“You can’t even start residential occupancy below 20 floors in a lot of these buildings, because the view has already been blocked,” said Daniel Safarik, an editor with the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat.
Residential high-rise construction has taken off just as some commercial sites face headwinds. The renowned Chrysler Building sold in March for just $151 million, a fraction of the price paid in 2008, when a sovereign wealth fund from Abu Dhabi bought a 90 percent stake for $800 million. Part of the price cut was attributed to an expensive ground lease, but it also reflects investors’ changing priorities.
In 2012, Alchemy Properties bought the top 30 floors of the 792-foot Woolworth Building, once the world’s tallest building and referred to as the cathedral of commerce, for $68 million — to convert the office space into 33 luxury condos, starting at about $3.6 million for a one-bedroom. The 9,710-square-foot “pinnacle” penthouse, inside the copper-clad peak, was last listed for $110 million.
“There is a lot of ego involved in being a developer,” said Kenneth S. Horn, the president of Alchemy Properties, referring to some of his peers’ preoccupation with height. Despite no longer being the tallest in the city, let alone the neighborhood, the Woolworth still has panoramic views of the city, he said, which was a key factor in the residential conversion.
Engineering Feats
Motivation aside, it is technology that has enabled the height of the latest towers.
“It’s because we can,” said Stephen V. DeSimone, the chief executive of DeSimone Consulting Engineers, who has worked on a number of new supertall buildings.
Stronger concrete, faster, more efficient elevators and sophisticated computer modeling have allowed developers to build taller and skinnier on sites that used to require much wider bases, he said. A better understanding of aerodynamics has produced skinny towers that can sway from four to six feet in any direction at the top.
A mechanical device called a damper — a kind of shock absorber typically installed on the roof of towers to reduce the queasy feeling of building sway — was rarely used before 2005, he said. Now he estimates that about a dozen are in use in New York buildings.
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