Hey, hey, up she rises. (DCP)

We're kind of embarrassed to admit that this never occurred to us until just now, reading The Times' recap of the Midtown East debate. Sure, all the familiar arguments on both sides are there—the city is moving too fast, the city is not moving fast enough, the buildings are too big, they are not big enough, we must compete, we must consider the consequence—but there is also are new argument that should have been obvious from the start, though no one has brought it up, at least not publicly, until Charles Bagli spelled it right out.

But many of New York’s prominent corporations, law firms and other businesses are not about to decamp for a spectacular skyscraper in Hong Kong anytime soon. Part of the obsession with taller buildings is about prestige and worldwide bragging rights, for size and architectural supremacy.

New York did not invent the skyscraper, but it has become a synonymous symbol of our city. The Woolworth Building, Empire State, Chrysler, both World Trade Centers. The skyline has never been stagnant. This mayor and his planning potentate Amanda Burden have never been satisfied to let zoning lie, transforming almost every corner of the city over the past decade. Why let the very heart of it be, either?

Going up? (Trinity Real Estate)

Hudson Square today. (Skyscraper City)

We know that the reason there are no skyscrapers in the middle of Manhattan has nothing to do with bedrock and everything to do with development patterns. And it is development that will alter that skyline once again. Trinity Real Estate recently unveiled their plans to rezone Hudson Square, the last undeveloped corner of Manhattan just west of Soho, north of Tribeca, south of the Village. As those neighborhoods would suggest, it is a place ripe for development. Just beware of over-development.

That is the message Trinity delivered when it went to the Community Board last week to present its plan as part of the city's months-long public review process. Our buildings may seem big, but they could be bigger, as a presentation reported Curbed reveals (there will also be gourmet chocolate!). Trinity furnished The Observer with their key slide making this case, which shows towers pushing 500-600 feet in the neighborhood. Compare that to the roughly 200-foot skyline now, the Trump Soho not withstanding.

It is true, current zoning has no height limits, meaning clever developers could build even higher. At the same time, residential development is currently barred, so there would be limited reason to build bigger (a big office tower, or more likely, hotel is  possible regardless of the rezoning—see: Trump Soho).

All the same, even with a 320-foot height limit, these towers will top their hulking industrial neighbors. Another striking revelation from these renderings is just how many development sites there are in the district. As we previously reported, the city is looking at at least a dozen new buildings, but it's always hard to conceive of just how many that is until you see a visual like this.

Not that there is anything wrong with this. In fact, it is quite exciting. Manhattan is a place of skyscrapers, and we will need more to house everyone moving here, especially given an affordable housing within the rezoning.

It kind of helps fill out the science fiction future where Manhattan is just one giant skyscraper district.

Now that's a skyline. (William Weber/Curbed)

How does it compare to today?

Back when we did our big report one what the Bloomberg administration has in store for Midtown East under an in-the-works rezoning, we came up with a little dream/doomsday scenario of what that might look like. Then, when the city officially unveiled the plans, they revealed that some sites could potentially see buildings as big or bigger than the Empire State Building, and they produced their own images of this brave new world.

Now, our pals over at Curbed have come up with their own rendering of a Midtown of the future, which are equally exciting and terrifying, depending on where you stand on cool new skyscrapers and the crowds and shadows that come with them. Which camp are you in? Let us know in the comments.

Going up. (original image:Dave Hogarty/Curbed, with additions by NYO)

Last night, The Observer got a glimpse of the super-tall residential tower Gary Barnett has planned for Broadway and 57th Street, just one block away from his already very tall One57.

Our good friends at Curbed picked up on this and were brilliant enough to photoshop the two onto the same skyline. It is quite the striking image, but not quite complete.

After all, rival 432 Park is already underway—and looking for more investors, if you're interested, as The Journal revealed yesterday—so we figured, what the hey, let's put them all together.

Welcome to your new skyline, circa 2015.

Still No. 1 in our hearts. (ESB)

As of today, as you probably already know, 1 World Trade Center reached the historic height of 1,271 feet, eclipsing the Empire State Building and reclaiming its place as the tallest building in the city. In honor of that achievement, the tower will be lit up red, white and blue tonight. The Observer asked Tony Malkin, owner of the iconic tower, what he thought of being No. 2 again.

