To wit, the shoe brand is renewing its first New York City location in the iconic Chrysler Building for another 10 years. Aerosole moved into the roughly 1,300-square-foot space in the foot of the tower roughly a decade ago and its lease expired at the end of this year. But the tenant saw an opportunity to lock in a deal early.

"With its close proximity to Grand Central and dense office population of many female workers," Mr. Pruger said, apparently reading from a brochure, it's the perfect location for selling "chic shoes." He added: "They love the spot. They love being a part of an iconic building."

Greg Cohen represented the landlord, Tishman Speyer, in-house.

lkusisto@observer.com

Among the structures that will go dark at 8:30 p.m. on March 28: the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings, the Citigroup Center, the Reuters, NASDAQ and Coca-Cola signs in Times Square, most Broadway Theaters, City Hall, the Manhattan Municipal Building, Brooklyn and Staten Island Borough Halls, the United Nations, and the East River Bridges.

It’s a brilliant PR move, for both the landlords and the World Wildlife Fund, which organized this "Earth Hour," and a lovely, if rather unsubstantial symbol (only one hour?!). It's also a great feat of organization: World Wildlife Fund has gotten 1,800 other cities in 81 countries to participate, including Atlanta, Chicago, and Miami.

“This will be a pivotal year in the future of our planet as we look to Congress, President Obama and global leaders to take immediate and decisive action on climate change,” said Carter Roberts, CEO of World Wildlife Fund, in a statement. “Having New York City go dark for Earth Hour will send a powerful message to the world that the U.S. is ready to assume a leadership position in solving one of the most serious challenges facing our planet today. By turning out the lights, the people of New York City will be casting a vote in support of the future of the Earth.”

Other participating towers include Hearst Tower, Time Warner Center, the The New York Public Library, 7 World Trade Center and the other Silverstein Properties buildings, The Helmsley Building and other Monday Properties buildings, Con Edison Clock Tower, the Grand Hyatt New York, and others.

From the release:

Joining these properties are top New York City organizations and institutions including Columbia University, PACE University, CUNY, New York University, Brooklyn College, the Building Owners and Managers Association of New York, the U.S. Green Building Council New York, Fall Out Boy Pete Wentz’s Angels + Kings, and many more.

Around the world, icons committed to Earth Hour include:

•         The Las Vegas Strip

•         Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco

•         Sears Tower in Chicago

•         Eiffel Tower in Paris

•         Notre Dame in Paris

•         Sydney Opera House

•         Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro

•         Niagara Falls

•         Stockholm Castle

•         Burj Dubai

Oscar nominated actor and New York City resident Edward Norton is the official ambassador for Earth Hour 2009 with support from Nobel Prize Laurite Archbishop Desmond Tutu, actresses Janeane Garofalo and Jennette McCurdy, fashionistas Stacy London and Clinton Kelly, as well as musicians Linkin Park, Alanis Morissette, Coldplay, Jo Dee Messina,Big Kenny (Big & Rich), Gavin DeGraw, KT Tunstall, Mary Mary, Dierks Bently, Wynonna Judd, Vince Gill, Amy Grant, Lady Antebellum,SHeDAISY, Finger Eleven, Simple Plan, Justin Nozuka, The Veronicas and Rise Against.

WWF officials stressed the importance of safety during Earth Hour, noting that all lighting related to public safety will remain on.

More information about Earth Hour and ways to get involved can be found at www.EarthHourUS.org/newyork and www.EarthHourUS.org

National partners for WWF's Earth Hour 2009 are Esurance, Cox Enterprises, The Coca-Cola Company, Wells Fargo and Hewlett-Packard.

About World Wildlife Fund and Earth Hour

Earth Hour (www.EarthHourUS.org) is a global initiative of WWF in which millions of people around the world will cast a vote in favor of action on climate change by turning off their lights for one hour on March 28, 2009 at 8:30 pm local time. By voting with their light switches, Earth Hour participants will send a powerful, visual message to their leaders demanding immediate action on climate change. WWF is the world’s leading conservation organization, working in 100 countries for nearly half a century. With the support of almost 5 million members worldwide, WWF is dedicated to delivering science-based solutions to preserve the diversity and abundance of life on Earth, stop the degradation of the environment and combat climate change. Visit  www.worldwildlife.org to learn more.

The tower, revealed today by New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff, would rise to a staggering 75 stories on 54^th Street just east of Sixth Avenue, tapering from a small base lot to an even smaller peak. Apartments and a hotel will occupy the building, according to the Times.

Back in December, the Museum of Modern Art sold the parcel of land to Gerald Hines for $125 million. At the time, a source who worked on the deal told The Observer that Mr. Hines would build a “glass box” for MoMA. The glass box will be nearly as tall as the Chrysler Building.

Of course, according to the Times story, MoMA will get only about 40,000 square feet of gallery space, but that should go far in assuaging critics who say that when MoMA redesigned it built too small.

“They built beautiful, but too small,” the art critic Jerry Saltz told The Observer back in December. “It’s really the greatest collection of modern art in the world, and it’s somewhat tragic that they really can’t show enough of it.”

“It’s unprecedented. It’s extraordinary,” office landlord and developer Larry Silverstein told The Observer.

So where’s the next record? If every New York City office building went up for sale, which ones would sell for the highest price?

The Observer asked the denizens of the real-estate world—the people who buy the buildings and the ones who trade them— which towers they thought would close with the biggest price tags.

The following list is a compilation of this (indeed, very unscientific) survey.

Most of these buildings, if sold today, would eclipse the $1.8 billion record that 666 Fifth Avenue set when it closed in January. (The building was purchased by Kushner Companies, where Jared Kushner, the publisher of The Observer, is a principal.) Most of these buildings are near Grand Central Terminal. Others are either on or just off Fifth Avenue, and one is located downtown. According to those interviewed, Rockefeller Center would, all together, sell for more than $8 billion, and the G.M. Building by itself would clear $4 billion.

All of the owners and brokers agreed on a simple rubric to figure which buildings would go for the highest price: the total amount of office space, plus the amount of rent a building can command.

