The penthouse of the highest residential building in the world is on the market and could be yours — if you happen to be a billionaire.
In September, the three-floor apartment atop Central Park Tower in New York City was listed for an eye-popping US$250 million, or $390 million.
If the apartment sells at that price, it would become the US' most expensive home.
At more than 470 metres high, this towering new development is yet another chapter in the city's dramatic 150-year love affair with the skyscraper.
"We started with a very defined area of land called Manhattan," Patrice Derrington, the director of Columbia University's Real Estate Development Program, tells ABC RN's Rear Vision.
"That got filled up [but] more and more people wanted to be there. Rather than spread out and have the disadvantages, commercially and socially — [people] decided they had to go up."
"New York took that to the extreme, as usual."
Going up
For much of human history, most residential and commercial buildings didn't rise beyond a few floors.
"Buildings were constrained by the leg muscles of the people who inhabited them," says Carol Willis, the founder, director and curator of New York's Skyscraper Museum.
But the invention of the elevator dramatically changed this.
Willis says the development of elevators in the mid-19th century, specifically a safety system designed by American industrialist Elisha Graves Otis, made the idea of a skyscraper possible.
Otis famously demonstrated his invention at the 1853 New York World's Fair. In a suit and top hat, he rode an elevator platform up, before ordering its rope be cut. He fell a few centimetres but the safety system kicked in and the platform halted. The crowd went wild.
Willis says this "vertical transportation" technology was initially incorporated into New York hotels and dry goods stores, but it was soon adopted by the city's office buildings.
"This became a kind of revolution that allowed for the exploitation of the value of the land and the urban density and the competition and drive and energy that existed in lower Manhattan."
The first skyscrapers
So what was New York's first skyscraper or its earliest relative?
Mosette Broderick, the director of Urban Design and Architecture Studies at New York University, points to the Equitable Life Assurance Building, which opened in 1870 and rose seven stories.
"At first, people were a little afraid — the very top floor didn't rent," she says.
Meanwhile Willis points to two nearby buildings from this era which she considers the "very beginning of the skyscraper in New York": The New York Tribune Building and the Western Union Telegraph Building.
"These two buildings were about 10 stories tall … They rose to about 260 feet [around 80 metres] which is by far the tallest thing in the skyline of lower Manhattan in 1874, when each of them were completed."
Similar buildings continued to spring up in the lower Manhattan area.
"Interestingly, three kinds of businesses create the first tall, multipurpose buildings: They are insurance companies, newspapers, and inventions [like the telegraph]," Broderick says.
'Really stretch into the sky'
New York's earliest tall buildings were built with brick and stone, which came with severe limitations.
It was the introduction of steel that really gave birth to the modern-day skyscraper.
"[During] the last quarter of the 19th century, there's lots of experiments in the advancing technologies, particularly 'steel framing'," Willis says.
"A steel skeleton was a much more efficient way to erect tall buildings than a pure masonry structure."
Steel framing meant New York's skyline got taller and taller with each decade.
In 1899, the tallest office building in the world was the Park Row Building, coming in at 119 metres.
Then just 14 years later, that title was taken by the nearby Woolworth Building, which was more than twice as tall at 241 metres.
"So there was an enormous amount of growth — of business growth, of urban growth. The built forms of skyscrapers were able to exploit the new technology in order to really stretch into the sky," Willis says.
'Arrest the seriously increasing evil'
In 1916, New York passed a comprehensive zoning law, which was the first of its type in the world.
Borough president of Manhattan George McAneny said zoning was needed "to arrest the seriously increasing evil of the shutting off of light and air from other buildings and from the public streets".
While the 1916 law didn't set a height limit, it did constrain the design of skyscrapers as they rose, which meant they had more of a wedding cake shape.
"If you think of the great art deco skyscrapers of New York, like the Chrysler Building or the Empire State Building, they have a heavy base … and then an intermediate set of what the zoning law called 'setbacks'. So they pyramid up like a ziggurat," Willis says.
