[NYguy]

Quote from the One Wall Street article…


https://www.ft.com/content/4e5af632-...f-ed926b22c8df

Edwin Heathcote
2/11/22

One Wall Street’s change in destiny is being guided by Harry Macklowe, the developer who has set fashions in New York real estate for decades, from persuading Steve Jobs to build the “glass cube” Apple Store beneath his GM Building to his stark skinnyscraper at 432 Park.

…..Macklowe’s other big game-changer rises high above Midtown Manhattan, a more traditional condo district, at 432 Park, designed by Rafael Viñoly. There have been mutterings about creaking walls and leaks (“Teething problems” Macklowe says). And supertall, superslender towers will sway in the wind — though after walking up there from Wall Street on a blustery day, I didn’t feel a thing.

One of the first pencil towers by Central Park, this cool, abstract, gridded building was always the best of them, at least in looks: enigmatic, blank, an existential extrusion of pure wealth. Just as much as the conversion of Wall Street from banks to condos articulates changing patterns of power in the city, so 432 illustrates the economics of building a slender tower which would never previously have been economical. Taken together, the pencil towers are like a bar chart of extreme wealth disparity, casting long shadows over the public park. “Over the past 15 years a few of us were early to recognise that we could build tall and get better views, more air, more beautiful buildings,” Macklowe says.

Is he conscious of legacy? “No” he says. “The developer is just a footnote. But I’ve been lucky enough to create and I can be proud of the buildings. I’ve enjoyed it.”

And regrets? “Only that my parents were not alive to see that I had built a tower in New York taller than the Empire State.”