By Kim Velsey 10/29/12 7:30pm

Skyscraper Living

The bathtub in the unoccupied New York by Gehry penthouse. No water rippling in this store.

Skyscrapers May Shiver and Sway, but They’re Perfectly Safe (Just Stay Away From the Windows)

“You can tell the building is rocking back and forth because you can see the pocket doors hitting the wall,” said Eric Williams, a computer engineer waiting out Hurricane Sandy in his apartment on the 46th floor of the W Hotel and Residences in the Financial District. “It’s such a slow sway you don’t really see it, but you can feel it.”

Most of the building had been evacuated because of its proximity to the water, and he’d just received an email from the building management warning residents that the power would be shut off in the next hour, basically nixing elevator use, but he and his roommate were planning to wait it out. They didn’t fear floods on the 46th floor, but both of them were motion sick. He couldn’t see the building’s sway in glasses of water, but it was visible in the pots of water they’d filled in preparation for outages, a slow ripple from one side to the other, as though a hand were gently shaking the pots back and forth. Read More

By Kim Velsey 8/17/12 12:45pm

Stratospheric Living

Like living in a (sometimes bad) dream. (Extell)

Higher Than Thou: The Headaches That Come With Living on Top of the World

High life isn’t just a cheap beer. It’s also the way that some people—those who like to be in the upper echelons of society both literally and figuratively—live.

Local options for the vertically inclined include New York by Gehry at 8 Spruce Street, the still-rising One57 and the yet-to-rise 432 Park Avenue. Inevitably, there’s already something else in the works, or soon to be in the works, that will loom over all of those other buildings and block the sunlight for us mere mortals who spend most of our time at street level. Read More

By Kim Velsey 8/02/12 4:01pm

Starchitecture

14 Photos

The view from the penthouse

How the 0.1 Percent Lives: Touring the Gehry Penthouses

Inside the penthouses of 8 Spruce Street, the fact that the building was designed by Frank Gehry seems incidental. At 850-feet-high, the weirdly angled windows and sleek finishes blend into the exquisite (and exquisitely dull) good taste of thousands of other high-end apartments around the city. It is the view that dominates.

A set of rooms, in the end, can only have so many permutations, but the view from a tower that rises 76 stories above lower Manhattan—its developers say that it is the tallest residential tower in the Western Hemisphere—is unique, the trump card that New York by Gehry is counting on to collect $60,000 a month for the largest penthouse and $45,000 a month for the two smaller ones.

“For this type of renter, it’s kind of understood that it has to have a good layout. But layouts are subjective,” said Clifford Finn, the president of New Development Marketing at Citi Habitats, the agent for the building. “There’s no question that anyone would walk in here and not like these views.” Read More

By Matt Chaban 4/12/12 6:27pm

Starchitects

8 Photos

Occupy Frank Gehry

Occupy Frank Gehry: 8 Spruce Street Open Space Opening Within Weeks

If Zucotti Park is getting boring, and the folks at Occupy Wall Street are looking for something a little more flashy, they might want to check out New York by Frank Gehry. The super-rich rental tower (tallest in the Western Hemisphere!) rising at 8 Spruce Street has been open for more than a year yet it was not quite done.

The public plaza out front has been under construction until very recently, waiting in part for construction scaffolding to come down so that planting might commence. Now, the privately owned public space—a POPS just like Zucotti—is set to open in a matter of weeks, according to the folks at Forest City Ratner. Read More