So, in no order:

GM Building

The General Motors Building, at 767 Fifth Avenue, is the most valuable building in the world. It’s across the street from the Plaza Hotel, it sits at the foot of Central Park, and it has retail space on both Fifth Avenue—the cubed Apple store—and Madison Avenue.

It’s ridiculously huge, at 1.9 million square feet, and charges mind-blowing rents. Every person interviewed for this story was asked to give a short list of his favorite buildings in the city. The G.M. Building made every list. If it ever went on the market, it would set the all-time record for a single building.

“G.M. is worth $4 billion–plus,” said Scott Latham of the brokerage Cushman & Wakefield. It belongs to the father-and-son team of Harry and Billy Macklowe, who purchased it for $1.4 billion in 2003. It’s worth nearly three times that now.

200 Park Avenue

Sure, the MetLife Building, at 200 Park Avenue, dwarfs Grand Central. And sure, New Yorkers reserve a certain antipathy for the building. But, to real-estate insiders, its heft is its prize.

“I don’t think there’s any building you see more readily in the city than 200 Park,” said Woody Heller, a broker at the brokerage Studley.

“It’s hard to find a better location,” Mr. Silverstein added.

The building, which used to be known as the Pan Am Building, also has everything that might tickle a leasing broker: It’s huge, it has fantastic views, it’s literally connected to Grand Central, and it commands huge rents. It sold in 2005 for a then-record $1.72 billion—but if the current landlord, Tishman Speyer, decided to sell today, it could double that price.

Rockefeller Center

If Tishman Speyer ever sold Rockefeller Center and its collection of 12 buildings, which make up more than six million square feet, it would easily smash Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village’s $5.4 billion record-breaking sale. One broker estimated that it would go for about $1,400 per square foot—bringing the entire complex in at more than $8 billion.

“Buildings like this are art,” said Joseph Moinian, the developer.

It’s a complex that Jerry Speyer purchased in 1996 for $1.85 billion. Mr. Speyer, who also owns 200 Park Avenue, the Chrysler Building, 229 West 43rd Street and Stuyvesant Town–Peter Cooper Village, has assembled more trophy properties than any other developer around. “They are the greatest landlord in the city,” Mr. Latham said.

9 West 57th Street

The sloping-glass façade that makes up 9 West 57th Street is a signature touch to a signature tower in Manhattan. The building charges jaw-dropping rents, and its views are unmatched. “It’s like you’re sitting out in the park; it’s your backyard,” said Douglas Durst, the landlord and developer. “It’s an incredible location.”

“I think its views are wonderful,” said Mr. Silverstein. “The flow of the building as it arches upward is quite beautiful.”

The Sheldon Solow–owned building was designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, and includes public art outside and some of the city’s highest rents on the inside. When an elevator carries you up in the building, it opens to floor-to-ceiling windows with sweeping views of Central Park. Asking rents on the top floors stand at nearly $200 per square foot.

245 Park Avenue

The tower at 245 Park Avenue sits directly next to Grand Central. More importantly, it has 1.6 million square feet and takes up the entire block between 46th and 47th streets. That means a lot of space in an area where buildings sell for a very high price.

“It’s literally at the northern entrance of Grand Central, and it just has a special value,” said Jon Caplan, a sales broker at Cushman & Wakefield.

High-profile tenants include the headquarters for Major League Baseball, which takes up more than 130,000 square feet. “It’s a great, great building,” Mr. Moinian said. “I love that building—it’s one of the best in the city.”

277 Park Avenue

In the 1960’s, when tall towers went up all around Grand Central, they created a master plan that actually worked. Within a few blocks of the historic train station, billions of dollars could be traded in real estate alone. It is, without a doubt, the most powerful stretch of commercial real estate in the city.

Right next to 245 Park Avenue, the 51-story, 1.7-million-square-foot 277 Park Avenue would easily eclipse $2 billion if it traded today. The building is home to J.P. Morgan. “It’s a fabulous location,” said Bob Alexander, a broker at brokerage CB Richard Ellis. “All in all, how can you beat that location?”

7 World Trade Center

The finishing touches are still being applied to 7 World Trade Center, but when it’s all done, it will become downtown’s most valuable building.

“What makes it special is that it’s an exquisitely designed building,” said Mr. Silverstein, its developer.

But what makes it so valuable are its size and amenities: It’s 1.8 million square feet, and it’s brand-new. It embraces public art—there’s a Jeff Koons sculpture outside—and it’s attractive to deep-pocketed tenants. Moody’s Investors Service has signed a lease for more than 500,000 square feet in the building.

“It pushes the envelope for downtown,” said Mr. Latham of Cushman & Wakefield. “It’s arguably the best building in the city right now.”

One Bryant Park

The Bank of America Tower at 42nd Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues, is still a skeletal structure. But by the time it opens next year, the 54-story glass tower will be one of the city’s elite skyscrapers.

“It’s in the best location in the city,” said its developer, Mr. Durst. “It’s a large building, it’s a new building, and it will have the most advanced technology in it.”

It will also be able to capitalize on something that will take years for other owners to do: bring in all of its tenants at market rates. That means Mr. Durst will be collecting a lot of $100-a-foot rent checks. The building is over two million square feet, and its value will easily be more than $3 billion by the time it opens.

4 Times Square

When the Condé Nast Building was finished in 1999, it officially turned Times Square into an expansive playpen for developers. “Nobody believed we would find tenants,” said Mr. Durst, its developer. Then the law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom signed on. So did Condé Nast publications; Frank Gehry designed the cafeteria on the fourth floor of the building.

“When Skadden decided to go there,” said Mr. Durst, “it changed the perception of Times Square.” Suddenly, what had once been New York’s most public blight became a vital link in the increasingly expensive midtown market.

The Seagram Building

It’s New York’s most prized trophy: the Philip Johnson–and–Mies van der Rohe–designed Park Avenue classic, the Seagram Building. “It’s such a beautiful building,” Mr. Durst said, “and those rents that people are willing to pay to go there!”

