The view isn’t bad…
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Glad to be here, much less volatile than SSC or SSP!
More relaxed. Great site…
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Was incredible seeing some skyscrapers reaching into the clouds! I’ve previously seen mountains, but not clouds, was amazing!
432 Park Avenue peaking through the clouds by Saboooooooo, on Flickr
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Thanks for joining. Unlike SSP or SSC, information here is updated daily and accuracy is very important. 
We also do not have a bias against New York or an obsession with Chicago. We treat all cities equally here.
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I’ve been here for a few months now I think! 
But yeeeh, it is relaxed here, there’s no bickering between members, it’s just nice and indeed with it being on Yimby, we are updated with all the news first hand
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432 Park is scheduled to top out this week, making it officially the tallest residential building in the Western Hemisphere — for now anyway. The final few feet of the 1,397-foot-tall development by Macklowe Properties and Los Angeles-based CIM Group will be added Tuesday, according to Buzzbuzzhome. Two weeks ago, 432 Park made headlines when 17-year-old urban explorer Demid Lebedev scaled to the tower to get some pretty amazing Instagram shots. He was subsequently arrested.
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I’m still trying to reconcile the figure of 93 feet square with my sense of size. Does the tower (six windows on each side) have a larger size at the base, or does it take up only 93 feet on Park Avenue and 93 feet on West 56th Street? Thanks for your answer to this elementary question! Joe
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New Manhattan Tower Is Now the Tallest, if Not the Fairest, of Them All
When viewers tune in to “The Tonight Show” these days, besides Jimmy Fallon’s huge smile and the Afro of his bandleader, Questlove, they are met by a remarkably realistic Manhattan skyline.
There is the cityscape on a curtain, of course — a staple of late-night television since Johnny Carson was on the air — but also 37 wooden models behind Mr. Fallon’s desk. And not just of familiar landmarks like the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty, but less obvious ones, too, including the Hearst Tower, the Pier 17 mall and the Maritime Hotel.
Yet one building is missing that is impossible to miss, and not only from Mr. Fallon’s offices at Rockefeller Center but just about everywhere in New York City: 432 Park Avenue.
On Friday, the 104-unit condominium tower, between 56th and 57th Streets, reached its peak of 1,396 feet. At 96 stories, it is arguably the tallest building in the city. One World Trade Center has its spire, but the skyscraper itself is 28 feet shorter than 432 Park. As for the Empire State Building, this new 93-foot-by-93-foot concrete megalith bests it by nearly 150 feet. From the living room of 432 Park’s penthouses, it is possible to look down on the observation deck there, flash bulbs glittering like an oversize chandelier.
But even more than the views from the apartments, it may be the views of them that give 432 Park its allure. From Central Park, Park Avenue or Park Slope, there it is. On the George Washington Bridge or Long Island Expressway, there it is. In the bleachers at MetLife Stadium or Citi Field, there it is. Everyone from cinematographers and muralists to tourists and snow globe makers must now contend with the tower.
“It’s almost like the Mona Lisa,” Harry B. Macklowe, the developer building the $1.3 billion tower, said at a topping-out ceremony on Friday for 1,500 construction workers. “Except instead of it looking at you, you’re looking at it wherever you are. You can’t escape it.”
Not that everyone agrees the building, developed with the CIM Group, based in Los Angeles, is a work of art.
“God, does it stand out,” said Marlene Rosenthal, who regularly glimpses it while riding Metro-North. “It’s a status symbol, and that’s the name of the game in this city.”
There can be no doubt the skyline has changed, yet New Yorkers are less sure whether it has changed for better or worse. Some are awed by the slender, omnipresent obelisk, its perfect symmetries, an undeniable feat of engineering; others are repulsed by its dimensions, both physical and financial, where units cost as much as $95 million, an undeniable feat of excess […]
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Core jump occurred today. Probably one of the last. This was also on Fox 5 news. Now I think its safe to assume that the public is aware of it. Its presence can’t be ignored. Given its size, it will be a good reference in terms of scale for things to come. 1 Vanderbilt will be taller, which is incredible considering how dominant this tower is.
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Construction Update: The Newly Topped-Out 432 Park Avenue
BY: STEPHEN SMITH ON OCTOBER 22ND 2014 AT 6:30 AM
432 Park Avenue, photo by ILNY
When Midtown’s first two supertall 57th Street luxury towers started rising, everybody assumed that One57, with its deep blue Christian Portzamparc design, would be the more attractive structure. Many saw 432 Park, with its relentlessly spare and square look, as a leach on the skyline, sucking in all the views without giving anything back in terms of aesthetics.
432 Park Avenue
But now that One57 is complete and 432 Park Avenue has topped out at 1,397 feet amidst a minor snowstorm of carefully orchestrated PR, the consensus opinion seems to be the opposite: Extell’s One57 turned out to be a dog, and CIM and Macklowe’s 432 Park has become an icon of the skyline, visible far from Manhattan. (Let this, and the unfortunate clipping of the Jean Nouvel-designed tower above MoMA, be a lesson to those clamoring for more government regulation of the design of skyline-piercing towers.)
432 Park Avenue
Despite topping-out, 432 Park hasn’t yet shown its finished face – the windows are still covered by protective wrap, and the mechanical floors that break up the boxes into discrete sets are still covered in netting.
However it ultimately turns out, the building will – along with 20 Fenchurch Street, in London – define Uruguyan architect Rafael Viñoly’s legacy, likely being the tallest and arguably the most prominent building of his career.
432 Park Avenue, photo by ILNY
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Central Park has always served as a leafy oasis, a refuge from city life. But these skyscrapers are so tall—One57 is over 1,000 feet, and 432 Park Ave. recently topped off at 1,396 feet, overtaking the World Trade Center (minus its antenna) and leaving the Empire State Building in the dust. You can almost feel the breath of the billionaires they’re being marketed to on the back of your neck.
