http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/po...k-and-billionaires-shadow?top-featured-2
Central Park, and the billionaires' shadow
By Jim Windolf
Nov. 22, 2013
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.....I was walking through Battery Park on my way to the Skyscraper Museum, founded in 1996 by Carol Willis, an architectural historian who teaches urban studies at Columbia University. She was leading a 3 p.m. tour of her latest exhibit, "Sky High: The Logic of Luxury," which focuses on the advent of tall, skinny buildings throughout Manhattan, with an emphasis on the ones at Central Park's south end.
My interest in the subject had been stoked by "Shadows Over Central Park," an Oct. 28 New York Times op-ed by Warren St. John. I was trying to determine for myself whether the shadows to be cast by the supertowers were worth worrying about—or was this just a micro-concern for urban wusses who like to complain about almost any change?
Willis is an energetic woman in her sixties. The color of her loose, curly hair is academic white. She launched into an enthusiastic, slam-bang history of skyscrapers for me and the five other men who had shown up before hitting her main topic: the new breed of unusually thin towers.
One of these is the nearly completed glass tower called One57, a 1,004-foot residential building at 157 West 57th Street. This is the structure made famous during superstorm Sandy, when a crane dangled from an upper story, causing an evacuation. It made news once again last month, when one of its apartments, a duplex penthouse, reportedly sold for more than $90 million. Gary Barnett's Extell Development Company is the builder, working from plans by Christian de Portzamparc, who won the 1994 Pritzker Prize for architecture.
The developer Harry Macklowe is deep into construction of another such building, 432 Park, not far to the east of One57; it will reach a height of 1,396 feet—technically higher than the new World Trade Center, which tops out at 1,368 feet, before its spire hits the magic number of 1,776.
Another residential tower—this one to come in at 1,350 feet, developed by Michael Stern's JDS Construction Group—will rise between the Macklowe and Barnett buildings. The Skyscraper Museum's exhibit features large-scale models of all three, and Willis seemed house-proud as she showed them off.
"Engineers could have built slender buildings for decades," she said. "In effect, there's nothing very special about the technology of them. It's the land value of New York, and it's New York's characteristic zoning and air-rights transfers of property that allow for the buildings to become very tall. And it's the view of Central Park that creates the high prices. When a developer thinks about his projects, he knows how much money he is going to make. Today we have an excited market, and these buildings are commanding $6,000 to $8,000—even $13,000—per square foot, sales prices that allow you take the next step in development logic of these buildings, which is the logic of luxury."
After the tour, Willis told me to think of the towers as special entities similar, in a way, to "rare flowers that can grow only in the Galapagos Islands," because a combination of special factors (an exuberant market, the rise of the billionaire class, the Central Park views) has made made them specific architectural creatures native to Manhattan. Buildings in Dubai, to which they are often compared, are actually fatter, Willis said; the only similar structure is in Hong Kong.
When I asked her, in a phone interview, about the issue of the Central Park shadows, she said: "It's really important to know how slender these buildings are. People imagine the shadows will be huge and overbearing, but the shadow for 111 57th Street is going to be 50 feet wide and it's going to travel very quickly. The super slender towers are a new form in the history of the skyscraper. Once we begin to appreciate that part of it, and get away from the outrage of the $90-million penthouses and the resentment that rich people are going to throw shadows onto Central Park, then they become something special, rather than just another mundane tower."
The next morning it was sunny and 36 degrees. I stood in Central Park to see One57's shadow with my own eyes. At 10:45 it lay diagonally across the park's southwest corner and it was 45 paces wide. A bearded British tourist stood within its bounds, aiming his camera at One57. He snapped a picture, and I asked him what he thought of it. "It's awesome, isn't it?" he said. I told him it had just been built, and he said, "Really?" To him, One57 was not an interloper. It belonged to the cityscape as much as the Essex House, with its charmingly cheesy sign.
An old man with a white beard sat on a smooth glacial rock in the sun. I watched him as he removed his jacket and lay down, now using the jacket as a blanket. He scratched himself and seemed to fall asleep. Ten minutes later, the shadow took him in. He sat up and looked around with an attitude of, "What the hell just happened?" He stood and walked north, where the One57 shadow was stretching into the Heckscher softball fields.
By itself, the shadow of One57 may be no big deal. But it struck me as unfair that, sometime next year, someone who paid $90 million for a glass-walled, floor-through residence will lounge in full sunshine while the old man will have less light of his own. And it will be more unfair when other shadows join that of One57 in a race across the park. In addition to the three buildings I have mentioned, Barnett (of Extell) hopes to build yet another needle tower, at the corner of Broadway and West 57th Street. And it has been reported that a sale is pending for the rather homely Helmsley Park Lane Hotel, which stands even closer to the park's edge, at 36 Central Park South. Steven Witkoff's Witkoff Group has offered some $660 million for it.
The logic of luxury, followed to its extreme, would suggest that Witkoff tear down the 46-story Park Lane and replace it with a needle tower capable of fetching, oh, $8-13,000 per square foot. (Less clear is whether he can.) But the more certain thing is just down the block, at 220 Central Park South: Madave Properties, a partnership of Steven Roth's Vornado Realty Trust and Veronica Hackett's Clarett Group (these names!), has emerged from a legal duel with Barnett and hopes to put up a slim condominium of its own, at 920 feet, to be designed by Robert A.M. Stern, the architect of the nearby 15 Central Park West. Real-estate gods willing, a total of six towers will stand between the sun and the park—meaning six shadows will creep across the rocks and grass.
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