Maybe tomorrow I'll talk about one I rather like architecturally, were it not going up where it is but perhaps somewhere else, but for today, an explanation. We are in the throes of the Super Slender Skyscrapers. And if one looks to the southern perimeter of Central Park right now, from Connecticut for that matter, one views the full-throttle frenzied rise towards the sun.
Instead of the commercial spaces and corporate icons skyscrapers once served as, these skinny, sometimes anorexic-looking structures serve the very few. Almost exclusively residential towers, they are homes for the extremely wealthy and ominously, investments for the stealthy realty vultures, those who either individually or through some shady syndicate buy properties purely to flip for profit. Frankly, neither of those demographics add much to the quality of NYC. The extremely wealthy tend to use Manhattan apartments as pied-a-terres, and spend their capital, their time, cash, and loyalties, in the neighborhoods of their larger homes elsewhere. And the investors don't even live here at all, adding nothing to the tax base, to retail, to services. Those apartments are like vacuums, sucking in money, and falsely driving up values for the rest of us trying to live in a city that once truly valued creativity as the heartbeat of any great metropolis.
I see these buildings going up and I think, "No actors can ever live here again. What will all these people do at night?"
And worse, they are being built on the very threat they themselves are producing. Here's how it works.
We do actually have zoning laws. They get chipped away, but we do have them. And most of them have to do with height:footprint ratio. A building can go taller if it's footprint is smaller. It was all about sunlight, ever since The Equitable Building went up in lower Manhattan in 1911, rising 40 stories without a setback and effectively removing sunshine from that block ever since.
So slender buildings buy you height. And height buys you more money in a residential building. Despite the vertigo you may feel looking at renderings of these towers, most people will pay much more to be closer to the clouds.
But here's where it turns decidedly ugly.
There are no more big plots of land in Manhattan. And there is a width:height ratio as well. What we think of conventionally as skyscrapers typically have a w:h ratio of around 1:7.
432 Park Avenue has a w:h ratio of 1:15.
And, pictured here in a computer-generated image, the most egregious sky gobbler to date, 111 West 57th Street will have a gluttonous w:h ration of 1:24. I'm not sure you've ever heard me turn ugly on NYC. I'm a pretty loyal cheerleader. I loathe this building. And like it's sickly stick-like siblings, it does exactly what the zoning laws were designed to prohibit: It blocks the sun, casting shadows on Central Park and up to the center of Central Park.
How can these developers grab so much air?
They buy the air of their neighbors. You are a museum on West 53rd Street. You house the second greatest collection of art in NYC. You are struggling to survive. The developers of the property next to yours offer you a hundred-plus million dollars or so for the aggregate air over your building to add to their air. You can never go higher now. You sold your air. And you can blame MoMA the day you envision the trucks carting the van Goghs and Monets away. I blame the developers.
They rake over the showing bones of the starving cultural institutions whose very mandates are being threatened by creating a city that increasingly makes it impossible to live here as an artist. One can just look where they are popping up like moles, around the museums, theaters, and churches that will afford the best Central Park views. Just typing that sentence made me feel like the smarmiest marketer that ever slunk around Madison Avenue.
It's always been hard to be an artist in NYC, for sure. It has never quite been impossible. I think we are making it impossible.
And these spikes on the landscape go straight through my heart.