“The world's most famous office building, the ancestor of all super-tall towers, welcomes our newer, taller cousin to the skyline," Mr. Malkin responded in an email. "We've watched you grow, and now we salute you." He signed it as "Empire State Building."

It is a fitting tribute, if also unusual, considering Empire State Building staff were told not to discuss its "cousin's" ascent, according to New York magazine.

Meanwhile, Curbed had a rather amusing video of the history-making column rising to the top of 1 World Trade. It underscores both the banality and the eager emotions surrounding this milestone. We have waited so long for that column to be but into place, though it is still just a 26-foot-long piece of structural steel. This is just another construction site, but also the most important one in the world.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

Manhattan 1906, in the throws of a boom.

Last week, The Observer learned with the help of Rutgers economics professor Jason Barr that the reason for the development of Midtown apart from Lower Manhattan, and the skyscrapers both possess, had nothing to do with bedrock beneath these towers, as had long been believed.  Call it the uncanny valley, the soaring mountain range that makes the New York City skyline the best in the world.

Having determined what was not the cause of this unique skyline, The Observer thought we had figured out what was, that being the flight of the wealthy north.  But it turns out one very influential urban investigator begged to differ: New Yorker architecture critic and Pullitzer Prize winner Paul Goldberger.

Mr. Goldberger left an unexpected if incisive comment on our article with his own theory about the skyscraper's northern migration:

This reminds me of the old joke about a sociologist being someone who comes into a new city and studies all the demographic data to predict where the most likely house of prostitution will be, whereas anyone else would just ask a cab driver.  Of course bedrock has nothing to do with skyscraper location and with the fact that Manhattan has two business centers. Neither does the movement of the wealthy. It's transportation.

Nowhere in this article does anyone talk about Grand Central Terminal and the fact that in the late 19th century pre-electric trains were banned south of 42nd Street, which is why GCT was built there, and why the midtown district developed around there. Lower Manhattan is a product of history; midtown a product of transportation access. When GCT was electrified and rebuilt in 1913, then midtown's growth, relatively modest up to that point, truly exploded.

Mr. Barr counters that his research on Manhattan core samples actually undermines this explanation, to a degree, at least when looking at his historical focus from 1890 to 1915, when the first boom in skyscraper development began and before the city codified what had been fairly organic development in the first zoning laws adopted in 1916. He emails:

Mr. Goldberger raises an important question about the role that Grand Central Station played in the development of Midtown. However, the answer is both more subtle and less obvious than one might guess. The original Grand Central Depot opened in its current location in 1871. City officials mandated that the New York Central place its terminal well north of the congested business district of lower Manhattan. The tracks coming into the city were above-ground and trains bellowed steam and smoke along Park Avenue. Because of this, the neighborhood around the station remained unattractive for more than 40 years.

In our study, we investigate the locations of the first generation of skyscrapers, between 1890 and 1915 (before zoning). Most skyscrapers near the terminal were built during the second generation, after World War I. Thus the role of the station was to enhance development of midtown, but it was by no means its initial cause.

Of the 74 skyscrapers that were completed by 1915, only four were constructed directly adjacent to Grand Central Station. Three of them were built in anticipation of or after the enclosure and electrification of the tracks in 1913; the fourth, the Belmont Hotel, was completed in 1908.  The growth of midtown, however, was well underway before then.

Looking at the location choices of early skyscraper developers reveals that their initial interests were not the area of East 42nd Street. Rather developers were primarily locating skyscrapers around Union and Madison squares. These locations were natural draws for the well-to-do because they were quiet, park-filled neighborhoods above the fray of a bustling and slum-filled lower New York.  It is within this context that we see skyscraper developers “jumping” from downtown to midtown at the turn of the 20th century; the majority of these “jumps” were to Union and Madison squares.

More broadly, because of the common perception that bedrock depths were most crucial in the development of the skyline, our published study directly aims to measure the effect of bedrock. Our study reveals a relatively minor role for bedrock depths, and it also reveals a relatively minor role for Grand Central Station.  More importantly, the formation of the skyline was driven by no one single thing, it was driven by several general demographic and economic factors, such as population density, employment locations, land values, and access to elevated railroads.

