At Topos, we are fascinated by exactly this type of variation and believe it provides a powerful view into the culture of a location. While data sources like the United States Census are useful for understanding broad demographic trends over decades, they give little insight into what defines the moment-to-moment culture of a city, a neighborhood, a street corner.

Walter Benjamin at work

Inspired by thinkers like Walter Benjamin, who, in his unfinished Arcades Project examined subjects as varied as fashion, construction materials, poetry, lighting, and mirrors in order to understand Paris in the 19th century, we are fascinated by the way seemingly simple, ubiquitous subjects like the coffee we drink or the concerts we go to define a place. However, unlike Benjamin, we are interested in constructing this understanding in a way that can dynamically scale across the globe, allowing us to understand how different locations relate to one another, and how locations evolve in real time. To achieve this, we use data from dozens of different sources and techniques from a wide range of technologies and disciplines including computer vision, natural language processing, statistics, machine learning, network science, topology, architecture and urbanism.

In this article we apply this multidisciplinary, multidimensional approach to pizza in order to understand what pizza can tell us about New York City, and — conversely — what other aspects of life in New York City can tell us about pizza.

Pizza History

Lombardi’s Pizza, established 1905 and still in action (credit: Ephemeral New York)

New York-style pizza, like bagels and the Statue of Liberty, has its roots in a foreign country. In particular, the original New York pie was closely based on the traditional pizza of Naples — known as Neapolitan Pizza — a small, round pie topped simply with tomato sauce and mozzarella cheese.

Pizza arrived in New York with the waves of Italian immigrants who came in the late 19th and early 20th century. In 1905 Lombardi’s became the first official NYC pizzeria when Gennaro Lombardi asked his employee Antonio Totonno to start making pizzas in the bakery oven in the back of his grocery store. Originally a to-go business, customers would buy whole pizzas at 5 cents a pie. When pizza sales inevitably eclipsed the rest of the grocery store’s business, Lombardi’s transitioned to running as a pizzeria full time. Lombardi’s also started the New York tradition of eating individual pizza slices; when customers couldn’t afford a whole pizza, Lombardi’s would sell slices by the inch depending on what the customer could pay.

Pizza in Italy was traditionally cooked in wood-fired ovens. Wood was harder to come by in NYC, so most of the first New York pizzerias used coal-fired ovens, a trend that continued as pizza’s popularity grew. Coal-fired ovens helped take pizza from its Neapolitan form — thin-crusted, lightly topped, individually sized and eaten with a knife and fork — to the Neapolitan-American style: larger (~16”) pies, that lacked the chewy center of wood-fired Neapolitan pies.

A slice of NYC pizza from…Ray’s… ;)

The true New York Style pizza wasn’t born until Manhattan banned coal ovens to limit the amount of heat they generated, forcing pizzerias to start using gas. Gas ovens cooked pizza more evenly than coal, unlocking new worlds of form and texture; pizzas could now be as large as 18” in diameter, enabling division into 8 triangular slices, and could support significantly more mozzarella cheese. Thus was the NYC style slice born.

This foundational cultural invention has happily remained ubiquitous throughout the city. At the same time, pizza culture in NYC has evolved in myriad ways over the past 100 years. Wood fired ovens are making a comeback; vegan slices are on the rise; new school ‘Brooklyn style pizza’ pioneered by restaurants like Roberta’s and Emmy Squared have influenced topping approaches not just in NYC but around the world — never again will slices be safe from honey and jalapeño peppers.

Pizza in New York has not evolved in isolation. Despite its global influence, the pizza scene in New York continues to absorb a variety of ‘imports’: pizzerias, toppings, pairings, and pie style. These imports range from national chains like Domino’s (established in Ypsilanti, Michigan in 1960) to burrata cheese (from Murgia in southern Italy); the popular pairing of pizza with chicken wings is also an import, albeit from another part of New York State (Buffalo); In addition to American pepperoni, pizza is now topped with a variety of cured meats from around the world: speck, prosciutto di Parma, sopressata, chorizo, and jamón ibérico have all found their way onto New York pies. In this sense, New York Pizza has become a forum for cultural exchange — a blank canvas where contemporary pizzaiolos can express themselves and the influences that formed them — a theme well captured by the inaugural episode of Ugly Delicious.

