Was Midtown & FiDi once like TriBeCa &SoHo (apartments, townhouses)

[frischee112]

Before the skyscraper boom of the early to mid 1900s, was midtown Manhattan and the Financial District like TriBeCa, SoHo, and other parts of old NY? What I mean is, were they low to mid rise stone mix use buildings (retail & apartments)? Were there a lot of town homes in these areas before the skyscraper boom?

[BrownstoneNY]

The Financial District has been all sorts of things, being the oldest part of the city (though nothing from earlier than the mid-late 1800s survives now).

Midtown did have a low-rise history. It had townhouses and mixed-use low-rises. You can still see a few of these left scattered around Midtown on lots that are isolated by surrounding skyscrapers and too small to build higher on. That period didn't last long, though.

Neither ever looked like Soho and Tribeca, though. Both of those neighborhoods were mostly industrial from the late 1800s through the 1960s, and all of their architecture is pre-war industrial. None of that architecture ever existed in either the Financial District or Midtown, which were never industrial.