The RFR-owned building impresses landlords in two ways: It’s absolutely the hallmark to any portfolio, and it’s a huge moneymaker, with eager tenants dropping well over $100 per square foot.

“It’s the best building in the city,” Mr. Moinian said.

It’s a bit less than 800,000 square feet, so the Seagram is the only building on the list that wouldn’t clear $2 billion. It is a building, however, that would probably clear $2,000 per square foot.

“I think it falls into a group, a handful of buildings that would set new per-square-foot pricing records,” said Mr. Caplan of Cushman & Wakefield.

Where’s the Empire State Building?

Rents matter more than legend to those who buy and trade New York’s concrete canyons

Hey, what about those other icons piercing the sky? Why didn’t the Empire State Building or the Chrysler Building—or even the Woolworth Building—make the list of New York’s priciest?

Well, real-estate people aren’t aesthetes.

Something that New Yorkers regard as an engineering disaster—the MetLife Building girdling Grand Central Terminal, for instance—can be, for real-estate people, the gold standard for office towers. Why? A building like MetLife was designed specifically with bloated rent checks in mind, while the Woolworth Building’s tiny floor plates certainly were not. And higher rents mean higher sales prices.

The Empire State Building has its own issues, like a decades-long battle to attract tenants. It’s been the butt of jokes among real-estate brokers. (The Empty State Building! Ha!)

The building, owned by a partnership between Peter Malkin and Leona Helmsley, is undergoing an extensive makeover. And it’s still the city’s trademark skyscraper. Considering its size—2.77 million square feet—it could crack the $2 billion sales barrier soon. Still, a lot of that depends on what it looks like post-renovation.

The only part of the Chrysler Building that would go up for sale, meanwhile, is the leasehold position. Tishman Speyer is the current leaseholder, which means managing the building and collecting the rent checks. Since a leasehold position doesn’t mean total ownership, it generally doesn’t bring in the billions and billions of dollars being traded.

Cooper Union controls the ground that the Chrysler Building was built on; if the school waited for Tishman Speyer’s lease to run out and then decided to sell the building, it would be a top sale.

Our tale this week of university real estate woe left out a lot of worthwhile research from the City Project paper on which we reported. One bit of that is how the Chrysler Building has been standing there, all 1,048 tall of it, for 76 years without it contributing any property tax to the city. That's because a court decision exempted the owners of the land beneath it, Cooper Union, from real estate tax liability. The commercial tenants in the building pay what are called "tax-equivalency charges, but that money goes to Cooper Union instead. Neil deMause has more details.

-Matthew Schuerman

I should have been more attentive. I should have gotten up earlier. I let my guard down. I let the city down. I felt that I-literally-let the lights go out for at least a year without taking action. But now I'm on the case, and I've already got results.

The lights I'm talking about are the Chrysler Building lights, those luminous spikes on that lovely spire. The most beautiful sight in the New York night.

I might not have noticed what was missing if it hadn't been for the all-night Dunkin Donuts that opened across the street from me. Not the most beautiful sight in the New York night, but a pleasant one and an incentive to make my already early-rising workaholic habits take a giant leap backward. I began getting up around 4 a.m. and shuffling zombie-like over to D.D. to get my large coffee and a whole-wheat doughnut (organic all the way for me).

Anyway, one of the first things I discovered, to my shock, during my pre-dawn D.D. trips was that the Chrysler Building spire was dark. Maybe you don't care, but I had not just a civic, but a personal investment in that lovely late-night/early-morning glow.

Back in 1998, I got the Chrysler spire lights kept on all night long. It was one of my proudest achievements as a columnist. For many years prior, under its previous owner, the lights of the Chrysler Building spire-those supremely elegant triangular spikes of near-spiritual luminosity-had been shut off at 2 a.m.

Then, that year, two things happened: I moved into a new apartment and the Chrysler Building came under new ownership. My new apartment featured a beautiful view of the Chrysler Building's upper floors and spire-to me, the quintessence of New York City's luminous nocturnal elegance. I'd go to sleep bathed in its glow, but wake up, as I usually did around 5 a.m., to see it dark as death. A dull leaden shadow that was like a distillation of all the negation of night and lost light.

So I wrote a column for The Observer, a plea to the new owners, Tishman Speyer Properties, to keep the Chrysler spire lit till dawn. The column ("Come On Tishman, Light My Spire," Feb. 23, 1998) actually worked! The new owners read the story and the letters from my readers, and in an unusually enlightened gesture, decided to keep the lights all night long-anyway, till six in the morning.

It was not only satisfying in a power-of-the-press sense (almost as satisfying as my success in getting Charles Portis' novels back in print), it was rewarding for the pure beauty it gave back to New York. Particularly as the night grew closer to dawn.

The restoration of that lost light meant more than giving back to the city the up-all-night glamour and excitement that a lit-up spire represented. It gave us back that magic hour when light begins to filter back into the sky, that deliquescent moment when the illumination of the light sabers on the Chrysler spire are overtaken by the glow of dawn and suddenly, at 6 a.m., the spire-having guided us across the bridge to dawn-faded back to black. Some might savor the moment when the lights went on; for me, it was the drama of their departure.

This loveliness lasted for a little more than four years. And then the picture changed about a year ago: Once again, the lights began to go off at 2 a.m.-about the time the drive-in window at the Wendy's in Podunk shuts down. A call to Tishman Speyer representative Steven Rubenstein yielded the depressing information that the change had come last summer, when the Mayor's fulminations about an energy crisis led the building's owners to turn off the lights at 2 a.m., returning us to the dark ages.

I don't fault the building's compliance at the time of the crisis. But I do blame the Mayor for his penny-wise, pound-foolish puritanical attitude, which now has extended from no-lighting-up to lights-out everywhere . Get this: According to a recent report in the Post , some idiot city official has-to save a whopping $75,000 out of a $280 million annual Department of Transportation budget-ordered the shut-off of the lights strung along the lovely, curving cords of the Brooklyn Bridge (and the structural silhouettes of the Williamsburg, the Manhattan and the 59th Street bridges, too).

