Fresh photos of Central Park Tower, aka 217 West 57th Street, show that the exterior safety netting has now reached the 92nd floor, and with formwork for the reinforced concrete following, construction has officially surpassed the 1,396-foot-tall rooftop parapet of 432 Park Avenue, making the supertall the tallest residential structure in New York and the Western Hemisphere. The imminently 1,550-foot tower is being designed by Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill, while Extell is the developer.
Central Park and 57th street seen from the New Jersey Turnpike. Photo by Michael Young
Looking at the top of the northern elevation of Central Park Tower from Central Park. Photo by Michael Young
Central Park Tower and Midtown seen from 99 Hudson Street. Photo by Michael Young
Once work reaches the rooftop, the height difference with 432 Park Avenue will become more apparent. Meanwhile, SHoP Architect’s slender 111 West 57th Street will become the second skyscraper in Midtown to surpass 1,400 feet, followed by Kohn Pedersen Fox’s One Vanderbilt office tower.
Central Park Tower looking at the southwest corner from Broadway. Designed by Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill, image via Extell
There will be 179 condominium residences and a 285,000-square-foot, seven-story Nordstrom flagship department store in the main podium. Nordstrom is expected to open the new retail space this Fall.
Looking up at Central Park Tower and the cantilever on the eastern elevation. Photo by Michael Young
Completion of Central Park Tower is expected sometime next year.
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One Vanderbilt seems like a ‘cheap’ 1400 footer with that little spire pushing it to 1401.
Perhaps but it’s making quite the impression on the skyline. It’s sheer bulk before it tapers is very noticeable when viewed from LIC/Astoria areas in Queens and the South Bronx. It’s not going to look “cheap” at all, I think when complete.
Yes, it is a nice design that has that office building bulk the residential towers don’t have, it now looms over the Pan Am (sorry, I can’t quite bring myself to say Met Life) which seems to me a bit of a sacrilege. I only meant ‘cheap’ in terms of pushing over 1400 by that ‘tacked on’ Spire
ESB is 1,454 to the tip.
This uniquely original super creative feat of modern glass box architecture that is such a beautifully transformational addition to the skyline is the tallest residential building In the whole hemisphere? Now I can really take pride in being a New Yorker!
A true set of ugly smokestacks south of Central Park or Manhattan’s Middle Fingers by the greedy rich.
Almost all of Manhattan is inhabited by the rich, wealthy, then Uber wealthy. Get over it.
I am not rich and I do live in Manhattan and I have seen Manhattan when no one wanted to live here to the situation today. The majority of people living here are not wealthy. The wealthy for the most part buy second or third properties here and have their legal residences elsewhere.
Well said Mark.
These ugly structures are not sources of true community pride.
Far from it.
Instead they are the stark tombstone shafts of a dying culture.
For they explicitly express what is so wrong with our economy and our society.
People of the future will no doubt gaze at their ruins and bemoan our values,
our woefully misdirected energy & resources and our profound societal indifference & ignorance.
Don’t view these buildings from Central Park or Jersey for their true meaning and import. Instead view them as you drive over the plebeian Kosciusko bridge in nearby Queens, on the border of Brooklyn.
There you will see myriad cemetery tombstones in the foreground, as they mimic the shapes and echo the forms of the misty tombstone skyscrapers of the City in the background, as they aptly all merge together and become one.
For these crass buildings are nothing but tombstone monuments to greed and exclusivity, the markers and last gasps of a dying culture of stolen wealth and misplaced energy and values. Floating above the mists of a Queens cemetery they evoke a sad tableau, a memento mori metaphor for the fleeting nature of our vane & selfish strivings and our callous & ultimately doomed civilization of greed.
Chill the hell out it’s a stupid tall condo building. Overpriced condos arnt a new phenomenon in NYC. The reason some of us delight in such buildings is the same reason others like sports. It’s simply somthing to waste time on.
These buildings are white heads, all of them pimples ready to get blown up by terrorists.
WHAT IS WITH PEOPLE, WHO’S ERECTION IS BIGGER , IS THAT WHAT REAL ESTATE HAS BECOME TODAY?WHY I LIVE IN THE TALLEST BUILDING IN MANHATTAN ,SO MY BLOOD IS REDDER THAN YOURS PU PU. All we need is a few more of these monstrosities and the sun will never shine on the crowded streets.Where are the city planners?too busy stuffing their pockets with money from the real estate goons ?
