View above Central Park looking south towards “Billionaire's Row” towers, with Midtown towers in background and various Financial District and Downtown Brooklyn Towers in far background.image © CityRealty

What would a city owned by the one-percent look like?  

New renderings for City Realty get us part way there, illustrating how Manhattan may appear in 2018. The defining feature will be a bumper crop of especially tall, slender skyscrapers piercing the skyline like postmodern boxes, odd stalagmites, and upside-down syringes. What they share in common is sheer unadulterated scale and a core clientele of uncompromising plutocrats.  

The renderings instill a depressing sense of inevitability toward projects that should have been fought off. I don’t just mean one or two of these luxury towers, but all of them. Some of these designs threaten to mar the skyline for generations. One 57 is supposed to look like a waterfall, altogether failing. The “Nordstrom Tower” emerging on West 57th Street is plain enough to complement the suburban mall ethos of its eponymous tenant. 125 Greenwich offers another variant on tall, thin, and bland. The placeless, over-scaled Hudson Yards complex earned itself the label “Hong Kong on the Hudson.”....Continue Reading

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