A time when Midtown South was exactly what it still is today: a neighborhood of old low-rise office buildings, with small floor sizes and lots of interior columns, poor lighting, low ceilings, and woefully inadequate infrastructure to support the demands of today’s office tenants without serious upgrades. The difference between the old Midtown South and the new Midtown South is, in large measure, the rent landlords charge.

The neighborhood is considered cool by its tenants—the tech and new-media world—and they are, in every sense of the vernacular, cool. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg changed our world. And they opened the floodgates of invention in every realm of communication, and those ideas became companies, and those companies need office space, lots of it.

Before those companies go public or join the ranks of the Fortune 500 and take office space Uptown in the high-rent Midtown business district, they need smaller, cheaper office space with good access to transportation. Welcome to Midtown South. Where the amount of office space is finite, where your friends who started their companies before you did already are, where you will pay more than they do because there is less space left to rent but where you’ll still pay a lot less than Midtown, and where you can be considered as cool as your neighbors and other firms in your industry. That is, of course, until they depart for bigger and better digs, or simply depart.

It will be interesting to see whether Midtown South has the legs to sustain what the real estate industry has dubbed a trend. For now it’s still a fad. Five years from now—when, maybe, plans for making Bloomberg’s up-zoning of Midtown to raze and rebuild our antiquated building stock in that market may actually be on the boards—remembering Midtown South’s coolness likely will garner the same blank stares as other fads that came and went. All fads come to an end. Some move from trend to establishment and some just fade off into memory. Only time will tell.

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