In New York, these ghost towers that haunt lower Manhattan

Posted Feb 19 2022 at 02:01 PM

Along the East River near the Brooklyn Bridge, One Seaport is one of the last spiers to rise into the Manhattan skyline. Except that on closer inspection, this 57-storey skyscraper looks more like a concrete skeleton with floors open to the four winds. Work has been on hold for more than a year and a half due to a legal battle between the promoter and the builder, leaving the site unfinished.

One assures that the tower leans slightly to one side, while the other swears that it is perfectly safe. Between the two, the owners who have paid a fortune for these luxury apartments are trying to get reimbursed…

The new face of Wall Street

Beyond these standoffs, the situation of abandonment of the One Seaport is not unique around the Financial District of New York, at the southern tip of the city, reports the « Wall Street Journal ». “The project is one of those residential buildings launched in the mid-2010s, when the market was booming. These architecturally daring projects were meant to bring a high-end clientele back to lower Manhattan, which had become the symbol of the city’s resilience after 9/11, and compete with the chic districts of uptown. »

More than twenty years after the attacks which destroyed the twin towers, the face of the district has changed irremediably. Even on Wall Street, epicenter of global finance, banks and the headquarters of multinationals are increasingly next to apartments. The One Wall Street tower has just experienced the largest office-to-residential conversion operation, illustrating this symbolic mutation at the heart of Manhattan’s economic power.

But, like the protracted World Trade Center reconstruction, “several of these projects have been abandoned or stalled, largely due to the decline of the luxury real estate market in New York. Added to this, in some cases, are construction problems or battles between developers,” notes the American daily, which offers a guided visit of these phantom skyscrapers.

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