Hello NYY,
You consistently speak about the tallest residential tower in the Western hemisphere, but what residential tower is/will be taller than this one?
I don’t believe there are any higher res. buildings than CPT and therefore it’s the tallest in the world.
It is truly, inextricably, stone ugly.
All of these middle fingers in the sky are vile insults to true architecture, all about the fast buck for soulless developers and real estate speculators, and the non-New Yorkers who inhabit them. I shall miss the gentle, tasteful skyline of Central Park South of yore.
How about sales? Going well?
That blue glass does not look at all like the rendering. It looks like a primary color that is childlike when looking at it from the park or TimeWarnner. NY projects never seem to look as good in built form as they do in their rendering. It’s a very different situation in the London building boom happening right now. Buildings there often look just as good in their finished form. I’m guessing the UK/EU has a more powerful regulatory structure that holds developers and architects accountable for what they put up. I’m all for development and super talls. NYC needs more residential at every level. But when the finished product looks so different from the sales pitch, something is wrong.
The glass is currently wrapped.
Agree 100% that many of the buildings built in London since the turn of the century are far more impressive than the usually boring, banal and unimaginative towers seen here in NYC.
In fact, one need NOT look any further than the forest of Fuglies sprouting in Hudson Yards, which is to Manhattan what the “Canyon of Mediocrity” on 4th Avenue is to Brooklyn.
In a word: awful!
What a shame, too, that instead of competing to see who’s building will emerge as a 21st Century iconic work of architectural beauty and brilliance say the way the Empire State Building is; or several others built last century such as the Chrysler, Woolworth, Rockefeller Center, Seagrams, Lever House, IBM or AT&T/Sony buildings (to name but a few) are – instead what we get are gigantic, hulking eyesores such as 10 and (even worse) 30 Hudson Yards ?
Now compare those colossally fugly buildings with those seen in London such as the “Gherkin” or the “Shard”?
…or the many architectural wonders seen elsewhere around the world?!?!
If anything, what’s seen thus far in Hudson Yards will make it “win” the dubious “honor” as being the largest concentration of supertall fuglies in the planet! ?
Yeah, it’s all so sad and dispiriting – but it is what it is as long as we, as residents of the city fail to not just demand, but REQUIRE better buildings be built, and especially when developers are offered exceptionally generous taxpayer subsidies as the developers who are cashing in very handsomely at Hudson Yards are.
And yes, urban planning makes a difference, as the buildings AND public transportation in London illustrates so vividly.
Indeed, one need not look any further than London’s financial district, “The City”, or its nearby Docklands, with those two sections of London having extraordinary mass transit links when compared to the dismal, shameful and paltry mass transit link(s?) available at Hudson Yards that’s limited to a single, crosstown subway line, and a bus line, the M12, that’s more Nassau or Suffolk county than NYC it runs so infrequently.
So, yes, urban planning (if one can even call it that in NYC and throughout much of the USA), or rather the lack thereof in part explains why so many of the buildings seen in recent years are butt ugly or full-on fugly.
And it will remain that way until voters demand better of the politicians whom the developers generously fund their campaigns to better ensure they can build the mostly hideous looking buildings that emerge from the ground long after the beautiful buildings seen in renderings that were promised during the permitting phase were swapped out in the dead of night for the cheapened “value engineered” crap that was intended from the get-go.
It it really going to be THAT blue?? I can’t tell if that is a wrapping or not.
Wrapping.
Pardon me for using your space:
What rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches toward Midtown to be sold?
(Thanks to Michael Young)
The (ugly) blue tint on the windows seen in the photos (or with the naked eye from the street and afar) is a protective wrap that will be removed in the future (I would assume around the time the crane comes down), with the (silvery) glass curtain wall seen in the rendering likely to be a closer representation of the building’s exterior.
But, fwiw, I’ve also been with people whom have pointed to the building upon seeing it and then began expressing their opinions about the blue tinted wrap seen to date with them thinking that was the intended permanent color of the windows – so it’s hardly surprising to see some readers here also saying that!
HAVING DEPLORED THE OVERCROWDING AND USUALLY UNINSPIRING ARCHITECTURE IN YOUR EXCITING CITY FOR MANY YEARS, I CAN AT LEAST TAKE SOME COMFORT BY LOOKING AT BUILDINGS LIKE THE JIN MAO AND BURJ KHALIFA TOWERS. WHERE IS CASS GILBERT WHEN YOU NEED HIM?