What’s the Deal With Manhattan’s Pencil-Thin High Rises?

In Billionaires’ Row, a book by the Wall Street Journal reporter Katherine Clarke, we are presented with a riveting narrative in which the heroes of her account, the developers Harry Macklowe and Gary Barnett, race to build the city’s first very tall and exceptionally skinny condo towers. And when I say “very tall and exceptionally skinny,” I mean it: Macklowe’s project, at 432 Park Avenue, was planned to be a soaring 1,397 feet in height, while Barnett’s project (known as One57), at 157 West 57th Street, was just over 1,000 feet tall. And because these buildings are so much taller than they are wide, some unorthodox engineering was needed just to keep them standing upright: 432 Park, for example, has five double-height floors open to the elements to allow the wind to pass right through.

To those who follow New York City’s real-estate high jinks, Macklowe and Barnett were already well-known. Back in 1985, Macklowe achieved tabloid infamy by bulldozing a string of Times Square single-room-occupancy hotels to make room for a 38-story luxury hotel, just days ahead of a city moratorium on the demolition of this much-derided (but inarguably necessary) form of low-cost housing. Barnett, the chairman of a company called Extell, is no slouch either: He achieved his notoriety during Superstorm Sandy, when a damaged crane dangled from the roof of One57 and took a solid week to be properly secured.

Yet, as Clarke documents, the greatest challenge the two men faced in their race to finish the city’s first super-tall condo tower was money: It was very complicated to assemble the financing and, not incidentally, to buy the air rights from surrounding properties, which, under New York City’s zoning rules, would allow them to build taller than the floor-area ratio (or FAR) would otherwise permit.

One problem for both developers was that they were cobbling together financing in the wake of the 2008 mortgage meltdown, which meant that banks were not eager to lend—especially for speculative projects like outrageously slender towers for the superrich. Macklowe, at a certain point, tried to partner with an entity called CMZ Ventures. The “M” stood for Paul Manafort, Donald Trump’s future campaign manager, who brought in a potential backer for the project, Dmytro Firtash, a Ukrainian oligarch with alleged connections to the Russian mob. Firtash said he would provide $112 million in equity to help Macklowe, but the funds never arrived. A 2011 civil suit alleged that Firtash and his cronies were using supposed real-estate deals to cover up a money-laundering scheme; while the suit was ultimately thrown out, the gambit found its way into special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. Eventually, Macklowe’s financing would come from a Los Angeles–based private-equity fund called CIM. Barnett’s search for a backer, meanwhile, led him abroad, to an investment fund based in Abu Dhabi.

Clarke’s chronicle of these high-profile developers doing backflips to attract investors reminds me of a similar story I once wrote—except mine wasn’t about funding luxury condos but about the labyrinthine process of funding affordable housing. The obstacle in this case wasn’t the refusal of banks to lend, but rather that we no longer build new public housing in the United States, so low-cost homes can be built only via a labor-intensive process of securing tax breaks and vouchers. As the noted for-profit affordable-housing developer Jonathan F.P. Rose told me, a typical project requires six to 12 funding sources. An affordable-housing developer in New York often gets funding in the form of the low-income housing tax credits created under an arcane system in which major corporations can reduce their tax bills by funding low-cost housing.

All I could think while reading about the genesis of Billionaires’ Row in midtown Manhattan is that, in a sane world, corporations (and billionaire condo owners) would simply pay taxes and the government would directly fund low-cost housing. And guys like Macklowe and Barnett might even be killing themselves to build housing for people who want a decent place to live rather than a safe place to park their money.

Ours, however, is not a sane world. So the competition between these two developers to build the city’s first super-tall luxury apartment tower didn’t do anything to alleviate the shortage of housing for actual New Yorkers. Instead, it spawned more such towers and kicked off an aggressive reinvention of West 57th Street, a crosstown thoroughfare that has never been exactly one thing or another. In the past, it was known primarily for a motley assortment of high culture (Carnegie Hall, art galleries, the Art Students League), low culture (remember Planet Hollywood?), and eateries that—with the possible exception of the Russian Tea Room—were not generally regarded as destinations.

Many people I know, or that I encounter on social media, are outraged by how the towers of Billionaires’ Row distort the city’s skyline. The buildings are so tall that they’re hard to miss, but so skinny that they look more like a row of smokestacks. They possess a dystopian weirdness that suggests to me they were designed more by software than by human architects—and that the software might have made a miscalculation or two.

Admittedly, I have a genuine affection for the late Rafael Viñoly’s 432 Park: It’s the one skinny tower that, from the outside at least, has some aesthetic coherence. (Its inner workings, as reported by Stefanos Chen of The New York Times, are another matter altogether: The building has been plagued by flooding, elevator problems, and weird noises. Also, the ultrarich, it seems, don’t like each other any more than they like the rest of us: “Everybody hates each other here,” one condo owner told Chen.)