Look up from a few blocks along 57th Street, though, and it turns into a feathered quill, rippling with shadows and tapering to a sharpened point. Seen from the park, it’s a glass straw banded in brass. What holds the thing together is a massive concrete H, solid toward the east and west and open to the north and south. But 111 is unusual in that the most flattering sides are its flanks, not its front. But in the heart of the city, the sky is a precious and limited resource.Ī century ago, the law that created the New York setback gave large buildings the presence of three-dimensional sculptures instead of just so many segments of street-facing façade. If you spread those households out over a dozen acres, we wouldn’t call it grotesque inequality we’d call it a suburb. A small square of land supports 60 apartments, 14 of them in the base, the rest stacked like casino chips in the tower. (The narrow glass box that faces 57th Street as a retail entrance exists only because the zoning rules say it must.) The thinness also applies to its shadow, which moves along from any given spot in Central Park in a matter of minutes. That meant that it could be sutured to the landmark Steinway Building without swallowing it. The object in question is nearly 24 times taller than it is wide, making it by far the world’s slender supertall. Or as one of the firm’s founding partners, Gregg Pasquarelli, puts it, “If you’re going to put up a building that 8 million people can see all the time, it had better be pretty fucking good.” SHoP’s 111, however, works hard to seduce us all and to be a good New Yorker. (Also, the elevators break down.) It doesn’t matter: These ventures’ only audience is a tiny club of potential buyers who experience them from the inside out. The cool symmetries of Rafael Viñoly’s 432 Park Avenue charm some but rouse amateur critics to fury. Gordon Gill and Adrian Smith’s Central Park Tower expresses the primacy of engineering over elegance. Christian de Portzamparc’s One57 is repulsive. New York is a global principality overlaid on a democratic metropolis, and if the lords of capital are going to alight here, their supertall palaces might as well inspire some awe. The mighty and the rich have been dotting the globe with splendors since power and wealth were invented, and the masses have beheld those self-homages with a mixture of resentment, gratitude, and rage. There’s nothing new about that contradiction, of course. As a statement, it’s infuriating as architecture, it earns its place on the skyline. Of all the supertall towers that have risen like flares, lighting up the city’s excesses and inequities, 111 West 57th Street-designed by SHoP Architects and erected by JDS Development, Property Markets Group, and Spruce Capital-is by far the most thoughtful. Residents can enjoy an 82-foot swimming pool with private cabanas, a sauna, a double-height fitness center, a private dining room, a lounge, 24-hour attended entrances, concierge service, and a private porte-cochère at the 58th Street entrance.It’s an uncomfortable thing to fall in love with a building you wish didn’t exist.
On the upper level, there’s a master suite, sitting room, wet bar, two dressing halls, and a walk-in closet. The 7,130-square-foot apartment’s great hall spans the full 50-foot width of the tower and has floor-to-ceiling windows that directly overlook Central Park.
The tower’s Duplex Penthouse 75 has been designed around a central entrance gallery that boasts an oval staircase connecting the two floors. The Beaux-Arts building also contains 14 apartments, called the Landmark Residences, which will begin closings early next year. The project has incorporated the historic Steinway Hall, home to piano company Steinway & Sons, as part of its entrance and to hold amenity space. Its super slender frame allows all 46 full-floor condos to feel like private homes. Designed by SHoP Architects with interiors by Studio Sofield, 111 West 57th Street rises 1,428 feet, making it the second tallest residential building in the Western Hemisphere.
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