There is nothing in New York City-with the possible exception of the Chrysler Building spire-that defines the New York night more beautifully than the string of pearls that stretches so languorously and tautly across the river on the Brooklyn Bridge. Gone now. Out. As I pointed out in my initial 1998 column that got the Chrysler spire turned on all night, this is about the spirit of the city, an asset more valuable than any single piece of real estate. An asset that underlies, gives value to real estate, to tourism, to our very identity as a metropolis. The bridge blackout is so shortsighted, so small-minded. As I suggested back in 1998, people come to the city from all over the world because they want to "wake up in the city that never sleeps" (as Sinatra put it), not because they want to wake up in the city that declares "Lights out!" at 2 a.m.-or, in the case of the Brooklyn Bridge, no longer cares to turn them on at all.

No lighting up in nightspots, no lights on our bridges-we might as well be living in a convent.

So I decided it was time to mobilize again. We need these lights to keep our spirits up in the lonely hours and the dark nights of the soul. Perhaps some philanthropist can make himself a civic hero by shelling out the $75K to light up the Brooklyn Bridge again. Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz has been on the case, calling for the bridge lights to be turned back on.

And I can report a gratifyingly prompt response from the Chrysler Building owners: They're turning the lights back on till 6 a.m.! Once again, this column gets results! Thank you, Tishman Speyer, for understanding what an invaluable intangible poetic asset those lights are.

Speaking of poetry, there's a centuries-old literary form you may be familiar with, the aubade , the dawn poem. The lines that lovers in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and, more recently, in Auden, Lowell and Larkin utter to hold back the grim reaper of dawn.

Traditionally the lovers protest or deny the coming of light, which will mean separation. Often they rhetorically attack the cowardly night for fleeing, or the intrusive first light of dawn for over-hasty peeping. The Chrysler Building spire's light is a way of telling us the night has not yet fled (Juliet: "Yond light is not daylight … it is some meteor that the sun has exhaled.") There's still time to dream (and get busy). The lit-up spire at the moment of dawn captures the graceful urgency, the surprising sadness of first light. The lit-up Chrysler Building spire captures the spirit of the New York night with the urgency of a beautiful urban aubade .

Now it's time to kick ass and get the Brooklyn Bridge lit up, too. In an e-mail to me, Brooklyn Borough President Markowitz declared: "We shouldn't keep our beloved bridge in the dark any longer over such a small amount of money." Amen.

So call the Mayor at 311 or e-mail him (http://nyc.gov/html/mail/html/mayor.html). Email the Department of Transportation's Commissioner Iris Weinshall (iweinshall@dot.nyc.gov). Tell them to reverse this misguided decision and light up the night again.

Meanwhile I can't tell you what a thrill it was to wake up at 4:30 or so on the morning of Aug. 5, and see for the first time, through a halo of mist, the sight of the Chrysler spire lit up again in the dawn's early light. "But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?" It's our light-spiked spire giving us its all-night glow again.

Now if I ever get run over by a truck stumbling my way to the new Dunkin Donuts at 5 in the morning, I feel like those restored four hours of Chrysler spire light will be a kind of legacy. Keep them shining on.

So it's 1930, and you're a 300-ton, 90-foot gorilla, footloose, fancy-free, looking for kicks in New York City. "Gee, ain't we got enough of those?" pipes up a sailor as you pass down Fifth Avenue, which gets that joke out of the way. Let it go; you've snacked on enough sailors in your trip to the city, and frankly you preferred the cod. Now you've arrived, where do you go? Where's a primate of your standing to hang out? There's really only one place. Tall enough to remind you of your mountain home, with a needle-like peak you can really swing from once you get to the top ... there's no two ways about it: Head for the Chrysler Building.

When King Kong began shooting in 1930, the Chrysler Building was, at 1,077 feet, the tallest skyscraper in New York, and the obvious place for Merian Cooper to bring his movie to its high-altitude climax. But King Kong was made during the fiercest growth spurt the Manhattan skyline had undergone, and by 1931 the Chrysler Building had been overtaken by the 1,250-foot Empire State Building, and so Cooper's initial plans were scrapped: The Empire State it was, and a mythic match was made. Vaulting up the monolith's side, Kong never seemed less apelike and more human, his ascent acting out our basic aspirational desire to rise above our environment and roar Lear-like defiance to the heavens-a message with particular piquancy for anyone who's ever been stuck on the West Side Highway after 5 on a Friday.

That it took a giant ape to make the point should come as no surprise, for New York has always soaked up such extremes-from the sublime to the ridiculous, from The Great Gatsby (1974) to Ghostbusters (1984)-with the absorbency of blotting paper. "Here I felt anything could happen, anything," thought Fitzgerald's narrator, Nick Carraway, gazing upon this modern-day Ilium. And if that "anything," upon closer inspection, turns out to be Dan Ackroyd aiming his splurge gun at a lime-green blob of ectoplasm wolfing down hot dogs, so be it.

James Sanders' Celluloid Skyline radiates from a simple insight: New York is not just one city setting among others, but the city setting. Its shooting verticals and jutting horizontals offer filmmakers an instant lesson in composition, while its opportunities for random encounter are a dramatist's dream. Tom Ewall must bump into Marilyn Monroe on his stairwell in The Seven Year Itch (1955) and George Peppard discover Audrey Hepburn on the fire escape in Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961); both films could only happen in a city which houses citizens the same way it stacks sandwiches. Film critics often pay Paris the compliment of saying that it's the central "character" in a film, but New York isn't a character: It's pure plot waiting to happen-narrative, neat. One of Thomas Edison's first films offered audiences the primal thrill of hurtling along the stretch of Lexington Avenue subway line that ran from 14th Street to Grand Central. Wait 70 years, add a couple of hijackers and a few daubs of graffiti, and you have The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974).

