This month, my wife and I revisited New York City for the first time in over twenty years. I grew up in a town that lies an hour north of the city; many of my childhood notions about New York and cities in general involved the Manhattan skyline. Returning home after a road trip to another part of the country, a glimpse of the skyline offered the “welcome back” moment, the moment that told me that the immense, audacious place still existed, that it was still ready to cast its challenges at my feet whenever I was ready to receive them. The skyline, those bristling clusters of up-thrust towers, was a good stand-in for the city as a whole.
Thus, I suppose it was natural to find myself looking for that skyline as we approached the city from the south on the Jersey turnpike. As my wife drove and I navigated toward the city, the views were fleeting until we reached the on-ramp to the George Washington bridge at the top of the Palisades. There before us were the familiar, immense buildings: from the lower tip of Manhattan, the glass skin of the new “One World Trade” glittered through the autumn haze, rising above the other downtown buildings in a way I found gratifying. At mid-town, the Empire State Building looked like the Empire State of memory, as stolid and massive as ever, if a little frumpy.
What surprised and confused me about the current skyline were several new structures interposing themselves between me and the Empire State building. As filmy and unsubstantial-looking as filaments, they rose to impossible heights, towering above the Empire State building. Radio towers? In Manhattan? No, I later discovered, these are a new type of residential apartment buildings informally known as “Pencil Towers.” Only as wide as one luxury apartment, the tallest of these residential buildings “Central Park Tower” at 225 West 57th Street rises to a height 1550 feet, several hundred feet above the Empire State Building.
An architect friend of mine firmly believes that these buildings add nothing to their surrounding neighborhoods. The apartments are owned mostly by non-resident investors – folks who park their excess wealth in these buildings, but live elsewhere, leaving these buildings feeling strangely empty and zombie-like. Few of them have attracted ground-floor retail businesses or services that could serve their neighborhoods. Too bad for the city, I thought.
A more positive change in the Manhattan skyline is a new element of architectural whimsey: I noticed at least one building near the village that looks like a deliberately misaligned stack of jewelry boxes. I was reminded of the jenga tower-building game I play with my granddaughter – the one that ends when a tower of wooden blocks begins to sway, collapsing across the table to the sounds of our laughter. Of course, new materials and techniques make this type of design safe, so I assume the uber-wealthy residents have no reason to fear such a catastrophe. The whimsey of these buildings is a nice change to the city’s projected personality: a New York City that can laugh, or at least chuckle, at itself. Who’d have thunk it?
