I have seen the future of Manhattan and it is this: an endless catenary of back to back bank branches covered in scaffolding.

Should you wish to regale yourself with a foretaste of what New York will soon become, you need only go to Broadway and 70th Street. Because of its intersection with Amsterdam Avenue, it has only three corners, each of which has a bank branch: Chase (covered in scaffolding), HSBC, and Wachovia. That missing corner, however, is more than made up for by the North Forkbranch 200 feet south at Broadway and 69th Street and by the scaffold-encrusted Ameritrade outlet (admittedly not quite a bank) 200 feet west at Amsterdam and 70th Street.

You can pretty much forget about convenience stores, newstores, bakeries, boutiques, restaurants, or anything else. Already the Upper East and West Sides are a paradise for people who want to do banking every moment of their waking lives. Even the once ubiquitous cell phone outlets and pharmacies are becoming rarer, as the gleaming, empty shells of new banks infiltrate our finest neighborhoods, driving up real estate prices — these banks can afford anything — and severely reducing the livability of our oldest residential areas.

Recently I saw a bus shelter with an advertisement for Bank of America’s nearly 400 branches in the New York area alone. Each branch was marked with a red dot. In some areas of Manhattan, the proliferation was so intense that the dots, like an infestation of coupling lady-bugs, coalesced into a massive, angry red ball. This is the future of New York.

“We all thought it would slow down but it hasn’t,” a broker at the prominent real estate firm of Cushman and Wakefield, Joanne Podell, said about the proliferation of banks in Manhattan.

One of the reasons that landlords are so eager to have banks is their financial solvency. “Banks are not going to default on their rent: they’re credit tenants,” according to Peter Slatin, author of the online real estate newsletter, the Slatin Report. “Banks will aggressively continue to acquire prime retail spaces at the expense of retail diversity in Manhattan. They’re generally willing to pay top dollar and even engage in bidding wars. That dampens the enthusiasm of other retailers,” he said.

To give you some quantifiable idea of national statistics, a report by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation states that there were 469 branch banks in New York County as of June 30, 2002. Four years later, in 2006, that number had jumped to 631, most of them in the borough of Manhattan. The entire report is available at fdic.gov/bank/analytical/f yi/2004/070904f yi.html, but here is a sample extract:

The number of institution charters has been declining since 1984, and in the decade between 1994 and 2003, dropped almost 29 percent. At the same time, however, the number of physical bank offices has been steadily increasing, driven by an increase in branches, [which] increased 15 percent. The growth in physical branches is all the more striking in that it occurred during a period of rapid technological advances that would appear to have diminished the need to use branches.

Especially with the proliferation of cash machines, the main rationale of the full-f ledged branch becomes ever harder to justify or explain. Given the soaring cost of commercial realestate in New York, and the relatively low traffic that most bank branches receive at most times of the day, one can only wonder what function these branches are supposed to serve.

To the best of my understanding, the primary benefit of these branches is to serve as permanent, three-dimensional billboards for the large banks that pay for them. Beyond that, there is surely an element of conspicuous consumption at the institutional level. Lodged deep within the ganglia of the average New Yorker is something that we might call “the real estate reflex,” that instinctive sense of how vastly expensive land is in New York, coupled with an inclination to assess people by where they live and how much rent they pay or how much their apartment cost them. And this instinct kicks into overdrive whenever New Yorkers see spaciously empty bank branches taking up not only huge swaths of real estate along our widest avenues, but corner lots, which are more expensive than others, on major thoroughfares such as 72nd and 86th streets. Somewhat tautologically, then, the main function of these banks is nothing other than to incarnate the message that they can afford to be there in the first place.

One of the few bright spots in this atrocious state of affairs is the new plan for 125th Street, which the Department of City Planning recently released and which it arrived at with the input of the locals. According to the director of the DCP, Amanda Burden, “In the 125th Street Special District, as part of our effort to encourage arts-, cultural- and entertainment-related uses to enliven the pedestrian experience on this distinctive corridor, we propose limiting the groundfloor frontage that banks may occupy in new buildings, while permitting them to do business on the second floor.” Similar bans have been enforced upstate in Rye and Bronxville.

Meanwhile, a secular desecration recently occurred at one of finest and oldest bank branches in the city, at 73rd Street and Madison Avenue. The Bank of New York, founded over 200 years ago by Alexander Hamilton, has just been taken over by Chase. Now the guiding aesthetic principle of the Bank of New York had long been a Federalistera décor, with red brick and white trim on the exterior and something approaching period furnishings within. Especially prominent were early American wallpapers depicting General Washington and other eminences of the time of Hamilton. It was all very charming.

No sooner had Chase taken over, however, than it summarily dispensed with the interior décor, replacing it with the garish, tasteless, neon-blue that is its signature. A pallid modern vocabulary took its place, together with glowing logos. Over time, such seemingly inconsequential acts of tastelessness and tackiness, quite aside from the exponential accumulation of bank branches, may coarsen beyond recall the urban fabric of New York.

jgardner@nysun.com