Most of the early movies made in the city were documentaries with staunchly on-the-nose titles like At the Foot of the Flatiron (1903) or Panoramic View of Brooklyn Bridge (1899). Even with these most straightforward snatches of reality, you could feel the forces of narrative muscling in from the sidelines, anxious to get to work: A man's hat is blown off, and you sense the first tremors of slapstick; a woman's skirt is blown over her head, and you can't help fast-forwarding to Marilyn half a century later. As Mr. Sanders reminds us, the movies were born in New York, and the only reason they didn't stay was the advent of sound; microphones couldn't pick up the actors' voices above the surrounding din-they called it "mike stew"-which meant that filmmakers moved indoors, into the sound studios.

In Hollywood, technicians recreated New York's balustrades, cornices and moldings in loving detail, a feat of artistry whose only parallel, perhaps, is to be found in the late Renaissance-"Brunelleschi might have smiled," Mr. Sanders writes-or maybe the alternative-universe fictions of Borges, who would surely have thrilled to the intimate connection being forged among architecture, artifice and memory. "Oh, to be back in Hollywood, wishing I was back in New York," said Herman Mankiewicz, and it was out of that same double-edged longing that homesick writers buffed their dreams of New York to a mythic gleam-never more blinding than in Swing Time (1936), a true wedding cake of a movie. Astaire and Rogers make a gradual ascent from one dazzling penthouse nightclub to the next, before finally reaching the uppermost tier, the Silver Sandal, from whence they gaze out across a New York skyline that looks as if the stars had come down to hang out on earth for a while.

A skyscraper gives you a view of other skyscrapers, and therein lies the profound democracy of New York's architecture. The city's sights are available to all, for the simple reason that the city is its own sight, visible from any vantage point. This works in reverse, too: As John Updike has noted, New York glitters from afar, even when you're in the middle of it-hence the almost ludicrous ease with which it can be mythologized. That mixture of proximity and distance is myth's catnip.

The city is flattered by every angle, the distant perspectives afforded by Oz's spires or the cheek-by-jowl confinement of Rear Window (1954). Hitchcock liked to prowl around his set, fussing and clucking proudly over its details-as well he might, for it was one of the last of its kind. After the war, audiences newly accustomed to the run-and-grab authenticity of the Pathé newsreels demanded more in the way of grime and grit; the era of the location shoot was ushered in, and New York was back in business.

So what had Gotham been up to while the movies were sunning themselves in California? How'd she look? "A little past her prime" would be the polite way of putting it. The urban landscape unveiled in the films of Sidney Lumet and Elia Kazan was all neon and rain, a city of garbage-strewn streets and rising crime levels-not only that, but if you believed Roman Polanski, a city where you stood a higher-than-average chance of moving in next-door to a coven of witches. The rheumy washed-out light that greets Popeye Doyle when he emerges, blinking, from a bar at 7 a.m. in The French Connection (1971) was achieved by overexposing the film and then overdeveloping the negative-a technical trick, in other words, as hokey, in its own way, as back-projection was in the 30's and 40's.

Was ever a movie era so instantly recognizable by the consistent lousiness of its weather? Under skies the color of reheated porridge, movie after movie competed to show off New York's grungy anti-splendor. Think The French Connection looks pretty down in the dumps? Try Ratso Rizzo's apartment and the vivid squalor of Midnight Cowboy (1969). The opening shot of Taxi Driver (1976)-Robert De Niro's cab emerging through a plume of vapor-presented a haunting image of urban hellfire; it looked as if Hades had opened up and belched. Sit through to the film's climax, and you realize it had.

One hesitates to point out that the vapor was merely steam produced by the underground network that so efficiently heats Manhattan buildings. After Martin Scorsese's succinct summation of this style of velvet rot, something had to give. What better turning point than Woody Allen's monologue at the beginning of Manhattan (1979)? When he flips through a Rolodex of descriptions of New York to see which one fits best, Mr. Allen could easily be offering a summary of Celluloid Skyline . "Chapter One: 'He adored New York City. He idolized it out of all proportion. No matter what the season was, this was still a town that existed in black-and-white, and pulsated to the great tunes of George Gershwin .... ' No. Let me start over. 'He was too romantic about New York, as he was about everything. He thrived on the hustle-bustle of the crowds and the traffic. To him, New York meant beautiful women and street-smart men who seemed to know all the angles .... ' Ach. Corny. Too corny. Let me try and be a little more ... profound. Chapter One: 'He adored New York City. To him, it was a metaphor for the decay of contemporary culture-the same lack of individual integrity that caused so many people to take the easy way out.' No, it's gonna be too preachy. Let's face it-I want to sell some books here .... " Mr. Allen eventually chose the first option, black-and-white and Gershwin tunes. Mr. Sanders' book-an invaluable tour guide to several cities, each going under the name New York-gives us all of them.

Tom Shone is the New York film critic for the Daily Telegraph of London.

Not that I'm unhappy with my situation in life. I love my work, love my column and the new book I'm working on, feel enormously fulfilled by the publication of my most recent two books ( Explaining Hitler and The Secret Parts of Fortune ) and the following they've developed.

Still, after watching Survivor religiously from the third week on, after being mightily surprised–no, stunned –by the triumph of the Machiavellian Rich and his killing machine of an alliance, it suddenly occurred to me that I'd like to have an alliance like that of my own. That my life might have been easier for me in the past–less anxious, more rewarding in practical (as opposed to merely aesthetic and metaphysical) ways, if I'd made strategic alliances. And perhaps more rewarding in the future: Yes, I have a certain amount of power over my own life, but an alliance might give me–and the like-minded people I ally with, of course– more power and influence. The intimidating kind of influence I've never really sought before. And so I think the time has come to form an alliance, an alliance with the people I feel most artistically and spiritually attuned to, an alliance of like-minded edgy enthusiasts. An alliance with you , dear reader. Yes, I want you to become a Founding Member of The Edgy Alliance.

