Why The World’s Tallest Apartment Buildings Are On The Same Street
Today architect Nick Potts joins AD in New York City for an in-depth walking tour of Billionaires’ Row in Midtown Manhattan. West 57th Street has been attracting Manhattan’s wealthiest residents for centuries–a former amalgamation of brownstone and gothic mansions in the 1800s, the street has evolved into a hotspot for supertall luxury skyscrapers boasting the three tallest residential buildings in the world. Join Nick as he deep-dives into the area’s rich history and explains why Billionaires’ Row could only be built on 57th Street.
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00:00 Three of the tallest buildings in New York are right behind me on West 57th Street.
00:03 Why are they all on one street? It's partially building technology that's emerged very recently,
00:08 but also reasons going all the way back to 1811 and the original layout of the city grid in the
00:12 Commissioner's Plan. I'm Nick Potts, I'm an architect, and today we're going to be doing
00:15 a walking tour of Billionaires Row in Midtown Manhattan.
00:17 When the Commissioner's Plan laid out these streets in 1811, essentially set up a hierarchy
00:28 of east-west streets between wide streets and narrow streets. The zoning bonuses of simply
00:33 because you're on a wide street, you get that much more height and that much more ability to
00:37 build tall as opposed to a narrower street such as 58th Street. And you think about the grid plan
00:42 of Manhattan, and 57th Street is the last wide street before you get to Central Park. So it's
00:47 really the only one of the wide streets that has access to Central Park. So why is West 57th Street
00:53 the only place in the city that could have become Billionaires Row? It's partially because of the
00:57 original plan of the city in 1811, it's partially because of the proximity to Central Park and the
01:02 commodification of views, and it's partially because of the building technology and how
01:07 over the past 20 years the advancements in materials and systems have enabled people to
01:12 build so tall and so thin. Over my shoulder is the first super tall building that was built on
01:20 West 57th Street and really the seed of what would essentially become Billionaires Row,
01:25 of these super tall residential towers. So what is super tall? It's a tower over a thousand feet.
01:30 157 is a thousand and four feet tall. Going all the way back to 1811, these sorts of buildings
01:35 were not on anyone's radar. You know, this idea of building super tall just didn't exist. And this
01:42 building type, the residential skyscraper, also didn't exist. This is 2014 and you can see in 157
01:48 a little bit of trying to figure out what to actually do with a residential super tall.
01:52 There wasn't a precedent for what a residential super tall building would be, so the architect,
01:57 Christian Bortzenpark, really relied on metaphor and the idea of the building was a waterfall.
02:01 And as you see with these towers, anytime there's a new building type, similarly to the Woolworth
02:05 building or a department store, there's always a struggle to find the right language. And this is
02:10 probably one of those first experiments about do we embrace the tallness? Do we try to hide it behind
02:15 a metaphor? Besides the metaphor, it's a fairly straightforward, what you would think of as a
02:19 commercial building that is actually a residential tower. When this building was proposed, it was
02:24 almost like a shock. The only thing that was this tall in this area was the Time Warner Center,
02:28 which is on the park and was controversial in its own right. But 157 freaked people out and
02:34 the imagery was almost terrifying. There were these overhead views and it looked so tall. And
02:39 now that you look at it among the buildings that have grown up around it, it actually looks quite
02:42 short. And just in the short amount of time between 2014 and where we are in 2023, you can see
02:49 how much this area has changed and how much the building typology has matured.
02:53 The tall building behind my shoulder is 432 Park Avenue. This is 2015. The building is 1,397 feet
03:03 tall and about 90 feet square. And the big innovation that happened with this building and
03:07 why it's so tall and skinny, unlike 157, is that this building is all residential. You think about
03:13 a typical office building is 300 feet long and 100 feet deep. It's a fragment of that. And that's
03:18 because everything that's in this is apartments. So you don't have restaurants, you don't have
03:22 office buildings that have peak loads of people coming and going. The discovery or the innovation
03:26 with this building is realizing that with a residential tower, unlike an office tower,
03:30 where you need essentially one elevator for every 50,000 square feet, for a residential building,
03:35 you need far fewer because you think about it, there'll be maybe three or four people on a floor
03:39 at any given amount of time. Remember, this is one apartment per floor. So as in any luxury
03:44 residential building, address matters. And Park Avenue, particularly north of 60th Street or the
03:49 park, has an incredible amount of cachet. And so what the developers did here in assembling the
03:54 lot assembly is they actually found a certain slice of a lot that fronted on Park Avenue and
03:59 gave it a Park Avenue address to give it the cachet of Park Avenue, though the bulk of the
04:02 building is between 56th and 57th Street. So all of the 57th Street supertalls have, because they're
04:09 a new building type, there's a huge amount of experimentation, even in the style of the building.
04:13 And this building really is a sea change in thinking of a tall building as not being glass.