The Observer shared Mr. Barr's take with Mr. Goldberger, and in the end, it seems they are more in agreement than disagreement, and this is simply a matter of when, not how:

I don't know that Jason Barr and I differ all that much here, and I certainly agree with his basic premise that the presence or absence of bedrock is largely irrelevant to decisions about where skyscrapers were located. He argued that tall buildings spread beyond their historic beginnings in Lower Manhattan toward midtown because developers were following the rich as they moved uptown, which is absolutely true.

The history of Manhattan in the 19th century and for a good portion of the 20th is a history of relentless northward growth, and it happened in uneven fits and starts, not only because of economic cycles, but also because of non-skyscraper development that blocked simple northward expansion. It's significant that the industrial district we now know as SoHo didn't give way to skyscrapers; when the skyscraper was still new, so was SoHo, and in the 19th century it was the city's industrial fringe, so major commercial high-rise development understandably leapfrogged over it in search of more tranquil sites. You could think of the early development of Union and Madison squares as being conceptually closer to suburban office buildings of today than urban ones, in that they represented an attempt to break away from the congested commercial center, most of which was still all the way downtown. Union and Madison Squares grew rapidly, supplemented by the Ladies Mile, but not enough before 1915 to pose a true threat to the hegemony of Lower Manhattan.

It wasn't until well into the 20th century, after electric trains arrived in the reconstructed and expanded Grand Central Terminal in 1913, that the area we now consider Midtown Manhattan entered its period of explosive growth, and achieved a critical mass sufficient to make it a true rival to Lower Manhattan, and ultimately to vanquish it. If you look at Manhattan before 1915, Jason Barr is right: the transportation infrastructure wasn't the critical factor in where skyscrapers were located. But after 1915 it was another matter altogether. "Terminal City," which was the name the New York Central Railroad gave to the blocks surrounding Grand Central, was one of the first, not to say most ambitious, large-scale planned urban developments in the world, and it is where the idea of air rights was invented. It's the beginning of the gargantuan Midtown that we now know.

But of course a lot happened between Midtown and Lower Manhattan in the years before 1915, as developers began the long process of expanding beyond the limits of the Financial District.

And there you have it, hopefully the definitive explanation for why the Manhattan skyline looks the way it does.

Just as a peacock, under its feathers, is no different from a turkey, so 8 Spruce Street -- shorn of its trappings, and notwithstanding a slight asymmetry in the massing -- is not greatly different from most other high-rises in the city. There are many of the same old rigid right angles to it, lurking under all the fuss and feathers of its shiny cladding. 

Gardner has a point, that there is little beyond the building's facade to recommend it, that inside it probably is just another over-priced luxury building. But what a facade that is! Nothing has had such a remarkable impact on the downtown skyline--if not the skyline as a whole--since the World Trade Center was built four decades ago.

As for those swishing metal curves, they may indeed be little more than overwrought window dressing, but as Gehry enthused to The Observer last month, they are not purposeless ornamentation. The undulating facade does actually serve a functional purpose in addition to an aesthetic one, creating distinctive bay windows with unique views of the city. By most accounts, there is nothing else like them in the city.

And yet Gardner closes on a point that cannot be ignored:

New York City is where the world's most daring architects come to complete their dullest projects. Indignant community boards and the various, ever-nervous municipal entities conspire with unimaginative developers to clip the wings of the architect's inspiration, all the while deriving such satisfaction as they can from the architect's fame. 

Norman Foster, Herzog & de Meuron, Shigeru Ban and all too many other out-of-towers can attest to that sinking feeling that anything too striking or out of the ordinary may fly in another city or in another country, but that here in New York it never stood a chance. 

Could 8 Spruce have been better? Might it not have its notorious flat back? Could it have all together defied gravity in some new and unexpected way? Certainly, for Gehry has done better work not only in Bilbao but also Boston and even--gasp--Cleveland. But 8 Spruce is still one of the best buildings the city has seen in a generation, a daring addition for which we should be grateful. The same goes for the supposedly dull work of Foster, et,al. 

We may not get to enjoy their most ethereal works, but theirs is still a cut well above what New Yorkers had become accustomed to for decades. Their arrival is something to be celebrated, not lamented. Otherwise, we may never have it this good again.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @mc_nyo

Skyline has said it could build a hotel or a residential building on the site just south of Bryant Park, which includes a neighboring lot. Mr. Wilf finalized the deal this summer, when he bought the property from a private family listed on the deed as Rosenthal Associates.