Pictures you didn't take

[glatt]

I'm not saying the elevator had no impact. I just think the bridge had a much larger impact.

NYC was always a bustling city. It was the gateway to much (most?) of America for centuries. The Erie Canal was probably the biggest agent for change in NYC. Followed by the Brooklyn Bridge, and then the inevitable elevators.

When you build a road into the wilderness, towns spring up along it. See the Amazon for an example in our lifetime. You can't look at the infill roads and highways built through existing suburbia to find your lessons about growth.

Manhattan was already there and already bustling before the bridge was built, but the bridge linked it to Brooklyn and that provided much needed residential space to house the employees. Brooklyn was already there too, but you had to take a boat (ferry) and the bridge carried exponentially more people. Living in Brooklyn and working in Manhattan made life more economically manageable for the workers, and so more workers came. Brooklyn grew in population very quickly. And Manhattan, where the jobs were, was also growing. But it was on a tiny sliver of land so the only way to build was to go up.

The height of buildings was limited by stairs, but there was a tremendous pressure to figure that problem out. Hoists were well known. Everyone had used them to get buckets of water out of a well. They had been around for thousands of years. This was the height of the industrial revolution, and the task of making a hoist just that much more reliable and safe was a relatively simple one that was inevitable. If Otis hadn't come up with the fix, somebody else would have. Manhattan was bursting at the seams.