Posted Oct 8, 2024, 9:51 PM
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New Yorker for life
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Join Date: Jul 2001
Location: Borough of Jersey
Posts: 52,964
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https://www.archpaper.com/2024/10/ma...0-rockefeller/
MADGI and THG Creative complete Skylift, a moving observation platform at 30 Rockefeller Plaza
By Claudia Yoon
October 8, 2024
https://www.travelandleisure.com/top...action-8720787
I've Been to Every NYC Observation Deck — Here's Why the Newest One Is My Favorite
Hovering 30 feet above the 70th floor of 30 Rockefeller Center, I felt like I found the new epicenter of Manhattan.
By Rachel Chang
October 7, 2024
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Over my 21 years living in the New York City area, I’ve spent a lot of time at Rockefeller Center at the bottom of the Rock. One of my first internships in 2003 was in its 1271 Avenue of the Americas building, where I learned about all its underground subway passageways. Later, I worked across the street from Radio City Music Hall for four years, grabbing lunch and coffee from the basement level’s eateries daily. In recent years, I’ve even spent the night on its sidewalk camping out in the standby line for Saturday Night Live tickets. In many ways, Rock Center has always felt like my home away from home, a place I look at with comfort and familiarity.
Early into my time here, the 22-acre complex between Fifth and Sixth Avenues and 49th and 51st Streets, opened a rebranded version of its most elevated attraction, Top of the Rock in 2005, inviting visitors up a 45-second elevator ride to open-air observation decks on its 67th, 69th, and 70th floors right smack dab in the middle of midtown Manhattan.
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.....with four other sky-high viewpoints in New York City — the Empire State Building and One World Observatory, plus the more recent Edge NYC, which opened in 2020, and Summit One Vanderbilt in 2021 — I never felt the need to join tourists for a viewpoint above a part of town I knew so well.
But a few months back, Top of the Rock announced its newest attraction, providing an extra boost on a cake topper from its top floor. Called Skylift, the open-air circular platform rises 30 feet above the rooftop and spins 360 degrees for a panoramic view. Luckily, I was able to snag a test spin the day before it opened to the public on Oct. 1.
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Without a tinge of a jolt, the platform started rising, so gently I didn’t even notice at first. After all, I was completely engrossed in my surroundings. Instinctively, I started to turn, taking in every angle. But then the platform started rotating. I didn’t need to do any of the work. Skylift would show me the city — all I had to do was take it in.
I felt like I was floating among the city’s greatest hits. Facing north, Central Park rolled out in front of me like a crisp green carpet. As we spun counterclockwise, familiar skyscrapers in Columbus Circle and Times Square I knew from ground level took a new form, as I had now risen to their heights. Then when my viewpoint turned south, we reached the crown jewel, the view of the Empire State Building. From this perspective, 900 feet in the sky, I imagined that if King Kong had been hanging off of the tower, we would have been exactly eye to eye — if only he paused to take in the view. But that’s how immersed within the city the Skylift put me.
While other observation points had taken me up to see the skyline, here I felt that I was a part of it. Skylift blends in seamlessly with 30 Rock’s Art Deco architecture from its 1933 opening but adds a modern-day twist with 96 LED pixel flutes that can radiate with colors from the base that lift into the sky. In the middle of the platform, there's also a speaker blasting music from its center, and a camera that takes a panoramic photo.
And that wasn’t it. In the middle of the three-and-a-half-minute ride, our guide said to look down at our feet. Suddenly the frosted floor turned transparent. Not for the weak of heart, it provided an adrenaline boost on top of the feeling of flying above the city, exactly what the intent was.
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