139 New York Skyscrapers Are Taller Than The Tallest Building Ever Torn Down
Hi folks! I’m sending this edition of The Black Umbrella to draw your attention to an article I wrote about why a Lower East Side co-op turned down $54 million. First, though, here’s a little essay about something pretty nuts that came up while I was reporting that piece.
Part 1: What Goes Up
New York City changes every day. When those changes are bad, it's nice to know that nothing's permanent.
Take, for instance, the row of skinny new towers extending like middle fingers up from 57th Street: Deep in the ashy soul of every New Yorker is a hopeful ember that believes that someday, the city will wake up and snap each of them off at the knuckle.
Let me stamp on that ember. Massively tall luxury condos, of the type that seems to sprout in a new neighborhood every time you look up from your phone, are exempted from the exigencies of urban creative destruction by virtue of a simple fact of engineering: No one really knows how to tear them down.
New York City has, in fact, built itself into a corner. At this very moment, there are 139 buildings standing in the five boroughs that are, or will be upon completion, taller than the tallest building ever torn down in human history.
The techniques one would employ to knock them down are, at the very least, unproven. The old slam-a-huge-goddamn-wrecking-ball-into-the-side method is out, of course. Even if you found a wrecking ball of sufficient hugeness, the resultant mess would lay waste to entire city blocks. The blow-the-goddamn-thing-up method is, for similar reasons, also not an option. In Japan, a number of destruction firms specialize in taking down tall buildings piece by piece, either from the top down or, using a system of jacks, from the bottom up, which is cool and all, but the tallest building ever demolished Japan was 462 feet tall, or a third the height of one of the 57th Street towers.
The tallest building ever torn down in the world was the exquisite 614-foot-tall lower Broadway headquarters of a sewing machine company, which U.S. Steel demolished in 1968 to make way a for a black metal box. In the years since, in the entire world, the only taller buildings to come down have been the two towers of the World Trade Center. Next year, JP Morgan Chase is going to set a new teardown record, demolishing its 707-foot-tall headquarters on Park Avenue. Yet even that building is relatively short by contemporary New York City standards: It’s only the 75th-tallest building in town.
Among the 74 irreversibly-tall skyscrapers are the luxury condos going up on 57th Street; the still-under-construction luxury condo on the Lower East Side with its own pet spa and “sunken tranquility garden”; the Frank Gehry-designed luxury condo looming over the Brooklyn Bridge; that luxury condo in Tribeca with the floors that stick out on the sides; Trump’s luxury condo near the U.N.; and a new luxury condo in Hudson Yards where there’s a penthouse on the market for, I shit you not, $32 million.
There’s something vertigo-inducing about this predicament. The city is like a climber in the middle of a rock face with no way down; a sailor in a dinghy being blown out to sea. Each new tower ratchets New York one click farther towards the day when it’s all just one luxury condo tower after another, from the Staten Island Ferry terminal at Whitehall Street up to Columbia’s football field on the Harlem River.
Real estate developers like to tell us that the urban landscape is fluid, and that change in the city is healthy and good. The neighborhoods and places you love may tomorrow be destroyed, but that's life in the big city, and it's the same all around. Developers could come for your favorite movie theater, or your house of worship, or your apartment building, or your basketball arena. Everything is on the table.
No one ever said that there's anything fair about real estate. But by putting up these towers for the ultra-rich that no one knows how to take down, the developers are cheating their way out of the rules that they exist to enforce, and undermining the basic laws of physics and capitalism that undergird the whole proposition.
What goes up must come down. Except for luxury condo towers. Which are forever. Whether you like it or not.
(All building height data is from The Skyscraper Center, an incredible website from the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat. See also their recent report on the world’s tallest demolished buildings.)
Part 2: Words of Advice
Watch this: “Minnie the Moocher,” Betty Boop/Cab Calloway (1932).
And this: “Mierda de Ciudad,” Kortatu (1986).
I’d also suggest that you read “The Salinger Contract,” a delightful novel by (my Forward colleague) Adam Langer.
And finally, try the grilled cheese at B&H Dairy on 2nd Avenue.
Part 3: My Latest
The laws of capitalism, real estate, common sense, and gravity itself suggest that when a person offers you $54 million for air you don’t happen to be using, you take it. So why didn’t the residents of the Seward Park Cooperative? Read about it here.
Part 4: Feedback
As you can see, I’m trying something new with this newsletter, which until the last edition was mostly just links to my stories. Respond with any suggestions.
Thanks for reading!
Best,
Josh Nathan-Kazis