THE GREAT MANHATTAN BOOM

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MANHATTAN, written off long ago by city planners as a dying city because of its jammed-in skyscrapers and canyonlike streets, has defied and amazed its critics with a phenomenal postwar building boom. In the short space of seven years, the big city has grown so fast that if all the new buildings were piled up, they would form a man-made mountain more than twice as tall as Mount Everest; Americans could soar 13 miles high in an elevator.

By last week 965 new buildings, costing an estimated $417 million, had been built, 32 of them this year. And still another 94, worth about $125 million, are under construction.

To make room for expanding old firms and new ones coming to New York, Manhattan's builders have put up office buildings with 7,300,000 sq. ft. of new space, enough to cover 152 football fields. In the rush (one building, 99 Park Avenue, took just 6 1/2 days for the aluminum outside walls), architecture has taken a back seat. To conform to zoning restrictions, most of the buildings rise in a series of recessed blocks, like Babylonian ziggurats and great wedding cakes. A few, like the U.N.'s stone and glass sandwich and Lever House's glass slab, have broken the pattern. But in midtown Manhattan, the wedding cake leads the field.

In addition to skyscrapers, great housing projects have gone up in Manhattan with as many as 2,000 apartments apiece. New York City's Housing Authority has put up 130 buildings (15,679 apartments), has 29 more under construction. Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. has built three new housing projects of its own; other private operators have built everything from swank $1,000-a-month penthouses to $32-a-month apartments. Altogether, they give Manhattan almost enough new bedrooms, baths, and kitchens to house Nevada's population (160,000).

When will the boom end? Probably not for a long time; at the last count, only a fraction of 1% of the available office space was unoccupied. But people who remember Frank Lloyd Wright's prophecy that cities will die and grass grow in the streets are worried about the new office buildings choking the midtown area. Grass may never grow on the streets, but it may some day grow on the roofs of the cars caught in the daily 5 o'clock traffic jam.

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