Center
Charlotte: 1992, Bank of America Corporate Center
Austin: 2024, Sixth and Guadalupe
St Louis: One Metropolitan Square, 1989
Detroit: Renaissance Center, 1981
San Francisco: 2018, Salesforce Tower
Seattle: 1985, Columbia Center
Washington, D.C. is a special case because of the city’s strict height limit: its tallest structure is the Washington Monument, and its tallest actual building is the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, followed in second place by the Old Post Office. You’ll have to go to Arlington and Fairfax Counties for actual high-rises.
Again, I’m not sure how tight of a correlation there is here with a pro-building attitude in general. But I will note that Austin is a big YIMBY success story and is building a lot of everything, and it also updated its tallest structure this year. And Boston is one of the major housing-crunched American cities, and it hasn’t updated its tallest since the Bicentennial—which, if you’re counting, is nearly 50 years ago. St. Louis and Detroit haven’t updated since cities came back into favor in America.
Housing advocates aren’t necessarily pro-skyscraper, especially because, as noted, these buildings are typically either office space or extremely expensive and exclusive condominiums. But I do think we’ve lost something of a general attitude when cities and builders no longer complete to set a new record. We understood that building things was tied to optimism and a belief in the future. And I wonder if the decline of those feelings is part of NIMBYism and our failure to build anything quickly and decisively these days.
What about these cities’ second-tallest buildings’ build years? (You can look that one up if it interests you.)
Tell me if you think anything in terms of housing policy can be determined from this.
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My hunch is that the age of tallest building has more to do with one of two other things than with anything related to urbanism:
1) the growth of environmental law, which can be used to stop large public projects.
2) (I realize I'm courting controversy with this one) the increasing presence of women in American public life. Women on average don't seem to care as much about breaking records / creating superlatives as men do, though of course there are exceptions.
I'd guess it might be insightful to search for count of structures over a specific height threshold (Arlington and Fairfax County property records might make this relatively easy).
Last thing: "how old is your longest (bridge)" is another great comparison. Here's a decent list ( https://www.ratepunk.com/blog/post/longest-bridges-in-the-us ), and 1980 jumps out to me as a cutoff year. All but one* of the listed bridges built after 1980 are replacements for obsolete / damaged earlier bridges.
*The sole exception is the Virginia Dare Memorial Bridge linking mainland North Carolina with the Outer Banks, which likely had a very unusual combination of extreme support from local commercial interests and minimal opposition from environmentalists & NIMBYs.
When was the last time that a "tallest" building was its city's best building?