"Then often they have a tower that emerges … to unlimited height as the zoning law allowed."
Willis says after 1916, the city had "a new generation of buildings, a series of ziggurats that give New York what we think of as the black and white skyline of noir film".
Towers of glass
In post-World War II America, further new technologies gave New York a whole new set of skyscrapers.
Willis says the era brought lighter welded steel frames, along with stretched glass and thin mullion (which hold up the windows). This dramatically changed the facades.
"The buildings seem to be these towers of glass," she says.
"The windows don't open. They're hermetically sealed. This was an opportunity that was created by the technology of air conditioning and also fluorescent lights. [This] allowed you to have a very deep space away from windows, but still illuminated, with cool, fluorescent lights."
From 1931 to 1971, the Empire State Building was the tallest in the world, before it was overtaken by Twin Towers of the World Trade Center.
With 110 stories and a height of more than 415 metres each, Willis says the towers were "of such titanic scale".
But buildings from around this time were far from perfect.
"[The Twin Towers] were so energy inefficient, in a time when the consumption and the price of energy was not that high. A single light switch would turn on an entire floor," Willis says.
The September 11 attacks
The terror attacks of September 11, 2001, fractured and changed many parts of New York life, including the relationship with skyscrapers.
"There was an immediate reaction against skyscrapers and against working in skyscrapers," Derrington says.
Surprisingly this was short-lived, she says.
"People's memories are short, particularly in New York when it comes to money. So they came back, they needed to be close [to each other] again."
Derrington says September 11 did have an impact on the DNA of skyscrapers around the city.
"The building [owners] did work hard to put in extra security, big security systems. Before that, you could just walk into an office building and take the elevator to [whatever] floor," she says.
"Similarly, driving under buildings, we forget that there's a whole lot of parking and access under buildings, that became much more secured."
"Plus, we put in better fire systems. One of the problems with the World Trade Center was that the steel melted faster than we had anticipated."
Today's World Trade Center is anchored by the One World Trade Center building, the tallest building in the US, with the tip of its spire at 546 metres.
For comparison, Australia's tallest building is the Gold Coast's Q1, at 322 metres.
Supertalls
Although commercial skyscrapers have continued to rise, there's a new kind of residential skyscraper making headlines in New York.
So-called "supertalls" are mainly clustered around "Billionaires' Row", along the southern end of Manhattan's Central Park.
"These buildings went up — skinny, ultra-tall buildings. It was a quirk or a loophole in the zoning laws that enabled these buildings, on a very small footprint, to actually go as high as they possibly could," Derrington says.
"Many people were horrified," she says.
But these super-slim apartment buildings have been plagued by complaints and lawsuits from owners.
"The famous example of a tall, thin building that's not working right now is 432 Park Avenue … It was the first super-tall of that order," Broderick says.
When 432 Park Avenue was completed in 2015, it was the tallest residential building in the world.
"But the people who bought units in 2015, 2016, they're now suing the developer for $125 million, because the building creaks, the building sways, the building is scary at night," she says.
"It's not dangerous, it's not going to fall over, but it's disconcerting. So those tall, thin buildings have a problem."
Derrington adds: "A lot of engineers have also said that these things are yet to be tested in terms of exit during a fire".
Awe or terror
As the founder, director and curator of New York's Skyscraper Museum, Willis talks about the minute details of these buildings, but also what she calls their "romance".
"That word is a romantic word — skyscraper. It's a word that creates in your mind's eye … a silhouette or an image against the sky," she says.
"When you're at that elevated height, you see the collective city, but you also see, in some cases, the curvature of the earth."
She describes this as "an incredibly powerful image and, I think for most people an emotional one, whether awe or terror at the great height".
"There's an emotional investment in the skyline, of looking at the city from great heights that I think that no one can be immune to."
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