Pizza Dollars

Gold covered truffle slices aside, people often think of New York pizza as an inexpensive meal of convenience. The meteoric rise of the dollar slice over the past 20 years supports this perception; yet the economics of NYC pizza is not always as expected. For example, depending on location, plain cheese pies from national chains like Papa John’s can range from $8.99 (Bay Ridge) to $18.99 (Springfield Gardens), surpassing even nationally revered pies like Robertas’ $16 Margherita (Bushwick).

The Pizza Principle, graphed

It’s impossible to bring up the economics of NYC pizza without mentioning the delightfully titled “Pizza Principle”, a theory first proposed in 1980 by Eric Bram which observes the surprisingly tight correlation between a slice of pizza and the base fare for a subway ride. From 1960 to as recently as 2014 the principle has largely stood up, but at $2.50, the 2018 mean price for a slice has yet to catch up with 2015’s subway fare hike from $2.50 to $2.75.

Pizza locations in relation to walking time to subway entrances

There’s also a strong geographic connection between the subway and pizza: Of all the pizzerias in New York City, 79% (1438 / 2290) are within a 10 minute walk of a subway entrance. Looking only at pizzerias that sell individual slices strengthens the connection — we find 82% are within a 10 minute walk of a subway entrance. This relationship speaks to the foot traffic required to sell a whole pie by the slice to different customers, a condition that becomes even more geographically specific when considering the economic miracle of invention that is the NYC dollar slice.

Dollar Pizza

The dollar slice is a phenomenon largely unique to New York City (with some notable exceptions). Dollar slice pizzerias started popping up along 6th Avenue in Midtown in the early 2000s, gaining popularity in the wake of the 2008 recession. Despite 2012’s price wars which saw slices dip as low as 75¢, the $1 price point has stuck around even as the economy has recovered and prices for other things (like rents) have gone up.

The business model for dollar slices is precarious. Most dollar pizzerias source their ingredients from wholesaler Restaurant Depot, and use the cheapest low-moisture mozzarella (around $1.50 per pound), tomato sauce, and flour. Factoring in the cost of ingredients, rent and labor, the average pie costs $6 to make, or 75 cents per slice. Charging a dollar per slice leaves a slim profit of 25 cents, making one component of the business model — high sales volume — critical. Dollar slice pizzerias need to sell around 200 pies (1600 slices) a day to remain viable; some sell as many as 450 pizzas a day. In contrast, pizzerias that sell slices for $2.50 can remain profitable selling 50 pies a day.

90% of dollar slice pizzerias are within 3 minutes of a subway entrance

Given the high volume of customers needed for dollar pizzerias to stay afloat, it is unsurprising that they tend to be located in areas with large transient populations. The relation between subway entrances and dollar slices is the strongest yet — 98% of dollar slices are within a 10 minute walk of a subway entrance. However, some neighborhoods like the financial district have a conspicuous lack of dollar slices despite a large daytime population and proximity to a subway; conversely the East Village has a large concentration of dollar slices with a low daytime population. Looking at the nighttime population of the city helps explains these discrepancies: neighborhoods like the financial district dramatically slow down at night (prime pizza time) while the East Village heats up.

Left: daytime population map. Right: nighttime population map encompasses East Village dollar slice locations

Dollars and Truffles

Despite the obvious economic value proposition, and clear relation to daytime and nighttime population, dollar slices say surprisingly little about long term neighborhood economic indicators like median household income or average house value. The daytime and nighttime populations that pass through midtown Manhattan, where the highest concentration of dollar slices occur, is radically different from the resident population, with correspondingly different income brackets.