The Towers of New York

'One57,' through the trees of a Central Park playground

The skyline of New York City is an ever-changing backdrop, and anytime you spend some time away you'll come back to a place very unlike what you remember. My personal map has been most rearranged around where I used to work, at 57th and Broadway, where the old Newsweek building is now wrapped in glass and in the shadow of the long-delayed Hearst skyscraper. 

But what stood out to me the most on our trip last weekend was this new obnoxious fad for incredibly high glass needles poking up all around Midtown. One in particular seems to be deliberately giving the finger to the rest of the city — the risible thing called "One57," where full-floor penthouses go for $90 million, and owners will have the cheap thrill of looking down on the Empire State Building, and pretty much everything else. 

Architecture reflects its time, and this skinny shard says quite a lot about overheated, plutocratic New York, with its top-heavy concentration of unearned wealth and rentier values. It is not a place where anyone will live, it will only be owned. The assembled neighborhood of billionaire plutocrats — Russian oligarchs, Middle Eastern oil royals, corrupt Chinese Communist officials, our own Wall Street "geniuses" — own too much to really settle down with any single thing, person, or space. One57 will remain unloved, wrapped in its cold self-absorption, a monument to the eternal value of selfishness. As an aesthetic object, it offers nothing to anyone who can't afford it. In the old days, the wealthy and powerful cared about creating stunning and beautiful structures. Of course it was for themselves foremost, but at least we peons and serfs got to look at the outside.

In terms of design, I'm sure our overheated real estate market can fund architectural raves about this thing, but it is all as meaningless and cynical as any commercial copy. To me, this thing recalls nothing but the medieval Towers of Bologna. In the middle ages there was a fad among the wealthiest families in the city to build ridiculously tall brick towers. Perhaps they were originally intended as "defensive" structures, but as is ever the case with any self-styled Master of the Universe (no matter how small), it became a visually striking way of just showing off. 

And of course, with time, most of them fell down.

The Assinelli Tower, one of the last of Bologna's famous medieval towers still standing (for now).