New York Times' football field measure - but how many WTCs, Maine plazas?

The New York Times reports this week that "There are 920 football fields of available office space in Manhattan." Now we're all in favor of abandoning the olde englisch weights and measures like feet and pounds and acres and miles, none of which are logically related to one another.  And it would obviously be too much to expect Granny Times to move to a grown-up system like metrics in her dotage.

But the usual measure of office space is thousands of square feet in the US and square meters outside it.

Who knows what the Times means by a "football field" of office space?

For starters, what kind of football are they talking about. 

To help anyone who wants to make sense of the New York Times report we did some research.

The most common kind of football, soccer, is played on a field 100m x 64m or 109yd x 70yd (FIFA standard)":

7654yd2, 68,890 sq ft, 1.58acres, 6400m2

American NFL football is played on a field a bit longer but a lot narrower - 110m x 48.4m, 360ft x 160ft, 120 yards x 53.33 yards:

6400yd2, 57,600 sq ft, 1.32 acres, 5351m2

Then there's rugby played on a 100m x 70m field:

8372yd2, 75,350 sq ft, 1.73 acres, 7000m2

Of course the Times could be thinking of Irish football especially since their reporter has the name Haughney.

Trouble is the Irish are very casual about playing field dimensions.

Irish or gaelic football is played on a field that varies between 130m and 145m in length and 80m and 90m in width.

That could be as large as:

15,600yd2, 140,470 sq ft, 3.25 acres, 13,050m2

The smallest Irish fields are at least bigger than the wimpy sized NFL 'mini-football' fields and FIFA soccer football fields for that matter:

12,440yd2, 112.000 sq ft, 2.57 acres, 10,400m2

Real football fields

Australian football or 'footy' fields are the world's biggest in length and width and can be 185m each way. But they are circular or oval shaped.

Ovals are beyond our powers of mathematical calculation but we do know about 'pie' so a circular Aussie Rules field of 185m diameter will be:

32,132yd2, 289,200 sq ft, 6.64 acres, 26,780m2

So the New York Times could be telling us that Manhattan's vacant office space ranges anywhere between a mere 4.23 million sq m or 45 million sq ft if they are thinking of the wee NFL fields, or as much as 24.8 million sq m or 266 million sq ft if they are thinking of the expansive 'downunner' fields.

WTC twin towers

Another measure of office space might be the twin towers of the late World Trade Center.

They contained 350k sq m or 3.8m sq ft of office space each.

The Times could be saying the vacant space of Manhattan is as little as 12 WTC towers or as much as 71 WTC towers depending on which brand of football the New York Times has in mind.

How many Maine Toll Plazas

Of course another measure for the New York Times to use for its square-foot challenged readers could be a new Maine Toll Plaza (MTB) as proposed by HNTB.

That's 325ft (99m) wide by 8,000ft (2340m) long. It's only a tad less complicated than an oval Aussie rules field to get an area because of the tapers, but we put an HNTB-MTP at around 2.15m sq ft or 200k m2.

If we've got this right the HNTB-MTP is 57% of the square footage of a WTC tower or 37 NFL fields,  31 soccer fields, 28 rugby fields, 15 to 19 Gaelic fields, and a mere 8 Aussie fields.

Maine Turnpike Authority can reassure the US Army Corps of Engineers that the proposed new toll plaza is only a negligible percent of vacant office space in Manhattan.

see http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/08/nyregion/08commercial.html?ref=business

POSTSCRIPT: deeper research shows we seem to have exaggerated the size of an Aussie football field a little.... but still it's the biggest.

A correspondent from Australia points out Australian Rules fields are sized the way they are because they're played on venerable cricket fields. Otherwise unused in the winter, cricket grounds and stadiums become football grounds in cricket's off-season. TOLLROADSnews 2010-01-08