Sky’s the limit: New towers for the rich soar in New York

NEW YORK - Here's how a 1932 guide to Manhattan describes the view of Central Park from the 43-story Essex House: "an unbroken vista - unequaled anywhere in the city. ... Few apartment buildings in the world are more ideally located."

Today, here's how visitors typically describe the park view from One57, an apartment building a block south of the Essex House and more than twice its height: "Wow!"

The same can be said of the building itself. One57 exemplifies a new type of skyscraper - very tall, improbably slender, ostentatiously opulent - that is reshaping a famous skyline composed mostly of bulky office buildings.

One such apartment tower under construction, 432 Park Avenue, will have a top floor higher than the Empire State Building's observation deck. Another will have a top floor higher than any in One World Trade Center, which is officially (by virtue of its spire) the nation's tallest building.

The 432 Park penthouse has sold for $95 million; two duplex apartments at One57, now nearing completion, also are under contract, each for more than $90 million. Even a studio apartment on a lower floor at 432 Park (designed for staff - a maid or butler) costs $1.59 million.

Such prices seem incongruous in a nation that has yet to recover from the 2008 financial crisis; that lost its lead in skyscraper construction decades ago; and that suffered a terrorist attack in 2001 that seemed to dampen enthusiasm for high-rise living.

And these mansion-size apartments with 30-mile views will go unoccupied much or most of the time. Not since the Gilded Age, when Vanderbilts and Astors spent only a few months each summer at their marble Newport "cottages," will so much expensive space be so little inhabited.

But what's most striking about these towers is their shape. The boxy old World Trade Center twin towers had a ratio of base width to height of 1-to-7 (209 feet-to-1,368 feet); an apartment house about to begin construction next to the Steinway piano showroom on 57th Street will be a feathery 1-to-23.

That kind of skinniness, also found in skyscrapers in Hong Kong and Dubai, is shifting the focus of high-rise construction. Twenty years ago, only five of the world's 100 tallest buildings were at least partly residential, compared with 31 today. They include the Princess Tower in Dubai, at 1,358 feet the world's tallest apartment house.

These towers are shaped by their clientele: a transnational nouveau riche looking for a second (or third or fourth) home. Having made fortunes in nations less regulated economically and less stable politically than the USA, these buyers want a safe investment as much as, or more than, shelter. And they don't want to pay New York resident income taxes.

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Sky's the limit: New towers for the rich soar in New York