If New Yorkers thought that construction during Michael Bloomberg's tenure as Mayor was frantic, then what's coming next might be quite a shock: courtesy of CityRealty, these images show the New York skyline in 2018, when many of the city's current projects will be complete. Produced from building models by TJ Quan and Ondel Hylton as a marketing ploy for Jean Nouvel's 53 West 53rd street which recently (finally) began construction, the images include all of Nouvel's illustrious future neighbors: the "Billionaire's Row" including 111 West 57th Street, 220 Central Park South, 225 West 57th Street (Nordstrom Tower) and One57; new Midtown developments such as 432 Park Avenue, 520 Park Avenue, 425 Park Avenue, One Vanderbilt, 610 Lexington, 15 Penn Plaza, and the Hudson Yards towers; and even the latest financial district towers, 1WTC, 30 Park Place, 125 Greenwich, and 225 Cherry Street.
However, beyond just showing the individual buildings, these images display the new urban form taking shape in New York: where hundreds of tall buildings previously combined to give a sense of undulating uniformity to (most of) New York's skyline, by 2018 this will have given way to a more attention-seeking skyline, with a handful of super-tall, ultra-slender towers piercing the clouds.
What's more, peeling back the glazed surface of this new urban order reveals a stark reality about the lives of the people way down on the ground: with the majority of these new supertalls providing luxury residential properties in a city in desperate need of more affordable housing, these are images of gentrification taken very literally to a higher level. Indeed, "Billionaire's Row" is even nicknamed for those residents who are ousting the lowly millionaires from their prime spot near Central Park.
For more images of the future Billionaire's Row, visit CityRealty's page for 53W53 here.