04:17 And you think about it in particular against 157, which was the building on 57th Street that
04:22 immediately preceded this, which is all glass and kind of tethered to a metaphor. The architect on
04:27 432, Rafael Vignoli, decided to express this in a big exoskeleton grid. There isn't columns inside
04:34 the building. What you see on the outside of the building is the structure. The architects and
04:37 structural engineers really brought back an older idea. Most skyscrapers have a curtain wall that
04:42 does nothing and then the columns and structure is all inboard. And with 432, the structure is the
04:47 exterior, so there's not lost square footage. One other noticeable thing about 432 Park are the wind
04:52 breaks periodically up the building. And this is another structural implication of building any
04:57 tall building, is you have huge wind loads. You create an open pore space up the building so the
05:02 wind can move through. It drastically reduces the pressure of the building. Behind me is 111 West
05:10 57th Street and from this far away, one of the most noticeable things about the building is really
05:15 its shape. This is the narrowest skyscraper in the world and in order to achieve that sort of
05:20 slenderness, there's a huge amount of engineering that goes into it. Notably the side walls, which
05:24 are solid because the building essentially acts like a very vertical I-beam where the end walls
05:29 are solid. It's really two townhouses wide. If you think about the structure of Manhattan blocks,
05:33 these 25-foot wide lots, it's just a little bit wider than two townhouse lots and essentially as
05:40 deep as one. So just imagine something essentially the width of two townhouses stretched up to 1,425
05:46 feet. And what 111 does is it takes that sort of setback tower form that we're familiar with
05:51 from the 1916 zoning code and essentially multiplies it. And rather than have them be
05:56 every 30 feet, it's actually at a very reasonable residential 7 feet 6 inches or so. So to provide
06:03 essentially something that's scalable for a terrace for the residents. So the relationship
06:07 of the 1916 zoning code and the 1920s commercial setback towers really resulted in this feathered
06:14 setback shape where many residences and many apartments could get terraces rather than
06:19 essentially three, which is what the sky exposure plane for a deeper setback would have mandated.
06:23 So this is a building that's really all about New York and trying to respond to both the city and
06:28 the historical skyscrapers that existed before it, which were also experimental in their time,
06:33 and also to the building that it's a part of. 111 Wesley 7th Street is technically in addition
06:37 to the 1925 Steinway and Sons building by Warren and Wetmore, who were the same architects as Grand
06:42 Central Station. And the Steinway building is landmark, which is something that the developer
06:45 was supportive of. It actually rests within a courtyard of it, so it doesn't change the
06:50 Steinway building, but it uses the air rights from a landmark building and transfers them over
06:54 into the adjacent lot. All of these buildings are very complex, three-dimensional, financial,
06:59 and zoning puzzles. So the fact that this is added onto the Steinway building kind of talks a little
07:04 bit about some of the history of West 57th Street between its first era, when it was a mansion
07:09 neighborhood that clustered around the Vanderbilt House, to its current state as a row of super
07:14 talls, in that in between time, it was really a corridor that catered towards musicians and
07:20 Carnegie Hall is across the street, and that caused the clustering of people and companies
07:25 that catered towards people who used and worked in Carnegie Hall to settle nearby. So Steinway
07:30 and Sons built their headquarters across from Carnegie Hall, essentially to do this. And at
07:34 one point, 57th Street was known as Piano Row. The developer took a huge amount of care towards
07:40 making sure that the addition both responded to and respected the landmark and brought its
07:44 language into the future. And the materials are really used to bridge between 1925 West 57th
07:50 Street and 2023 West 57th Street. If you look at the terracotta on the end walls, it's taking
07:57 the terracotta language, which was used a lot in the 1920s, using some motifs from the Steinway
08:03 building, if you look at some of the molding profiles around the front entrances, essentially
08:07 translated into the shapes of the terracotta and then manipulated to create shadows, it responds
08:13 to the sun and to the changes in the day and makes the building something different to look at and
08:18 interesting through the course of the days, weeks and years. And in the interest of full disclosure,
08:22 and also in case you haven't noticed how excited I am by this building, I was actually the project
08:26 architect for this building during its design phases with shop architects. The setback terraces,
08:32 111 has several of these, but at the windbreak floors, it's really one of the only places that
08:37 there's a terrace that's not accessible to building residents. And we even have a chance
08:40 to get up into the top one of those windbreak floors right now. So right now we're on the 86th
08:45 floor of 111 West 57th Street. This is a windbreak floor. So similarly to 432 Park, these very skinny
08:52 towers benefit greatly from having a windbreak or a periodic hole through the building where wind can
08:56 travel through and reduce the wind pressure moving across the building. So you have these on this
09:01 floor and two more below us on 111 and 432 Park has some as well, you can see off in the distance.
09:07 So in addition to these windbreak floors, there are also mechanical floors that exist. On 432 Park,
09:12 they're actually within the same assembly. So that donut in the middle is where the mechanical
09:15 equipment is. And they're also double height. So it's a zoning height bonus that they use here.
09:20 On 111, the floor that we're on is simply a windbreak floor. The mechanical floors are
09:24 directly below us. And the two mass damper, which helps balance the building from swaying in the
09:29 wind is directly above us. Another interesting thing here is it's also one of the few places
09:34 where we can see the terra cotta up close because the terra cotta on 111 is on the sidewalls and not
09:39 necessarily accessible to people. These finials at the end of each of the setback terraces are
09:45 really the only three dimensional expression of it. And it's similar to you know, the team when
09:49 they're working through this was thinking of the similar finials on the Chrysler building.
