Who’s afraid of “supertowers” near Central Park?
Most of the city’s inflexible preservationists, ivory-tower urbanists, community “activists,” pandering politicians, architectural critics and architects themselves, except for those fortunate enough to design them.
The five ultra-tall towers rising or planned along 57th Street and Central Park South were conceived to sell megabucks “homes” to globetrotting gazillionaires.
On Wednesday, Manhattan Community Board 5 is sponsoring a “town hall meeting” at the New York Public Library Celeste Bartos Forum to discuss the scourge. The event flyer mentions, among other concerns, public space lost to “real estate encroachment,” shadows, traffic and “dangers to landmark buildings.”
Those who’d normally file lawsuits aimed at blocking the rise of 1,000-foot-plus towers a few blocks south of Central Park are particularly apoplectic because there was nothing they could do to stop them.
None required zoning changes, tax credits, special permits, landmark-demolition exemptions or size bonuses granted in exchange for public amenities.
Developers simply spent years and fortunes assembling sites and air rights to build as large and as tall as legally permissible without public approvals. That leaves the haters essentially baying at the moon.
The city’s most widely read architectural critics have unsurprisingly ganged up on the projects. The New York Times’ Michael Kimmelman calls for new zoning to prohibit future atrocities and condemns the ones underway as a “clutch of preening runway models, super-tall and skinny, the expensive playthings of Russian oligarchs and Chinese tycoons.”
New York magazine’s Justin Davidson wittily described the “billionaires’ beanstalks” as “lining up for Central park views like an NBA team craning to peer at a new iPhone.”
Just how objectionable, though, are the new skyscrapers to an unschooled, but reasonably alert, lover of the cityscape like myself?
Had today’s NIMBY culture been around in 1930, the Empire State Building — immensely taller and “out of context” with everything around it — would not have gotten out of the ground.
The new supertower field might or might not include another masterpiece. But as a lifelong New Yorker who hates the MetLife (former Pan Am) Building, laments the monotony of reflective glass curtain walls, and seethes to this day over the demolition of the original Penn Station, I find little to fear, and much to like, about the new giants.
Studies suggesting they’ll plunge Central Park into permanent Stygian gloom are based on December-at-4 p.m., worst-case moments and ignore that offending shadows will be even thinner than the towers’ pencil-thin profiles.
The only landmarks “danger” issue, meanwhile, seems to be that planned 115 W. 57th St. will slightly cantilever over the adjacent Art Students League, at a point several hundred feet above its roof.
It’s entirely possible that one or more of the new giants, all designed by distinguished architects, will deserve future landmark status — a truth to which most preservationists seem oblivious.
Far from forming a thicket in the sky, the detested 57th Street Four will stand fewer than one per block between Park Avenue and Broadway. They will lend a more distinct identity to the great street, which west of Fifth Avenue has devolved into a hodgepodge with too many vacant stores.
Unlike pedestrian-hostile setback towers such as 9 W. 57th St., the new crop humanely line up with their neighbors at sidewalk level, preserving the all-important “street wall.”
Unlike in London, where foreign zillionaires turn out the lights on whole blocks when they buy houses for annual drop-ins, our high-rise enclaves present a friendly, public-welcoming face. One57 will be anchored by a Park Hyatt Hotel with restaurants and lounges open to all. The city’s first Nordstrom department store will fill the first nine floors of 1,550-foot-tall 115 W. 57th St., and more stores are planned for 432 Park Ave. and 107 W. 57th St.
Only two of the giants are visible as of yet: Extell’s One57 (West 57th Street between Sixth and Seventh avenues) and CIM/Harry Macklowe’s 432 Park Avenue (on East 57th Street between Park and Madison avenues).
Poor One57, the pygmy of the lot at a mere 1,005 feet tall, is the haters’ favorite punching bag, due to the fact that it was first out of the ground and is nearest to completion.
Davidson calls the tower designed by Christian de Portzamparc “preening but graceless . . . a stolid arrangement of beveled blocks upholstered in silk and satin stripes.”
Yet to this ignoramus, it’s quite arresting now that most of the scaffolding is down. It flatters the Midtown firmament from the Central Park Reservoir where I jog. And from a high floor of a nearby hotel, viewed from the southwest, its confident verticality, softened by a gently sloped crown, seems almost demure.
I can’t wait to see more of Rafael Viñoly-designed 432 Park Ave., which is not yet halfway up. Its symphony of squares — the tower’s form itself, echoed in a pattern of 10-by-10-foot windows rising without interruption nearly 100 stories on its concrete face — promises an unthreatening, classical monumentality.
New projects may indeed block views and “overwhelm” a lower-rise street or neighborhood. But everyone choosing to live in Manhattan, not only in the privileged zone near Central Park, knows it’s a risk going in.
A huge Memorial Sloan Kettering cancer facility will soon blot out the remaining East River view from my First Avenue home. A few years ago, a new apartment tower across the street wiped out a larger slice of river. But I accept them as trade-offs: They bring to my neighborhood more talent, energy and prosperity.
The “billionaires’ beanstalks” won’t make the rest of us wealthy. But however counter-intuitively, they make the city a richer place for everyone.