A massing diagram from 606 West 57th Street's rezoning application.

Back in 2011, AvalonBay abandoned plans to build a 44-story, 700-unit rental building on the block south of West 57th Street between Eleventh and Twelfth Avenues. TF Cornerstone was rumored to be interested in the site, and it turns out the rumors were true: the Manhattan-based developer now wants to build a 45-story, 1,189-unit residential tower on the same site, according to documents filed with the Department of City Planning.

If approved, the project would contain a total of 1.2 million square feet of floorspace, with 42,000 square feet set aside for commercial use and a 550-space underground parking garage. Of the apartments, 20 percent—238 units—would be set aside as affordable housing under the city's inclusionary zoning program.

The project would, along with the residential pyramid that Bjarke Ingels is building for Durst Fetner on the north side of 57th Street, anchor the booming crosstown corridor, where half a dozen other luxury towers are in the works.

One of the site's more attractive buildings.

TF Cornerstone will have to go through the same private rezoning process for 606 West 57th as Dursts and Fetners had to do with the Bjarke Ingels building, involving a slurry of acronyms and eventually a vote in City Council. They're seeking to rezone the parcels—which make up most, but not all of the block—from their old manufacturing designations to a zone that allows the highest residential density in the city.

A building on the southeastern corner of the block, included in the rezoning application but not in TF Cornerstone's project, is owned by Republican mayoral candidate and Gristedes owner John Catsimatidis.

TF Cornerstone signed a 99-year lease for the site last May, leasing the land from Montgomery, Alabama-based Four Plus. Charles Edgar Appleby, the progenitor of Four Plus, first acquired land on Manhattan's West Side in the 19th century. He once declared, "It has been my rule to keep the value of my property in land, not in buildings." Apparently his offspring feel the same way.

Forget Fifth Avenue, West Broadway or Columbus Circle—57th Street is the new gold coast. (Emily Anne Epstein)

Michael Stern was walking to a meeting last summer when he saw the vacant site, barely wider than a townhouse, at 107 West 57th Street. On one side was the Steinway Building, an 87-year-old city landmark with an etched white limestone façade. On the other was a dowdy old SRO about to be gutted and transformed into the Quin Hotel, yet another boutique confection for the tourist masses.

Yet it was not the barren lot’s immediate neighbors that set Mr. Stern’s heart racing, but another edifice further down the block: Gary Barnett’s One57. The 1,005-foot, 90-story tower was only about halfway built at the time, but already it was on its way to taking the crown, on the skyline and in the record books, as the city’s tallest apartment building. Billionaires were already circling the units, which ranged from $5 million to $115 million.

Looking from Mr. Barnett’s site to the one in front of him, Mr. Stern knew he had to have it.

“Right now, there is nowhere else in the city like 57th Street, and it is only going to get better,” Mr. Stern told The Observer. “You’ve got so much on the horizon. You’ve got proximity to Central Park, you’ve got proximity to some of the world’s most premier shopping. I think it’s perceived to be the dead center, heartbeat of the city.”

Mr. Barnett is not alone in that belief, as a number of the city’s biggest builders have set their sights on the strip, positioning a boulevard that is equal parts grand (Bergdorf Goodman) and greasy (the Brooklyn Diner) to become New York’s new gold coast.

Barry Sternlicht, the creator of the W and Starwood hotel chains, had already planted his flag at 107 West 57th Street, having bought the vacant lot from another developer for $52 million in 2005. Last year, Mr. Stern bought into the property for $40 million, and together they’re now planning a shard of an apartment tower, all boutique luxury beauty, shooting up some 700 feet and 50 stories, but only 34 feet wide. With its pointy top, this might become the most expensive toothpick ever made.

Towers skinnier than runway models have begun to rise skyward all along this hiding-in-plain-sight strip. All seem to be in pursuit of the same thing: better views and bigger payouts. Already, at least a dozen billionaires are said to have bought into One57, where two of the units have sold for $95 million, the highest price ever paid for a home in the city, topping even the $88 million penthouse at the grand 15 Central Park West. These are untold heights in a city famous for them.

“I’ve taken to calling it the billionaires’ belt,” said author and 58th Street resident Michael Gross.

Always lacking the cachet of better-known crosstown boulevards, 57th Street is having a moment, thanks to a confluence of decades-old zoning and newfound global wealth. While City Hall has played almost no role in the development of 57th Street in the past few years, the Tiffany-tinted thoroughfare may soon stand as the singular symbol of the Bloomberg era. All it takes is an apartment—average price: $20 million.

