Fred A. Bernstein

< Back

An Icon in Eclipse? Let the Empire State Building Continue to Shine

The Empire State Building risks being obscured by lesser towers


Published in The Huffington Post, November 28, 2014

In September 2001, just a few days after the World Trade Center was destroyed, I found myself outside a Broadway theater, looking up at what was, once again, the tallest building in New York. But it was a foggy night, and for a split second, part of the Empire State Building disappeared from view. Reflexively, I panicked.

Then the fog lifted, and I was fine. I needed to see the Empire State Building with my own eyes.

I still do.

But 13 years later, a spate of new buildings is getting in the way. The arrivistes, including a 60-foot-wide tower with one apartment to a floor, threaten to turn the iconic New York skyline into just another urban jumble.

New York is Gotham, Metropolis, and Emerald City, a man-made mountain range with Everest at its center. Its skyline is a kind of ziggurat, reaching its peak at 34th Street and 5th Avenue.

Countless films open with aerial shots of the Empire State Building. "Do we want to compromise that," asks James Sanders, the architect and author of Celluloid Skyline: New York and the Movies, "especially in a highly visual, highly iconographic culture?"

The present skyline is "recognizable, familiar, and unbelievably alluring," says Sanders. "And if it's gone, it's gone." Indeed, with a spate of supertalls obscuring the Empire State Building, the only movies with shots of the Manhattan skyline will be vintage ones.

New York will have diminished its brand and hidden one of the most famous logos in the world.

Right now, at least four buildings taller than the Empire State Building are under construction in Manhattan, like tent poles that are higher than the tent.

The first is 1 World Trade Center, which restores the skyline, more or less, to its pre-9/11 state. Because it is symbolically important to New Yorkers, and because it is three miles south of the Empire State Building, anchoring its own cluster of skyscrapers, it gets a pass.

But what of the other buildings? It's hard to miss 432 Park Avenue, at 57th Street, a gridded concrete monolith expected to reach 1,397 feet. Just to its west is 107 West 57th Street; at 1,350 feet, it will be more than 20 times as high as it is wide. Further west, One57, with its curved blue glass facade, climbs to just over 1,000 feet. And 217 West 57th, the so-called Nordstrom Tower, is expected to hit almost 1,500 feet (not counting a 300-foot spire). Though they are slim, together they will make the Empire State Building (ESB) invisible from swaths of upper Manhattan where it had long been part of the scenery. If you do manage to catch a glimpse of the ESB, it will look diminished.

Most troubling is the planned 30 Hudson Yards, an angular 1,300-foot-tall building far wider than the towers on 57th Street. It is one of 16 skyscrapers planned for the Hudson Yards development, which is directly west of the Empire State Building. The phalanx will block views of the ESB from the west side of Manhattan. (Because the ESB is narrower on its east and west than on its north and south facades, it appears to be loftier, and perhaps more beautiful, from those directions.) From across the river in New Jersey, the iconic tower will be just one of the boys.

New Yorkers may be, literally, lost without it. Since 1931, the Empire State Building has been the city's GPS. Do you need to go uptown or downtown, east or west - find the Empire State Building and you'll know which way to turn. It is to New Yorkers what the North Star is to navigators: both a help and a comfort.

What can be done to avoid letting the foothills block the mountain? Assuming it's not too late, the city should limit new construction for a mile around the ESB to 1,000 feet. (It's true that a building doesn't have to be higher than the Empire State Building to hide it. When the fussy Republic Bank building at Fifth Avenue and 40th Street was erected in the 1980s, it was reviled, and rightly so, for blocking views of the Empire State Building from much of upper Fifth Avenue. A law that varies height limits according to distances from the ESB would be a more nuanced solution.)

Height limits have worked in other cities. In Washington, DC, no building can be taller than the Capitol dome (or be more than 20 feet taller than the street it fronts is wide). City leaders, who have defended the height limit against developer-led attempts to overturn it, understand the Capitol is the capital city's crown. In Paris, restrictive zoning lets the Eiffel Tower retain its pre-eminence.

New York City's crown deserves no less. To visitors, it's what makes New York New York; it's the king of the hill and the top of the heap. To locals, its meaning is more complex. From my rooftop in Brooklyn, it still serves as the reassuring presence I needed in the wake of 9/11. Somehow, the building is both anchor and beacon, pinning the city to the earth while helping it reach for the stars. Nothing should stand in its way.