First, let me explain how Rich's triumph in the final "tribal council" made me rethink my attitudes toward alliances. What got me was the way I completely misread the situation, completely failed to anticipate the way things went down in the final tribal council–this despite becoming an addicted student of the show. I loved the way that, beneath its crafty architecture of contrivance and artifice, Survivor seemed to give you a window into the sublime, ineradicable pettiness of human nature. The moments when some kind of bizarre Chekhovian glimpses of people under pressure would emerge. But as the show drew to a close, like everyone else I found myself focusing obsessively on the Tagi alliance, its manipulative leader Rich, and the ethical and practical questions about Life it raised.

For those of you who had better things to do on Wednesday nights this summer, or made a conscious decision to opt out of participation in this communal pop-culture drama (the national debate about Survivor , the water-cooler culture of Survivor , was even more authentic and revealing a phenomenon than the show itself), let me briefly explain why I found the climax so astonishing. Why it prompted the formation of The Edgy Alliance.

You know, of course, that the 16 game players on the Survivor island were initially divided into two tribes named Tagi and Pagong. That each week at a tribal council, one of the two tribes (the one that lost the so-called immunity challenge) had to vote off one of its members until the seventh week, when the 10 remaining members of the two tribes merged to form one tribe that then proceeded to eliminate one member a week. Until the final tribal council when there were only two survivors left, and the last seven people kicked off the island would return as a jury to pick the million-dollar winner.

Early on, whether by accident or design, the two tribes began to take on two personalities that mimicked those of the survivors in H.G. Wells' futurist novel The Time Machine : the fun-loving but defenseless Eloi and the subterranean scheming meanies, the Morlocks. While the Eloi-like Pagong tribe idled away their days amiably, among the Morlock-like Tagi a sinister-seeming four-person alliance emerged, engineered by "corporate trainer" Richard Hatch. The four-person voting bloc (consisting of Rich, the septuagenarian Navy SEAL Rudy Boesch, the abrasive truck driver Susan Hawk, and the wavering but resourceful river guide Kelly Wiglesworth), first combined to eliminate most of the non-alliance members at the Tagi tribal councils, and then, when the tribes merged, began mowing down the hapless Pagong patsies who were like deer in the headlights before the Richard-driven alliance juggernaut. The Pagong were clueless Eloi, either unwilling or unable to form an alliance to defend themselves.

It seemed at first that what was being enacted was an eerie fulfillment of Yeats' despairing maxim in "The Second Coming" about the birth of 20th-century horror: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are filled with passionate intensity." It was yet another instance in which passivity by dithering liberals like Sean and Greg–who used purported ethical rationales for making wussy choices–allowed the greater of two evils to triumph. Sean, you'll recall, was the goofy neurologist who refrained from making choices in the tribal-council votes over who to expel, instead adhering to an ostensibly neutral, non-offensive alphabetical voting system: voting to expel not the one he disliked or wanted gone, but just whoever was the next one down in the alphabet. Sending poor Jenna to her metaphorical death at the one moment when the deviously scheming Rich was still vulnerable!

And Greg, the goofy guy who called a coconut shell his "nature phone" and who apparently couldn't close the deal with the fabulous Colleen when he had a chance (what's up with that?), pulled a Sean-like move in the final jury vote: Instead of choosing between the final two, Rich and Kelly, on the basis of merit, friendship, anything , Greg chose a numerical rather than alphabetical cop-out, ostentatiously asking each of the two to pick a number, and gave Rich his (deciding) vote when it turned out Rich's number was closest.

Typical liberal behavior: trying to be "nice" rather than principled. But still I was fairly certain, up until the very last ballot of the very last vote, that Rich's strategy would ultimately backfire.

Yes, the alliance might work up until that moment, and yes, Rich did end up in the final two. Ended up there largely because Kelly must have been thinking the way I was: that when it came to that final round of voting by the jury of seven, most of them Rich's victims, they'd naturally give him a taste of his own medicine and vote in favor of the nicer, more ambivalently (or ineptly) ambitious Kelly. And so when Kelly had the choice in the semi-final round to make her final rival Rich or Rudy, she knocked off Rudy because she figured she'd be better off staging a good-versus-evil showdown with Rich.

Was she wrong ! Was I wrong!

I figured it might even be 5-2 for Kelly over Rich, but it turned out 4-3 to make Rich the winner. No one voted against him because of his aggressive, Machiavellian, alliance-forming, game-playing behavior; in fact, some voted for him because they admired his aggressive, Machiavellian, alliance-forming, game-playing behavior.

And who's to say they were wrong? It was a game, after all, and they were applauding and approving him not as a candidate for sainthood but as a game player. It began to dawn on me that there was a Life Lesson to be learned here. Look at the way it's reflected in the game of American politics. Look at Bill Clinton. Is the source of his continuing high poll ratings admiration for his character? No, it's admiration for his ability to keep his alliance together, for surviving the ultimate tribal council of impeachment. For being a survivor.

And it's why I now think it's no accident that the recent big shift to Al Gore coincided with the final episodes of Survivor . People haven't come to like Al Gore any better, but I think they've begun to see him through the lens of Rich. Not an alpha male but a delta male . D for devious. They know he staged "the Kiss," for instance. But they don't resent the staging; they admire him not for the sincerity but for the staging.

And when George W. gets all whiny and defensive and trembly-lipped about something and asks America to think about what's "in my heart," I think from now on they're going to be thinking: Kelly. Or maybe even crybaby Jenna, if not goofball Greg.

And so, in the aftermath of the Survivor finale, with this further evidence of the power of its Life Lesson, I began to rethink my attitude toward Rich, toward the concept of alliances. It was in the aftermath of Survivor that I began to think it was time to form my own alliance. And where better to seek like-minded allies than in the readers and fans of this column?

After all, looking back on it, over the years I've called upon readers of this column to form a number of temporary, ad hoc alliances for noble causes. Alliances to support the late, lamented Books & Co., the illustrious independent mecca for readers and writers, as it struggled to survive the shameful squeeze put on it by the real estate speculators in charge of its Whitney Museum landlord.

And then there was the equally noble but more successful ad hoc alliance formed to save Mystery Science Theater 3000 , the brilliant movie satire show. The president of the network that picked the show up when the Comedy Channel was about to dump it credited this column and its readers for clinching her decision–which kept the show alive for three more years. (You can still see reruns on the Sci-Fi Channel, 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. on Saturday mornings. Don't miss it!)

