Thanks, Mayor Mike! Welcome to 432 Park Avenue, the tallest residential building in the Western Hemisphere

In "the tallest residential building in the Western Hemisphere," lucky buyers may be able to snag penthouse digs for a mere $95 million.

by Ken

In the clip, note the comment 432 Park Avenue from the real-estate guy: "It definitely catches your eye as you are walking down Park Avenue, but I think people are going to be following suit and there are going to be more like it, I hope."

Well, that's one way of looking at it. Here's another, provided by our pal Mitch Waxman in a recent post on his Newtown Pentacle blog, where he happened to be taking pictures way across the East River in Long Island City's Queens Plaza (at the East River end of the Queensboro Bridge).



"As a note," Mitch wrote in the post,

I’ve been unable to stop noticing the super tall Manhattan building “432 Park Avenue” and everywhere I go these days it’s just popping up and demanding to be acknowledged. Here it is from Queens Plaza, a monster building as seen from the central gearbox of the Great Machine. One wonders, and more than wonders, what the weather is like up there.

Here's still another way of looking at it:



What's that stick thing sticking up over there on the left? Why, that's 432 Park Avenue, as seen in this scaled-down portion of the photo on its website home page. I don't know whether it looks better or worse than in Mitch W's photo from Queens Plaza.

THE LEGACY OF MAYOR MIKE

Let me stress that I can't speak to the genealogy or legal history of each project, but buildings like 432 Park and the super-tall towers now rising south of Central Park and preparing to cast their shadows over the park, and a growing horde of out-of-scale tall buildings sprouting up around NYC, are the legacy of Mayor Mike Bloomberg, whose legitimate concerns for the future of the city -- which included a degree of future planning and preparedness hardly ever undertaken by conventional politicians -- unfortunately included rezonings and other legal rejiggerings that have developers attacking the sky with a vengeance in ways that are already disfiguring neighborhoods. And I'm told by people privy to planning issues that Mayor Mike left behind a series of triggers that will continue going off well into the future, with consequent surprises.

It's not that development should or for that matter can be stopped. It's the lifeblood of the city, after all. But unchecked development is something else again.

By the way, commenter georgetheatheist added this note to Mitch's Queens Plaza post:

Can you imagine spending millions to live on the top floor of that building on Park Avenue? I’d be pretty wary of a plane flying in. I can’t not notice it either. What a bland entity just like the Freedom Tower. The entire NY skyline is now effed’ up. In midtown, the most beautiful building is the Chrysler building with the Empire State number 2.

To which Mitch replied:

I’d like to spend a solid clear day up there, with tripod and camera, of course.

#