A quick history of the Chrysler Building in New York City provides a reminder of a key reason skyscrapers emerged in American cities:

Dominating the New York skyline brought prestige and publicity, but tall towers also resolved a more prosaic problem: As land prices climbed, developers had to build upward to turn a profit, pushing their projects as high as engineering, natural light and, eventually, zoning would allow. “Skyscrapers were a self-fulfilling prophecy of the heated real estate market,” writes Neal Bascomb in his 2003 book Higher: A Historic Race to the Sky and the Making of a City. By the 1920s, with Europe in ashes after World War I, these buildings became brash totems of a new world order. Manhattan in particular had become the “harbor of the world, messenger of the new land … of the gold diggers and of world conquest,” wrote the German architect Erich Mendelsohn in his seminal 1926 book Amerika, published the year after New York overtook London as the world’s most populous city.

In a dense space like Manhattan, demand for land pushed prices up. To make more money from the same plot of land, skyscrapers offered more space. The addition of thousands of square feet of office space, even if it could be hard to fill at times, provided profit.

I would be interested to see analysis shows the profits of a skyscraper over a lifetime compared to other options builders, developers, and companies could have pursued. Instead of building up in major cities, here are other options they could have pursued: building underground; building dense and wide buildings (imagine ones that cover several city blocks at a height of ten stories or so); constructing large buildings in other parts of the city and suburbs; and pursuing multiple business districts rather than centralized locations where everyone wants to gather.

Even if there was profit at stake, there is also the matter of the prestige of skyscrapers. Skyscrapers are important symbols in a city skyline. Were skyscrapers both profitable and status-enhancing or did the increased status mean that the absolute numbers did not matter quite as much?