Inside 432 Park, a Pinnacle of the Luxury Condo Boom |
Weather: A bit of relief: Mostly sunny, with a high around 40 (but a few gusts persist). |
Alternate-side parking: Suspended through Saturday for snow removal. |
 | | Karsten Moran for The New York Times |
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There's a condo tower on so-called Billionaire's Row in Manhattan that resembles a skinny cereal box. It's one of the wealthiest residential addresses in the world. It's also shrouded in mystery: Many owners at 432 Park are concealed by shell companies. |
"They're still billing it as God's gift to the world, and it's not," Sarina Abramovich, one of the earliest residents of 432 Park, told him. |
I spoke to Mr. Chen about the exclusive building and the city's evolving skyline. (Our conversation was lightly edited for clarity and brevity.) |
Q: What's the state of the luxury market in New York City? |
A: We're already a few years out from the peak of the market. This building was a good one to home in on now because it represented the pinnacle of the luxury condo market, around 2015. |
Since then, a lot of things have changed that have pulled that market back, even before Covid: recent caps on state, local and property tax deductions that disproportionately affected home buyers in high-cost states like New York, and the introduction of a so-called mansion tax on properties that sell for more than $1 million. Couple that with a slowdown of interest from some foreign markets, like China, Brazil and Russia, and the luxury market began to sink. |
Many people aren't sympathetic to the plight of the ultrawealthy. |
I think a lot of people online have talked about schadenfreude, the idea that it feels good to have a laugh at these very rich people's expense. But I think beyond that, there is also real concern here about what was permitted to be built in the city at this height. |
These tall buildings are seeing complaints, whether it's related to mechanical issues or water or elevators creaking, all these issues that you wouldn't expect someone to have paying $20 million or $30 million for an apartment. |
(In his article, Mr. Chen wrote that the problems have also raised concerns that some of the construction methods and materials have not lived up to the engineering breakthroughs that only recently enabled the construction of towers like 432 Park, which stands nearly 1,400 feet high.) |
There was a lot of contention about these buildings even rising in the first place. People complained about them blocking out their views and casting shadows. Now that they're completed, why were they allowed to rise in this state? |
What's the appeal of exceptionally tall buildings? |
As some developers themselves have admitted to me, it's ego. It's wanting a trophy apartment that has the best view of Central Park. |
Many recent additions to the skyline were built explicitly because they can make a ton of money on the tippy-top penthouse apartments. |
What's next for the skyline? |
The pipeline for new fancy apartments of this stature has slowed down, but there are several still rising. So long as New York is seen as a safe investment by many of these well-heeled buyers, I think there's always going to be this incentive to buy. |
A police officer was transferred to Staten Island from Brooklyn after posting himself dancing on TikTok. [New York Post] |
Under elevated subway tracks, the nets that catch debris are bulging with snow and dangling over pedestrians. [Gothamist] |
A New Jersey man died in a car fire after revving his engine as he tried to escape a snow bank. [NJ.com] |
And finally: The prolific Ricky Powell |
The Times's Jon Caramanica writes: |
Often referred to, lovingly, as "the Lazy Hustler," Ricky Powell oozed vintage New York City charm and pluck. An inveterate walker, he pounded the pavement with his camera and snapped photos of whatever caught his fancy: superstars, well-dressed passers-by, animals. |
He documented the early years of hip-hop's ascendance, as well as a host of other subcultural scenes and the celebrities and fringe characters who populated the city. Crucially, he was proximate to the emergence of the Beastie Boys, which catapulted him into an unanticipated career as tour photographer and key entourage member, giving him a front-row seat to the worldwide explosion of hip-hop beginning in the mid-1980s. |
Mr. Powell learned he had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease last year. On Monday, he was found dead in his West Village apartment. He was 59. |
The death was confirmed by his manager and archivist, Tono Radvany. |
Ricky Powell was born on Nov. 20, 1961, in Brooklyn and grew up mostly in the West Village. He attended LaGuardia Community College in Queens and graduated from Hunter College in Manhattan with a degree in physical education. |
Mr. Powell's photographs were intimate and casual, a precursor to the offhand hyper-documentation of the social media era. They often felt fully inside the moment, living it rather than observing it. His subjects were varied: Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, captured on the street outside a gallery opening; Francis Ford Coppola and his daughter, Sofia, at one of her early fashion shows; Run-DMC; a pre-superstar Cindy Crawford; people sleeping on park benches. |
Josh Swade, who directed the documentary "Ricky Powell: The Individualist," said Mr. Powell had a raw social and cultural intelligence, "from being just out in the streets of New York in the '60s and '70s, fending for yourself." |
It's Thursday — capture the moment. |
Metropolitan Diary: What it's all about |
A friend of mine was visiting from Rio de Janeiro and staying in an apartment on the Upper West Side. I met her there and we prepared for a day out on the town. |
After leaving the apartment, we got on the elevator, where we were greeted by an older woman with two small dogs. |
I could not help smiling as I read the slogan on the woman's shirt: "What if the Hokey Pokey is what it's all about?" |
"What does that mean?" my Brazilian friend asked. |
Then we did what any respectable New Yorker would do. We did the Hokey Pokey and we turned ourselves around. |
New York Today is published weekdays around 6 a.m. You can also find it at nytoday.com. |
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