An even more lasting and visible victory achieved by this column and its readers can be glimpsed every night in Manhattan: An alliance of this column and its readers convinced the new owner of the Chrysler Building to reverse previous policy and keep the lights of the building's beautiful spire (once extinguished at 2 a.m.) lit all night long. A triumph–perhaps my most lasting legacy–that was, I'll admit, predicated on a previous, rather more selfish ad hoc alliance. That was the time when I had an apartment crisis and called upon readers of this column to help find me a new place (and accompanied that plea with a plaintive-looking picture of my legendary charismatic cat Stumpy above the caption "Please find a home for us"). It was when I moved into the new place that one of my readers had tipped me off to, and it turned out to have a view of the Chrysler Building and I discovered the lights went out at 2 a.m., that I was prompted to call for an alliance to keep it lit.

Still, more often than not I've used this column's power for strictly unselfish reasons. There was the alliance in support of Charles Portis, the brilliant, reclusive author of The Dog of the South , most of whose novels had gone out of print, an alliance that helped prompt a smart publisher (Overlook Press) to bring them back again. (You must read The Dog of the South .)

And then there was the great outpouring of communal solidarity prompted by my formation of the Can't Stand Seinfeld Society, an informal alliance of people who felt left out by the torrent of hype for the insipid, overrated sitcom. Many people who sent in the "membership coupons" I printed for the C.S.S. Society expressed gratitude at being able to bond with others in that lonely crowd through the medium of this column. (Just trying to do my part to bring people together.)

It was the Can't Stand Seinfeld Society coupon that clinched my decision to form what I've decided to call The Edgy Alliance. I love designing coupons, particularly that little scissors icon.

A couple questions might occur here. Like, what is the purpose of the Alliance? Hey, what is the purpose of the Elks Club, the Crips and the Bloods, Skull and Bones, the Hellfire Club? An excuse for like-minded people to freely associate. A vehicle to reward friends and punish enemies. In this case, a mobile cultural strike force to galvanize support for deserving books, movies, CD's and TV shows. A more coordinated way of engaging in cultural activism with people of similar tastes in high and low culture. I might even expand it to interactive cyber activism if I could find one or more people to volunteer to act as Web master.

Now, dear reader, it's time to make a searching personal inventory to see if you qualify for The Edgy Alliance. Not everyone will. There's no entrance fee–well, no monetary fee is required, but rather what you might call intellectual currency, a shared aesthetic sensibility. Those who qualify and supply their address on the coupon will receive a free personalized membership card signed by me and witnessed by Official Alliance Mascot (and Power Behind the Throne), Stumpy. (When I say "witnessed" by Stumpy, I mean Stumpy will witness me signing it; his agent and attorney have advised Stumpy not to co-sign anything with me.)

So: If you are a subscriber or regular reader of The Observer , you qualify ! You can call yourself a Founding Member.

If you are one of the many people who tell me they turn to my column first, you qualify ! And you will receive the designation Exalted Founding Member.

If you have written letters of support for previous cultural campaigns advanced by this column, you qualify ! Consider yourself a Knight of The Edgy Alliance. (The Can't Stand Seinfeld Society is hereby merged with The Edgy Alliance, and all members automatically qualify as Knights.)

If you have purchased a copy of The Secret Parts of Fortune , you qualify ! Congratulations, you are Supreme Commander of The Edgy Alliance.

Finally, if you're a new reader of the column or you're not sure whether you qualify, or even whether you have an affinity for the enthusiasms of The Edgy Alliance, consider the following randomly organized list of works and people praised in previous columns and see if one or more resonates with you. If so, you qualify !

All the King's Men , the Cowboy Junkies, Dead Souls, Mystery Science Theater 3000 , The Long Goodbye , Peter Brook, Badlands , Smokey Robinson, Chimes at Midnight , Don DeLillo's Libra , Chrissie Hynde, Murray Kempton, Larry Sanders , the Dixie Chicks, De Rerum Natura (Lucretius), Persuasion , Doo Wop, Pale Fire , Brian Kulick, Sandra Bernhardt, David Berlinski, "Shipping Out" (David Foster Wallace), Tom Petty, The Third Man , Julie Taymor's Titus , Lingua Franca , Willie Nelson, Tom Frank, the Shirelles, Eric Ambler, Blade Runner , The Anatomy of Melancholy , Charles Portis, Blood on the Tracks , James M. Cain, Bruce Wagner, Rickie Lee Jones, Sam Cooke, Errol Morris, Ann Magnuson, Seven Types of Ambiguity , The Woman in White , The Simpsons , "Losing My Religion," Christopher Ricks, Renaldo and Clara , the dream of Clarence (in Richard III ), Edith Wharton, Jon Stewart, George Herbert, The Pat Hobby Stories , Nicholson Baker, The Crying of Lot 49 , Other Inquisitions (Borges), Chinatown , Bill Murray, Rosanne Cash, Hart Crane, Bruce Cutler, John Gotti's lawyer (no official Gotti endorsement implied) … to name a few. (By the way, if you are reading this online you can apply at Box #105, 577 Second Avenue, New York, NY 10016.)

Oh, one last word. In case anyone wonders why the membership coupon (and the free membership card you receive if your application is accepted) is adorned with a headshot of Rich from Survivor , as well as one of me and Stumpy … well, one of the first official acts of The Edgy Alliance will be to formally attempt to make an alliance with Rich. Are you kidding? I want to stay on his good side. That dude is scary.

Where was I? Off on a parenthetical rant, distracted by rage from my last crusade. This is a more lighthearted one, a light- centered one, in fact. But it involves another landmark crucial to the very identity of the city: the Chrysler Building.

Breathes there a soul in this city so dead he or she doesn't thrill to the sight of the Chrysler spire? Especially to that spire lit at night? To those elegant glowing arrows of pure light that put to shame the ugly colors Leona Helmsley bathes the Empire State Building with.