09:53 If you look at the Eagles, they're about the same size as these. So you know,
09:57 elements that are like this that are twice as tall as a person look pretty small from far away. And
10:02 it's a bit of the kind of eye trickery that happens whenever you're dealing with a very
10:06 tall or large building. Right now we're outside of 35 West 57th Street. And this is the only
10:17 survivor of West 57th Street's first residential phase when it was anchored by the Vanderbilt
10:22 Mansion just the end of this block at Fifth Avenue and 57th Street, which was the largest
10:26 house in the city at the time. And this building, which was actually built for W.K. Vanderbilt,
10:32 his brother's daughter as a wedding gift, were exactly the kind of people that were living here.
10:35 It was people who were related to or wanted to be near the center of power and the biggest house
10:41 in town. However, this didn't last long. The house was built in 1891. By 1898, it had become too
10:46 hustling and bustling. This was kind of the dawn of Midtown, which is what it is now. Anything
10:51 south of the park was noisy and commercial. And by 1898, the bride had moved further uptown.
10:57 You can see in the ornamentation, this kind of Ozarks, brownstone carving. This was a fairly
11:02 impressive townhouse in its day, but you can see the scale of it looks almost like a toy next to
11:07 the new buildings. Behind me is the Osborne, and this is the flip side to the townhouse residential
11:20 development that was happening just a few blocks further to the east around the Vanderbilt house.
11:25 By the 1880s, this was already starting to emerge as an apartment house district,
11:29 and the Osborne was really the crown jewel in this. This was obviously a very high-class luxury
11:35 building. Osborne, who was the developer of this, owned a stone cutting business, so it's very heavy
11:39 masonry because he could get the material and was probably profiting on it. So this was a very tall
11:44 building of its time, and if you compare it with the townhouse further down the street, you can
11:48 imagine an 11-story building like this kind of looming over its neighborhood almost as a prelude
11:53 to what would come in the later phases of what would become Billionaire's Row. In terms of the
11:57 height and the technology, this is really at the maximum of what would have been built out of a
12:01 masonry building at the time. You can think of it as being similar to the Monadnock building in
12:05 Chicago, which is 16 stories in brick and has massive walls. So the Osborne, it's a stone
12:10 building, but it still is similarly hefty and bulky and really taking advantage of the weight of its
12:16 material. And it's a Romanesque style building, which is perfectly suited to that. It's heavy,
12:20 it's about expressing arches, it's about heavy materials. It's an interesting juxtaposition to
12:25 think about the Osborne, which was the tallest building of its district of its time back in 1890,
12:30 to towering over it. Central Park Tower at more than 100 stories.
12:35 Above me is the tallest residential tower in the world, Central Park Tower.
12:43 This is 1,550 feet and similar to Signway or 111 West 57th Street, it makes a creative use of a
12:51 zoning bonus. You can see how it cantilevers out over another landmark building. The Arts
12:56 Students League immediately next door to it, both giving them air rights to build over the rights
13:01 that could have been built over the Arts Students League, but also crucially letting the building
13:04 rotate so there's more frontage by going over the Arts Students League to get a little bit more
13:09 frontage facing the park, which is just on the other side of the building from us. Aside from
13:13 that, this is probably the most conventional of the super tall buildings on 57th Street in terms
13:18 of skyscraper design. You can see, like 157, it's a glass tower. It's wrapped with glass on all four
13:24 sides, which gives views in a 360 degree direction from the building. The floor plates are larger
13:30 than what you see on 111 and on 432 Park because there is enough room with the Arts Students League
13:36 to project out a little bit and get a few more apartments on each floor. So instead of something
13:40 like 432 where there's two or one apartments per floor or 111 where there's simply one, this has
13:46 multiple apartments, particularly in the lower floors, four or five on the lowest tier, then
13:51 three, then two, then one. So you can kind of see each vertical striation is a different model of
13:56 planning the inside of the building going from large to small. This building also crucially
14:01 makes the use of the lower parts of the building, which don't really make economic sense because
14:05 they don't have views towards the park for other uses. There's a Nordstrom department store
14:09 occupying the ground floor real estate space to activate the ground plane. And then in between,
14:14 there's also a hotel. Even though Central Park Tower is probably the most conservative in terms
14:18 of architectural expression, it's really the culmination of the lessons learned on the other
14:23 super tall towers that have been built over 111 and West 57th Street. If you think about its height
14:28 at 1,550 feet, 150 feet taller than 432 Park, which was kind of the first major one of these,
14:34 and also the real estate potential. This has a triplex that just listed for $250 million. So
14:40 these buildings are both the competitive race to the top in terms of height, but also in terms of
14:45 speculation and finding unlocked potential to recoup the investment of buying what ultimately
14:51 is very expensive real estate. And this, the ultimate expression of billionaire's row and
14:55 all we've been talking about with these super tall towers really could have only happened here
14:59 on West 57th Street.