The results range from the sublime to the ridiculous, or even both at once. There is 432 Park Avenue, a surreal square tube of white concrete that appears to shoot twice as high as anything around it, its endless Cartesian grid of windows framing worlds of solid marble bathtubs and climate-controlled wine cellars within. It is the most elegant of the new towers, recalling the minimalist sculptures of Sol LeWitt, although its architect, Raphael Viñoly, says it was inspired by a trash can. He can clearly turn garbage into gold, given the penthouse sold for $95m (£72m). [...]
Standing right across the street, 220 Central Park South aims to be the gentleman of the bunch. A neo-art deco tower clad in silvery Alabama limestone, with set-back terraces and ornamental metalwork, it is the work of Robert AM Stern, expedient purveyor of whatever style his client wants, from Spanish revival to Qing dynasty. “Architecture is a banquet,” Stern tells me, “and most architects are starving to death.” He says that “unlike some of its neighbours now under development”, his design “will belong to the family of buildings that have framed Central Park for generations”. The dapper costume has paid off: some apartments in his tower have gone for more than $10,000 per square foot. The penthouse was recently acquired by a hedge-fund billionaire for $238m, making it the most expensive home ever sold in the US. [...]
The revamped laws also introduced the curious notion of transferable development rights (TDRs), also known as “air rights” – a mechanism that allows landowners to buy the unused air space of their neighbours and add it on to their own lot. It is the ultimate free-market planning clause: if your neighbour is not exploiting their potential to go skywards, you can buy it off them and make your building even taller. It seems fitting that in the cut-throat capital of capitalism, even the air is for sale.[...]
But these negotiations pale in comparison to what has happened over the last decade. The parade of poles that have sprouted along 57th Street (AKA Billionaires’ Row) on the southern edge of Central Park, represent some of the most fiendishly complex and aggressively litigious dealing the city has ever seen. Gary Barnett, founder of Extell Development Corporation, took 15 years to assemble the property and air rights for One 57, one of the first of the new generation of super-tall residential towers, a garish blue-speckled shaft designed by Christian de Portzamparc, completed in 2014. He took another decade negotiating nearly a dozen further acquisitions to put together the 1.2m square feet of development rights he needed to build Central Park Tower. It was probably time well spent: the project will reportedly have a total sales value of $4.4bn, making it the most expensive residential building in New York’s history. “Our strength is assembling land,” says Barnett. “On that, we’re Number One.”
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