As I was reading about 262 Fifth Avenue, New York’s latest very slender skyscraper (but, interestingly, not a super tall) two thoughts came to mind. First, there’s a huge invisible mass of unclaimed zoning envelope floating over Manhattan, and the slender buildings and supertalls don’t make it bigger, they just redistribute it. So there may be reasons to dislike those buildings but “blocking the sky” isn’t one of them. If they were not built, we’d have more tall-but-not-as-tall buildings built.
Second, this is nothing new. The picture above is the 1907 “Chimney Building” at Wall Street and Broadway, demolished for the Irving Trust Building and looking very much like a child’s crayon drawing of a skyscraper.