Here’s how out-sized 432 Park is: It makes One57, which previously appeared as if it was giving Central Park the finger, appear modest, even demure, by comparison. If I were a plutocrat who had already plunked down $50 million or $100 million, or whatever penthouses in the building are going for these days, I might be suffering buyer’s remorse.
And there are apparently larger condos still to come. At least one of them, topping 1,400 feet…
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The main tower is 93feet wide at the bottom too!
Well one side the base sticks out slightly, but only for a few floors and would barely make a difference to the structural side to it; it’s just a 93x93footwide build from the ground up
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Took some pics on Google Earth. Some of the views from the tower roof.
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http://static2.nydailynews.com/polopoly_fs/1.1992301.1414628432!/img/httpImage/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/article_970/wtcweb30n-4-web.jpg
Source: One World Trade Center about to open for business — wait until you see the view! – New York Daily News
This shot really illustrates the height differences and it becomes apparent. The crazy part is that One Vanderbilt will be even taller, and than Nordstrom, which in this image, would rise above the top border considering the ESB pinnacle is almost 1,500’. 
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Amen, brother!
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Pied-à-Neighborhood
Pieds-à-Terre Owners Dominate Some New York Buildings
Almost half the apartments on a stretch of Park Avenue are empty most of the year.
OCTOBER 24, 2014
The question of who, if anyone, lives in the multimillion-dollar condominiums being built across Manhattan grows more intriguing with every new tower crane that hoists glass slabs and concrete blocks hundreds of feet into the sky.
New Yorkers want to know: Who are these people who hide behind limited liability companies while shelling out a fortune for a condominium — who see the apartment as an investment or even just a vanity play, and who are too busy sunning in St. Bart’s or skiing in Gstaad to actually show up and shop at the local market or pay for tickets to a Broadway show?
…In a three-block stretch of Midtown, from East 56th Street to East 59th Street, between Fifth Avenue and Park Avenue, 57 percent, or 285 of 496 apartments, including co-ops and condos, are vacant at least 10 months a year. From East 59th Street to East 63rd Street, 628 of 1,261 homes, or almost 50 percent, are vacant the majority of the time, according to data from the Census Bureau’s 2012 American Community Survey.
“My district has some of the most expensive land values in the world — I’m ground zero for the issue of foreign buyers,” said State Senator Liz Krueger, whose district includes Midtown. “I met with a developer who is building one of those billionaire buildings on 57th Street and he told me, ‘Don’t worry, you won’t need any more services, because the buyers won’t be sending their kids to school here, there won’t be traffic.’ ”
The developer told her that the buyers basically would never be here, Ms. Krueger said. “He said it like this was a positive thing,” she added. “You can’t make this stuff up.”
While the Census Bureau data is illuminating, it does not drill down into individual buildings. This is not easily done, although one method is to track a city property tax break given only to full-time residents. In years past, the 17.5 percent tax abatement was widely available for owners of cooperatives and condominiums, but after a rule change was enacted last year, only those who are deemed primary residents are eligible to claim it.
High vacancy rates suggest that the apartments belong to out-of-towners.
…George Sweeting, the deputy director of the Independent Budget Office, said the agency plans to look further into how tracking the tax abatement for primary residents could shed light on the number of pieds-à-terre across the city.
It is an important endeavor, according to Brad Hoylman, the state senator who is proposing legislation to charge an additional tax to owners of expensive pieds-à-terre. According to the proposal, owners of a pied-à-terre priced between $5 million and $6 million would pay 0.5 percent of the amount over the $5 million threshold in annual taxes. This would gradually increase, capping off at properties of more than $25 million, where the owner would pay a $370,000 annual fee plus 4 percent of the amount over $25 million.
While the owners could be wealthy New Yorkers who happen to own a primary residence uptown, say, and a secondary apartment downtown, many who would be targeted by this new tax would be non-New York residents. These nonresidents typically do not pay New York’s hefty income taxes and instead pay just a small fraction of their apartment’s value in property taxes. Property taxes here are based on a complex equation related to rental values and can be very low. At One57, for example, a unit that sold for nearly $3.6 million is estimated by the city to have a market value of just $430,000 when calculating its property tax.
“The pied-à-terre tax is seen by New York’s wealthiest 1 percent as a question of fairness,” said James Parrott, the chief economist at the Fiscal Policy Institute, who first made the proposal for the tax on which Mr. Hoylman based his legislation. “Here they are in the top tax bracket paying the top New York City and New York State income tax rates, but these non-primary residents are just paying property taxes, and the effective property tax rates are so incredibly low.”
…This data is now two years old, and New York City, of course, is a place of constant change. Many new buildings are being built along the Brooklyn waterfront and downtown, and if you look along West 57th Street, for example, the Census Bureau information does not tell the whole story. Only around 23 percent of the apartments there are vacant for most of the year, but this doesn’t include the many new ultra-pricey condominiums that are being constructed. They will certainly attract many buyers who are new, and perhaps some who will remain unknown, to the city.
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^^^^
I’ll gladly move into one of those places. If they don’t want to live there, I wouldn’t mind. 
I’ll pay the taxes and do the cleaning too.
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11 10 2014
samsebeskazal.livejournal.com-05432.jpg by samsebeskazal, on Flickr
samsebeskazal.livejournal.com-05487.jpg by samsebeskazal, on Flickr
samsebeskazal.livejournal.com-05470.jpg by samsebeskazal, on Flickr
samsebeskazal.livejournal.com-05458.jpg by samsebeskazal, on Flickr
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