A big part of the appeal, of course, is that all of these buildings are condos, which don’t tend to exclude residents based on pedigree, the way co-ops do. An ill-gotten oligopoly and half a dozen divorces? Who cares! Welcome to 57th Street.

In addition to 107 and 157 West 57th Street, there is 432 Park Avenue, rising on the old Drake Hotel site between 56th and 57th streets, which Harry Macklowe has controlled for years. It will usurp Mr. Barnett’s record, becoming New York’s tallest tower, bar none, at a height of 1,397 feet. (That’s ignoring 1 World Trade’s 400-foot spire, but you can’t live on a pole.) So far, Mr. Macklowe and CIM have pegged the most expensive units at 432 Park Avenue in the $80 million range.

Not to be outdone, the brash Mr. Barnett is poised to one-up those who have one-upped him. For some time now, he has been planning a tower at 225 West 57th Street, on the corner of Broadway and West 57th Street.

Early speculation had been that the building would reach 1,250 feet, but some reconfigurations and a few more air rights deals have now yielded Mr. Barnett a tower of 1,550 feet—set to reclaim the crown of city’s tallest tower by a good 151 feet. Mr. Barnett’s 88-story tower will have New York City’s first Nordstrom in its base, a sure sign that the luxury brands clustered around Fifth and Madison will continue to migrate west.

Further down, both on the boulevard and on the skyline, is the Durst Organization’s 625 West 57th Street, the one major new rental tower on the strip. Every design magazine from here to Dubai cannot stop talking about the 32-story pyramid, which looks like a giant paper airplane crossed with an aircraft carrier, designed by Danish wunderkind Bjarke Ingels.

Among the other smaller developments on the stretch are a new brooding hotel on the southern side of 57th Street, designed by the rough-edged industrial glam outfit Roman and Williams. Mr. Barnett also controls a 50-foot-wide parcel at 16 West 57th Street that he bought last year for $80 million. The site, off Fifth Avenue, had previously been marketed as a boutique shopping spot and 28-story hotel, but given Mr. Barnett’s keen ability to assemble air rights, something much taller seems possible.

And all the way over on the corner of Second Avenue, World Wide Group is preparing to break ground on a 57-story avant-garde behemoth with 270 high-end apartments, designed by Roger Duffy of SOM. Earlier renderings showed a faceted tower, like an uncut diamond, but a source explained that the newest plans “undulate.”

The length of 57th Street has encompassed the broad sweep of humanity, the high and low, the cultured and the crass, the chichi and the chintzy. Like so much of the city in the past 11 years, its rough edges are being demolished and reshaped, fashioned anew. Manhattan is starting to look as much like Dubai as New York, and is starting to feel like it, too.

For a few glorious decades more than 100 years ago, 57th Street was one of the city’s most sought-after addresses, the home of Manhattan’s first luxury apartment towers.

Up until the late 19th century, crowded tenement houses served as refuges for the masses, while patricians kept to their own townhomes. Only with the construction of buildings such as The Osborne at 57th and Seventh in 1885 were the well-to-do convinced to abandon their own private buildings. Then as now, it was amenities like doormen and sprawling layouts that made the move so attractive, the most important of all—as always—being the views, albeit only 10, 11, 12 stories above the low-slung hordes.

The Alwyn Court, Mr. Gross’s home, still stands at the corner of 58th Street and Sixth Avenue, a limestone grandee built in 1907 with etched sculptures running up and down its façade, every inch detailed by a mason’s hand. Then there are Cass Gilbert’s Rodin Studios, the Art Deco Parc Vendome apartments of the 1930s and the Ritz Tower at Park Avenue, the tallest residential building in the city when completed in 1927. And one of the saddest examples, at 57th and Ninth Avenue, the horribly dilapidated but still grand Windermere.

“In a lot of ways, the city’s craze for apartment living began here,” Ronda Wist, vice president of preservation at the Municipal Art Society, said during a recent walk along 57th Street. “The archetypes are all here.”

While the grand dames were soon eclipsed as the city continued its inexorable move northward, 57th Street still had other attractions to recommend it. It was an art hub long before there was Soho or Chelsea, owing to the Fuller Building, the Steinway Building, Carnegie Hall and The Art Student League, the former home of Georgia O’Keeffe, Alexander Calder and Ai Weiwei.

It has also long been home to some of the city’s most exclusive shops, starting with the arrival of Henri Bendel at 10 West 57th Street in 1913. The Louisiana milliner had left behind Ninth Street in the Village to cater to the emerging uptown set, and it was here that he would introduce them to the likes of Coco Chanel. Bergdorf Goodman followed in 1962, when it bought and demolished the old Cornelius Vanderbilt II mansion that had lorded over the northwestern corner of Fifth and 57th, taking up the entire block. Now, LVMH Row stretches the entire length of the block on the other side of the street, clear down to Madison.

“It may not be Fifth Avenue, but there’s a five in the address, and that’s all a lot of these buyers care about; for the foreigners, it’s all they even know,” said retail real estate maven Faith Hope Consolo. “It could be Fifth Avenue in the 60s or Fifth Avenue in the 20s, their friends back home aren’t gonna know. All they see is the postcard address. It’s the same with 57th Street. They know Bendel’s, and now they know One57. To these people, the address matters more than what’s outside the door.”

A big reason for this boom is that there are few other places in the city with the right mix of regulations and existing development to allow for these kinds of towers. There are no height or landmark restrictions in Midtown, unlike areas like Tribeca or the Upper East Side, making going higher that much easier. Plus 57th Street has the added advantage of being an extra-wide street, which allows for even taller buildings. And being just two blocks south of the park, it really is the perfect location for an ostentatious tower, or a dozen.

But more important even than the physical geography of the place is its psychogeography, particularly for Chinese and Russian buyers, said Yuval Greenblatt, a vice president at Douglas Elliman who has run the firm’s Midtown office for more than a decade.

“It’s the center of the city. They’re near shopping and all the hotels, the St. Regis, the Pierre, the Plaza; they’ve got the theaters, and the businesses are there,” he said. “Plus it’s close to the hedge funds at the Solow Building and GM and Seagrams. It already had this international feel, and now more than ever.”

But is there really a market for so many multimillion-dollar homes all bunched up together like this? “I think so,” said Jonathan Miller, the master appraiser. “So long as the market isn’t flooded, which it’s really not, and we only get one or two of these projects a year, we should be fine.”

“Remember,” he added, “these buildings are big, but so are the apartments, so there really aren’t that many of them.” One57 has 135 units (plus a Hyatt hotel on the bottom half) and 432 Park has 128, while 107 West 57th Street has all of 27 units planned, each one taking up at least an entire floor and more than half will be duplexes.

Meanwhile, demand is skyrocketing like these towers. Just as these new buildings are in a different class, so are the buyers. “Before, this was a small investment, little more than a hotel room,” Mr. Greenblatt explained. “Now, these are real homes, big homes, with the nicest finishes. These are the type of buyers who own homes all over the world, so that’s what they want.”

Mr. Greenblatt actually believes that there has been pent-up demand for these kinds of apartments for years that is only being worked out now, and that it should last for years, as global wealth continues to concentrate in the hands of the few and find its way into New York and other world capitals. As of this year’s Forbes list, there are 1,226 billionaires. And counting. Economic uncertainty only spurs on this kind of investment, too, according to Mr. Miller.

“If you’re looking out from your apartment on the 70th or 60th, even the 50th floor, you’ve got a certain perspective on the city,” Mr. Greenblatt said. “You’re looking out over one of the most powerful cities in the world, and you’re on top.”

In 2006, when Mr. Gross left the Village after 17 years to take up residence in Alwyn Court, it was, he told The Observer at the time, “Precisely the kind of neighborhood that the Village used to be. Creative people, no entitlement, no rage, no stroller Nazis.”

And now? “I’m just happy I don’t have to leave the neighborhood to go to Sur La Table.”

Going up to come down. (Matt Chaban)

The facade of 1780 Broadway will be retained, but that's it. (Matt Chaban)

No sooner did Extell Development file permits for a new 1,550-foot residential tower on the corner of 57th Street and Broadway then scaffolding started to go up around one of the final properties comprising Gary Barnett's little west side assemblage that will be home to the city's tallest tower. On Friday morning, The Observer happened to be out for a stroll on the crosstown boulevard when we noticed construction workers assembling a sidewalk shed, the first sign of construction commencement.

A source close to Extell confirms that demolition will soon begin on 1780 Broadway, a 12-story building that was once home to BF Goodrich. At the time, this corner of Gotham was known as Automobile Row during the Gilded Age. Because of an agreement with the city's Landmarks Preservation Commission, the facade of 1780 Broadway must be retained as part of any new building, so this will presumably be a careful deconstruction.

It is worth noting that, according to construction documents, the hotel will occupy floors seven through 12, the same height as 1780 Broadway, so it could make a good entrance for the hotel, while the Nordstrom would presumably have its entrance on busy 57th Street, with something quieter for the apartment tenants on 58th Street.

Inside the old, trashed Morton Williams (Matt Chaban)

The building at 225 West 57th Street was also part of the BF Goodrich complex, but the eight-story building was not given protections by the landmarks commission. The only thing holding up its demolition, which is also just beginning, was a Morton Williams grocery store in the ground floor and basement. Construction netting and scaffolding has been up on the building for months, but until a new Morton Williams opened a block down 57th Street, this one stayed open. Currently, the space is half empty, with ripped ceilings and empty cold cases strewn about the space.

Neighboring 117 West 57th Street was torn down last year and has lain dormant.

Is this a sign that this new building might indeed start rising sooner rather than later? "Once a building is torn down, a new one tends to rise," according to our source. "It's quite possible."

That would be an impressive feat, given that One57 is not even finished. Then again, if that building is indeed almost sold out, Mr. Barnett will need something else to start selling to the billionaires of the world, eh? Which begs the question, what could he possibly build next to top these two?

Update:Extell spokesman George Artzt explains that the building is being prepped for future work, but nothing will happen before plans are approved by the city's Landmarks Preservation Commission. "We're not doing anything to the building right now," he said. At the moment, demolition is only underway on 225 West 57th Street.

Going up. (NYT)

So we are obsessed with the changing skyline along 57th Street, so we are always excited and intrigued by new renderings that pop up for it. The latest may also be the greatest, and while 432 Park Avenue is nothing new, the pic that ran in The Times today gives the clearest indication yet of just how big this spindly behemoth will be. At 1,397 feet, the ritzy condo building surpasses 1 World Trade Center, less its spire, by 29 feet, boasting by some measures the biggest building in New York status.

It will also be the most expensive, as The Times, which got its hands on the condo's offering plan, reveals:

The apartments will be large, and very expensive, with an 8,255-square-foot six-bedroom penthouse on the 95th floor being listed for $82.55 million, according to the condominium’s offering plan.

The Park Avenue tower’s 147 residential units, which have already undergone two price increases totaling 3 percent, are being listed, when counted together, for $2.43 billion, a record for a residential development, appraisers say.

That penthouse will not beat out the prices at rival One57, where at least one unit has already surpassed $90 million, nor the previous record holder, 15 Central Park and its $88 million manse-in-the-sky. Will it have the same ability to attract the world's billionaires as those buildings, or are we running out?

Another important question: Who gets to cut the ribbon?

Will it be Harry B. Macklowe, the legendary developer who has survived a roller-coaster career of highs and lows? Or the CIM Group, the Los Angeles-based real estate investment company that acquired the land, on the site of the old Drake Hotel, after Mr. Macklowe defaulted on his loan in 2007?

Both are listed in the tower’s offering plan. While some real estate executives in New York are embracing a familiar narrative for the famously risk-loving Mr. Macklowe for staging yet another comeback, just how involved he will be in the building’s development—and eventual profits—remains a mystery to outsiders.

How could something so insistent and ostentatious contain so many mysteries? Perhaps it is all part of the plot. How better to draw attention away from your skyline-topping rivals?

Hello, Central Park.

The new look of Midtown.

Forget Park Avenue, forget Central Park West, forget Bond Street. Pretty soon, 57th Street is going to be the place to live in New York.

Already we have the uber-hyped One57, where billionaires buy condos pushing $100 million. The taller-than-1WTC 432 Park is just beginning to rise a few blocks away, with the recent revelations its penthouse will be asking $85 million. And at some point in time, Gary Barnett, the man responsible for One57, will begin work on another luxury tower on the corner of Broadway and 57th Street.

As if that were not enough, here comes a 51-story bolt of luxury to the heart of Manhattan.

Back in May, Starwood Capital announced it had sold a majority stake to JDS Development for a site it had long controlled at 107 West 57th Street—on the same block as One57. According to a March building permit on file with the city, the tower will reach 697 feet, about two-thirds the size of One57 but 140-feet taller than the landmark Essex House on Central Park South.

The project is designed by Cetra/Ruddy architects, who may be best known for another slender condo tower, the blocky One Madison, which overlooks the park of the same name. Renderings of the firm's 57th Street project have been making the rounds among developers and brokers in the city, which is how they made their way into our rendering-loving hands. They show a more angular structure, with swooping, faceted edges not unlike the nearby LVMH headquarters. As the building slopes away from 58th Street, terraces jut from the face—providing full views of the park, of course.

The building site, just off Sixth Avenue.

The building is narrow, located on a 43-foot wide lot, about the size of two row houses. This creates for quite the exclusive building, as there is no more than one apartment per floor, according to the building permits. In fact, there are more duplexes (14) than simplexes (13). The latter are located on floors 7 through 19 while floors 20 through 46 contain the former. The top of the building is dedicated to a quadraplex that will no doubt challenge its neighbors on the block for price supremacy.

The 51st and final floor is listed as "recreational space." Forget Top of the Rock. How about Top of the Shard.

As for the rest of the building, it contains retail on the first, second and third floors, nearly 10,000-square feet of it. There is also recreational space on the second and sixth floors, where amenities for residents, like lounges, common outdoor space and workout rooms will presumably be located.

A spokesman for JDS, which is best known for its work on the Walker Tower in Chelsea, declined to comment. There, too, the firm is creating some striking apartments with commanding views of the surrounding landscape. Perhaps next they can build something crazy down on the Battery. Wouldn't it be great if they revived Santiago Calatrava's plans for a stack of Seaport cubes? Certainly would seem to fit the portfolio.

Durst Fetner Residential brought their idea for the pyramid-like 57th Street apartment complex to Community Board 4 last night to a mixture of adoring fans and skeptical residents.

The project, first immortalized in comic form, then a City Planning-ordered fly through video, would be Mr. Ingels' North American debut after several critically acclaimed projects in his
native Denmark.

"City Planning is brain dead," a man clad in suede pants and a tweet jacket told The Observer in a thick Eastern European accent. "There's a lot of conflict."

If there is, then the kind of conflict peddled by Hell's Kitchen and Clinton residents is of the most cordial kind. The board members seemed almost smitten by the project, or at least more so than a rezoning proposal on nearby 11th Avenue that the board
eviscerated, pushing back The BIG/Durst presentation 40 minutes.

Many in the crowd were most impressed by the ambition of the project.

Mr. Ingels called his plan a way to fuse the density of a New York skyscraper with a Copenhagen garden. The final project will be "a way for Clinton/Hell's Kitchen residents to really connect to the waterfront," he said, while not taking away the river views currently enjoyed by residents of the Helena, another Durst residential property.

Not that there won't be roadblocks in the way. The thought of more rezonings--this project sits just two blocks north of the aforementioned 11th Avenue rezoning and is just a block south of Extell's huge Riverside Center--caused plenty of pained looks and squirming on the part of the board members.

The rest of the community's concerns were summed up by the West Side Neighborhood Alliance, an affordable housing group. "The neighborhood is now becoming sort of a bastion of experimental architecture," one of the group's members said. "What [this project is] offering the community is an iconic piece of architecture. I do think you really need to think about what else might benefit the community."

That, for Durst and Ingels, means affordable housing, which right now is projected, but not locked in, at an 80-20 split--a deal that would also reap the developers building incentives. Many members of the board were relatively silent on issues like public green spaces, which they complain are few and far between in Hell's Kitchen, and parking during the meeting, but they chimed in that affordable housing needs to be included in perpetuity.

Attendees did seem placated by the retail space and cultural programs built into the current design. The retail, which includes one large retail space and several other, smaller ones, got a positive response from the group. City Councilwoman Gale Brewer did point out that the larger space should not include a Costco, a swipe at Extell's plans, or a Walmart, a company the City Council is currently at war with.

Current plans give the cultural program 170,000 square feet on the third floor with an entrance on the southeast corner of the building. One potential tenant is the International Center of Photography, currently housed in another Durst property at Sixth Avenue and 43rd Street.

As for the sustainability features of the project, one speaker asked if the project would be built to LEED standards. Any queston of that was quickly quelled when another attendee replied, "Of course it will be LEED-certified. It's Durst."

mcoyne@observer.com