I feel a bit disloyal making this invidious comparison because the Empire State Building was an icon of my family history, my link to the Emerald City. When I was growing up on Long Island, my father commuted to the city to work in the Empire State Building, the tallest building in the world at the time. It was a thrill to visit him in his office in the sky. I wasn't aware until recently how heated the rivalry was between the Empire State and Chrysler buildings when they were being built, both racing to top out as the tallest spire in the world. The Chrysler, which finished first, held the title for only 40 days before the Empire State beat it by 202 feet.

But let's face it: When it comes to sheer elegance, if you had to name one structure that is quintessentially Manhattan in its fusion of sophistication and mythic dimensions, true New Yorkers are going to choose the Chrysler Building, if only for the lights, those mystical hieroglyphs of luminosity arrayed against the night sky.

Hey, I'm not trying to sell you the Chrysler Building with this riff. It's just been sold, in fact, to new management: to Tishman Speyer Properties L.P., the people who own Rockefeller Center. But I've been thinking a lot lately about those lights, those luminous hieroglyphs and their hidden meaning, because for the first time I've had a chance to study them, to stare at them for hours on end. Because for the first time since I moved to New York, I have an apartment with a view, not just any view, but a view of the Chrysler Building.

Faithful readers of this column might recall that last fall, facing an apartment crisis, I issued an appeal to Observer readers-accompanied by a poignant (but dignified) picture of my cat, Stumpy-for help in finding us a new apartment. I was gratified by the response, both to my plight and to Stumpy's true soulfulness, and one of the first tips (from an alert independent real estate person, Cheryl Tanenbaum) resulted in my recent move to a place with a Chrysler Building view.

It resulted in two discoveries as well, one thrilling, one deeply disheartening. The thrilling discovery came on my first night in my new place. Exhausted by the move and aching too much from shifting boxes of books to sleep, I was staring at the Chrysler spire, trying to figure out the deeper meaning of the pattern of lights arrayed around those arched sheaths of stainless steel at the top. You know, those equipoised triangles of light sabers. The A.I.A.Guide to New York City describes them as "a crown of lancets," which sounds too clinical to really capture the sublime, ethereal glow of those wands of light.

In technical architectural jargon, lancets are sharp pointed arches. The word is derived from lance, of course, and can also be a term for a surgical cutting blade: lancet as scalpel. But I think there's something more visionary going on than the surgical metaphor conjures up. I doubt whether the Chrysler Building's architect, William Van Alen, had this consciously in mind when he was designing the spire, but it struck me with visionary force that sleepless night what those triangles of light were really about.

Think about it, check it out yourself: two-sided triangles of light, luminous dwellings with no floor. Call me crazy, but I think they represent teepees ! The Indian dwellings that the skyscraper skyline superseded, here recapitulated as emblematic hieroglyphs of light atop the iconic spire of that skyline. The more I thought about it, the more symbolically just this interpretive vision seemed to be: The hieroglyphs of light atop the Chrysler spire recuperate (as historicist academics love to say these days) the dwellings of the Native Americans who owned the island before being cheated and dispossessed by the Dutch. (I don't want to hear any quibbles about whether the Manhattan Indians lived in lodges or teepees-or bed-and-breakfast places for that matter. The point is the symbolic dimension: what the teepee forms represent to us.) Those triangles of light are the luminously transfigured return and reconquest of the island by the culture the skyscrapers replaced. They are glowing, incandescent emblems of the lost origins and exiled owners of the land, haunting its nighttime sky, presiding over its dreams and nightmares.

You're skeptical, I can tell. So was I at first, so I checked out my teepee interpretation with a learned friend, a Harvard doctoral candidate in comparative literature. She thought I might be onto something, although she saw not teepees but arrowheads. Either way! It's the return of the repressed, the return of the dispossessed, the return of the native written across the night sky in the language of light.

Until it goes dark: This is the other discovery I made that night, the deeply disheartening one. They turn the Chrysler lights off at 2 A.M. I suppose I should have known this, maybe everyone else knows it, but in recent years I've turned into an early riser, rarely stay out past midnight, and so was never witness to the dismaying spectacle of the lights being shut off in the middle of the night. But just as I was meditating upon my teepee vision, the teepees disappeared, the tower disappeared into a shroud of night and fog. The lights went out.

Something is deeply wrong here. Isn't this the city that never sleeps? Isn't that what Frank Sinatra sings? I don't think he's singing, "I want to wake up in a city that shuts off at 2 A.M." People leave towns all over America that turn their lights off at 2 A.M. to come to the city that never sleeps. It doesn't much matter whether, on any given night, you're up to watch the lights from 2 to 6 in the morning. What matters is that you know they're there . Even if you're asleep, you're asleep in a city that doesn't sleep, as opposed to a city that shuts off the lights on its most elegant and beautiful iconic spire while reruns of Charles Grodin are still on the air. There's something wrong, something out of whack about this.

I tried to get some answers on this issue from the new owners of the Chrysler Tower, Tishman Speyer. Were the Chrysler lights always shut off at 2 A.M., or was it a cost-cutting measure introduced by the previous owners of the building? At press time, they hadn't responded; their spokesman said they'd just taken title to the building a couple of weeks ago and weren't able to come up with an answer.

All the better in a way: Tishman Speyer can't be held responsible for the scandalous cheapness of the shut-off; instead, they can play the civic hero here. They can declare, Let there be light all night long. It can't be that expensive, a few extra hours, certainly not in comparison with the good will they'll reap from this kind of generous gesture. Write Tishman Speyer (at 1 Rockefeller Plaza, Suite 6620, New York, N.Y. 10020), tell them you want the Chrysler lights on all night long. I mean, is this New York or is this Dubuque? Tishman Speyer, with their mega-investment in New York real estate, ought to think of it as an investment in the city's future, a gesture of enlightenment in every sense of the word. Write Tishman Speyer and send a copy of your letter to me at The Observer . Or just send them a postcard with these words: Dear Tishman Speyer: light my spire .