Casting Shadows on Central Park

Seems like tall thin condominium towers are all the rage in midtown these days.  One57 (reflected above and behind the Essex House below) and 432 Park (on the left below) are the first of the super tall needles that are changing the face of midtown.  As shadows begin to creep across the southern end of Central Park, I am missing Jackie Kennedy Onassis who worked so hard to protect the park from just such a fate.   My favorite factoid from a May 2014 article by Paul Goldberger in Vanity Fair (Too Rich, Too Thin, Too Tall?) is that an early buyer at One57 was a Chinese mother who brought a "modest" (my quotes not Paul's) unit for her two-year-old daughter for $6.5 million.  Modest?

Like the Time Warner building, these towers will be mostly occupied by the super rich -- people that jet from Shanghai to New York City as if they were taking a taxi from mid-town to the east village.  Don't get your hopes up that the building will stop with these two.  I spent a lovely afternoon watching a crew put together the tower crane for 53W53, the Jean Nouvel designed tower that is rising next to MoMA.   I am not sure I will like this particular tower on the skyline anymore than I like the other two, but I am liking the way the architecture plays out in the renditions of the interiors.

Sadly, Facebook has me pegged as a candidate for apartments that are south of a million (seriously, those are the suggested posts I get these days), so I don't think I'll be able to get past the first layer of the various sales offices that have sprung up for these new towers (online at: One57,  432ParkAvenue, and 53W53).  Given that the penthouse at One57 sold for $100 million and the lowest price at 53W53 appears to be $3.1 million, I guess that I would just leave with a severe case of real estate envy so this is an expedition best dreamt but not taken.