![]() ![]() Hollywood star Jennifer Lopez bought a home at another similarly obtrusive pencil tower at 432 Park Avenue, but the identity of other buyers continues to be hidden in shell companies registered in tax havens. Which is a pity given that, if anyone welcomed the Steinway Tower’s 360-degree views, it would be the sort of dodgy businessman who wants as much warning as possible of anyone coming to arrest him. Credit: īut rich Russians are nowadays as welcome in New York as vodka at a Temperance Society meeting. In Billionaires’ Row (where the New York Times estimated in 2019 that 40 per cent of apartment s remained unsold) oligarchs have been especially well-represented. The tragedy of many recently built New York skyscrapers in a city where millions struggle to find affordable housing is that so many apartments aren’t occupied, their owners - many in China - buying them as speculative investments. The trend for super thin skyscrapers started in 1970s Hong Kong, an island short of space, and took hold in New York after the millennium. New York’s skyscrapers - including the Empire State Building and One World Trade Center (the replacement for the Twin Towers destroyed in the 9/11 attacks) - usually catch the eye because of their design.īut, nowadays, the defining characteristic of the new pretenders is slimness. Credit: Supplied MANHATTAN’S SLIM PICKINGS ![]() Look north and you have the famous park, south and you can see the length of high-rise Manhattan. The Steinway, which reportedly cost £1.5 billion ($AUD2.6 billion) to build, sits almost midway along the southern border of Central Park on a stretch so full of hig hrise residential blocks with skyscraping price tags that it’s been dubbed Billionaires’ Row. And those views - impressive near the bottom, heart-stopping at the top - could hardly be bettered from the sort of building that needs to be cleared with the Federal Aviation Administration. In fact, there are 84 floors but only 46 apartments. The Steinway (named after the 1925 headquarters of the Steinway & Sons piano company at its base) is particularly desirable - or so its owners hope - in being so narrow that each apartment covers at least one floor and so affords all-round panoramic views. Camera Icon But these “pencil towers” are the new ultra-prestige dwelling for the world’s richest people. ![]() To the casual eye, the 1,428-foot, 84-floor condominium may look like a deathtrap, liable with the first high wind to come crashing into Central Park or at least wobble so violently that if you weren’t already suffering from altitude sickness, you would almost certainly soon be feeling seasick.īut these “pencil towers” are the new ultra-prestige dwelling for the world’s richest people. “These are not the proportions of a classical column but of a coffee stirrer,” a critic sniped. It’s not only one of the tallest buildings in the western world with a height-to-width ratio of 24:1 (that is, 24 times taller than it is wide), it is the world’s skinniest skyscraper. More than a quarter of a mile high but no more than 60 ft wide, the Steinway Tower, which has opened for residents, isn’t just exceptionally tall, it is almost painfully thin.Īnd to live there you have to have the sums that even the Duchess probably never imagined. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |