Life above 800 feet in a city relentlessly on the rise.

Jamison Walsh on the spire of 1 World Trade Center. Jimmy Chin for The New York Times

A city on an island, teeming with cash and ego, has nowhere to go but up. And up. And up. Imagine the Manhattan skyline in a time-lapse filmstrip, starting around 1890 — when the New York World Building crested above the 284-foot spire of Trinity Church — and culminating in the present day: it is a series of continual skyward propulsions, each new proud round overshadowing the last.

Climb the spire of 1 World Trade Center in virtual reality with NYT VR.

Perhaps much of this history has been driven by crude competition — the fierce battle between the Chrysler Building and the Bank of Manhattan Trust Building (40 Wall Street), for instance, to be the World’s Tallest Building, a fight the Chrysler won by a stunning coup de grâce: the last-minute addition of its secretly constructed spire, which nudged New York’s altitude record up to 1,046 feet for 11 precious months until the Empire State Building topped out. But the city’s architectural history cannot be reduced to gamesmanship. Something else is going on. Manhattan builds up because it cannot build out and because it cannot sit still. Those of its inhabitants who can afford to do so will seek to climb to higher ground.

We are currently in the midst of another clambering epoch. The city has 21 buildings with roof heights above 800 feet; seven of them have been completed in the past 15 years (and three of those the past 36 months). In this special New York Issue, we explore the high-altitude archipelago that spreads among the top floors of these 21 giants. It totals about 34 million square feet in all, encompassing lavish living spaces, vertiginous work environments (during construction and after), elite gathering places. Visually, the experience of this new altitude feels different in kind from its predecessors, the peak uplifts of previous booms that topped out at 400, 500 or 600 feet. At 800 and above, you feel something unusual in a city defined by the smelly bustle of its sidewalks and the jammed waiting and inching and zooming of its avenues — a kind of Alpine loneliness. Every New Yorker knows the pleasant private solitude that can be found at street level, among anonymous crowds. This is something different: an austere sense of apartness inspired by achieving a perspective seemingly not meant for human eyes.

In 10 years, the views captured in the following pages might seem quaint, even inferior. But today they provide an uncommon glimpse into the city’s rarefied new neighborhood in the sky. JAKE SILVERSTEIN

Jake Silverstein is editor in chief of the magazine.

Vertical Frontier Created with Sketch.

New York has always stood above the rest. Now it’s reaching even higher — with economic, architectural and social consequences that will once again redefine the most famous skyline in the world. By Michael Kimmelman / Photograph by Matthew Pillsbury

A view from the 83rd floor of One57, looking northeast. Matthew Pillsbury for The New York Times

Alysia Mattson, who works near the top of 1 World Trade, likens the experience above 800 feet to “being in a giant snow globe. Everything is calm.” We were standing at the window, looking down at a ferry inching across the Hudson. “You focus on things like boat traffic,” she said. “You don’t feel you are really in the city.” At that height, the earth-binding sounds of city life evaporate, along with close-up details. Perspective flattens. Cars and people on the street appear to crawl.

“Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever?” Harry Lime asked on the Ferris wheel in “The Third Man.”

Jimmy Park, whose office is also on the 85th floor and who is a mountain climber in his spare time, put it another way: “You’re looking down on something you’re not in, and you feel you’re a long way from where you need to be if you need to be safe. At the same time, there’s something therapeutic about seeing great distances. It happens on planes, on mountains, on beaches. I’ll have a meeting with a new client, and we’ll gaze out the window and have this comfortable silence.

“It’s analogous,” he went on, “to the ‘overview effect’ that astronauts feel, which created the whole environmental movement. You realize how small you are and how big the world is.”

The Old Testament declared every valley shall be exalted and every mountain and hill shall be made low, in keeping with classical beliefs about proportion and balance. By the 18th century, awe, terror and exultation, previously reserved for God, passed over to geological phenomena like mountains and experiences like conquering peaks. Kant called it “the terrifying sublime.” In the 19th, with new technology and the growth of cities, nature was rivaled by the man-made. The sublime became reachable by climbing to the top of a tall building.

In this spirit, Richard Morris Hunt designed New York’s Tribune Building, built in 1875, with its clock tower at 260 feet, competing with the spire of Trinity Church to be the tallest structure in the city. A quarter-century later, Daniel Burnham’s Flatiron Building, at 285 feet, established a new ideal of tall and skinny, soon dwarfed by the 700-foot-tall Metropolitan Life Insurance Tower, just across Madison Square Park, which was itself outdone, in 1913, by Cass Gilbert’s Woolworth Building, at 792 feet.

The New York skyline found its Platonic ideal less than two decades later with the Chrysler and Empire State buildings. The Empire State’s 204-foot mooring mast for passenger dirigibles, which never actually docked there, represented the mercantile equivalent of Trinity’s steeple. As E.B. White wrote, the city skyline was “to the nation what the white church spire is to the village — the visible symbol of aspiration and faith, the white plume saying that the way is up.”

With its dips and peaks, New York’s skyline became a civic signature, the postcard picture and classic movie image of the American century, its contours a reflection of what was happening below. White’s notion depended on a vital street life, on how the towers met the sidewalk and the curb. In recent decades, aspirant cities have built buildings taller than New York’s without ever quite supplanting Manhattan, in part because skylines are just stage sets of urbanism if they don’t arise from real, bustling neighborhoods.

It was exclusivity of neighborhood, more than sheer height, that connoted status in Manhattan half a century ago: a 20th-floor penthouse on Park Avenue still signified the pinnacle of the social pyramid. Back then, real nosebleed altitudes, like 800 feet, belonged primarily to commercial, not residential, buildings. Skyscrapers advertised companies. Apartments alone couldn’t cover the extraordinary cost of construction at such heights.

That changed only during the last decade or so, once apartments in luxury buildings like 15 Central Park West fetched $3,000 a square foot and more. Suddenly, a very tall, very slender project on 57th Street, with a floor plate just big enough for one apartment, or maybe two, and needing far fewer space-hogging elevators than a commercial tower, seemed profitable to aggressive developers. Big-name architects were enlisted. As Carol Willis, the founding director of the Skyscraper Museum in Lower Manhattan, likes to put it, form follows finance.

Height suddenly substituted for neighborhood as a signifier of status, partly because zoning regulations steered sky-high construction toward less restricted, mixed-use parts of the city, like 57th Street, which also offered money shots of Central Park, and partly because a target clientele of South Asian copper-mining industrialists and Russian oligarchs had little intention of living in their apartments. In any case, they didn’t actually want neighbors. They wanted views. Developers promoted these buildings as de facto country estates, where the chances of encountering someone who isn’t a paid employee of the building are vanishingly slim, and in-house restaurants serve only tenants, so that even eating out won’t require actually going out.

Many New Yorkers, infuriated by tax breaks given to these skyscraping potentates, picture themselves toiling in the long, skinny shadows the new towers will cast. But shadows aside, that’s not entirely fair to the supertalls. Some people may not like their scale, but a handful of apartments in mostly nonresidential blocks of Midtown or near Wall Street are hardly the cause of gentrification and displacement. And there may be just a little xenophobia in the anti-supertall phenomenon. It’s a good bet that more than a few wealthy Chinese, Indians and Arabs, like Jews before them, facing an impossible vetting process from co-op boards on the Upper East Side, elected instead to look down on them.

Aerial view of 1950s Midtown Manhattan. Hulton Archive/Getty Images

In any case, 57th Street is now dubbed Billionaire’s Row, and wealth has reached new altitudes. Advances in skyscraper technology have much to do with this. William F. Baker, who helped engineer the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, at 2,717 feet the world’s tallest tower, recently explained the engineering behind life above 800 feet. Engineers, he said, who long ago figured out how to make sure skyscrapers won’t topple over, are focused more and more these days on the trickier problem of making people inside feel secure. It’s a challenge because very tall, very slim buildings are designed, like airplane wings, to bend not break. An average person starts worrying about movement in a high-rise long before there’s anything approaching a threat to safety. Mild jostling that you take for granted in a car or train can provoke panic at 100 stories, even if you’re still safer in the building than in the car.

Incredible efforts now go into mitigating those effects. Today’s superslender towers are outfitted with sophisticated counterweights, or dampers, and other movement-tempering devices, as they are also outfitted with elevators that speed tenants to their aeries but not so swiftly that you will perceive any troubling G-forces. Something around 30 feet per second seems to be an ideal velocity, suggesting there may be an ultimate height for luxury towers — not because we can’t engineer a mile-high building but because rich tenants won’t abide elevators that take several minutes to reach apartments for which they paid the annual expenditures of the Republic of Palau.

Exceptional engineering requirements are said to account for a hefty portion of the cost of apartments in the supertalls, like 432 Park Avenue, presently the tallest apartment tower in Midtown Manhattan, and one of the costliest. Its exterior is a grid of concrete and glass, like an extruded Sol LeWitt, or a distended Josef Hoffmann vase (or a middle finger stuck up at the city, depending on your perspective). Giant twin dampers near the roof, the size of locomotive engines — with their own spectacular double-height views over the city — act like shock absorbers, providing ballast and discouraging chandeliers from tinkling and Champagne glasses from toppling over.

If the twin towers and the Empire State Building used to define south and north in Manhattan, the poles of the city skyline, now the compass points include 1 World Trade, 432 Park and, just a few blocks west, One57. The last, with its clunky curves and pox of tinted windows, steers Midtown Manhattan more toward Vegas or Shanghai. A mile or so away, the vast tabula rasa development called Hudson Yards threatens to become a mini-Singapore on the West Side.

But taste is tricky to legislate. Critics greeted the Chrysler Building with horror when it was finished, then held it up as a model of what skyscrapers should look like when a modern generation of glass and steel towers reshaped the postwar skyline and provoked fresh outrage. Looking back, we can see that 1950s landmarks like Lever House, by SOM’s Gordon Bunshaft, and the Seagram Building, by Mies van der Rohe, are as beautiful and refined as any architecture in America, although in the following decades they spawned a million mediocre imitations, cluttering Manhattan and obscuring the originals’ genius. This was the era of white flight and suburban sprawl, when Roland Barthes described New York as a vertical metropolis “from which man is absent by his accumulation,” and America’s so-called towers in the park — those often unjustly maligned housing projects of clustered high-rises in poor neighborhoods, many on the margins of the city — were left to ruin. The ugliest skyscraper in town, long known as the Verizon Building, at 375 Pearl Street, a seemingly windowless behemoth, still looms over the Brooklyn Bridge. It went up in 1976, just after the twin towers, by Minoru Yamasaki, which New Yorkers loved to hate — until many came to regard them differently, and not just because of what happened on Sept. 11. At dawn and dusk, the sculpted corners of the towers captured sunlight, making orange and silver ribbons float in the ether. Now, 1 World Trade has risen from their ashes. The classic modernist skyscraper is fashionable again. Taste, like the New York skyline, remains an endless work in progress.

Of the new buildings, I like 432, designed by Rafael Viñoly, and the studied jumble of 56 Leonard, downtown (Herzog & de Meuron are the architects). They’re designed with finesse, punctuating the skyline. Other buildings going up, like Jean Nouvel’s 53 West 53rd, beside the Museum of Modern Art, and 111 57th Street, by SHoP Architects, promise to help tip the scales back toward an older ideal of the sophisticated, attenuated tower, crowded out by those decades of plug-and-play boxes.

There are still those who fret about scores of tycoon palaces overrunning the city. They may take solace in the fact that the supertall-apartment phenomenon has always been a game of fiscal musical chairs. New federal rules devised to thwart shell companies and money laundering now require that cash buyers of luxury residences disclose the true names of their owners. Roughly half of real estate purchases in Manhattan, it turns out, are made in cash, with overseas buyers accounting for a third of all new Midtown condo acquisitions. Combined with sagging oil prices and a fluctuating yuan, the new rules seem to be having an effect. For the moment, the market for apartments above 800 feet continues to soften. Some supertall apartment towers on the drawing board may be postponed.

And corporate chieftains are no longer clamoring for glitzy new company towers. They’re more in tune with millennials, who prefer repurposed buildings, street life and live-work neighborhoods. The architect Bjarke Ingels has recently envisioned a couple of New York towers that feature enormous, sky-high terraces, to bring something of the pleasures of being on the street into the ether.

“The tendency has been to create a hermetic experience, with floor-to-ceiling windows, so you’re incarcerated in a box,” Ingels said. “Outdoor space used to be considered a nuisance, which didn’t contribute to the building’s value, but I believe that’s changing. I am starting to hear leasing people say they want outdoor space. That’s true in residential as well as commercial properties. I think the future at 800 feet is more likely to be engaged with the outside and less an escape from it.”

Maybe. In New York, it can get pretty windy and cold up there. For ages, my aunt has rented a studio apartment, a bit lower down, on the 16th floor of a building in Greenwich Village, with a terrace looking toward Washington Square Park and Lower Manhattan, although mostly the view consists of a jumble of low-rise buildings, black-tar rooftops and fire escapes. The terrace has a sun-bleached, green-and-white canvas awning that can be rolled out for shade. Voices and car horns waft up from the street. Rain splatters on the terra-cotta floor. Spring blows in on breezes from the river. I feel like the luckiest man in New York when I’m there, above the city and in the middle of it.

Everyone’s sweet spot is different. I stood with Jimmy Park at his window in 1 World Trade, 1,000 feet up. He was extolling the view of Brooklyn and Queens. The roof of 7 World Trade, a neighboring 743-foot glass office tower, cleverly conceived by David Childs, was several hundred feet directly below us. We could just make out the mechanicals. Someone standing up there would have been one of Harry Lime’s dots.

I asked Park how tall he thought it was. He scrunched his forehead. He hadn’t really thought about it, he said. ♦

Michael Kimmelman is the architecture critic for The New York Times. He last wrote for the magazine about Manhattan’s secret pools and gardens.

Matthew Pillsbury is a photographer. His work will be shown at the Benrubi Gallery in New York in 2017.

21 Giants
1

1 World Trade Center

Year completed:

2014

Height:

1,776 feet

Cost:

$3.9 billion

Once called the Freedom Tower, it’s the tallest skyscraper, with the fastest elevators, in the Western Hemisphere. The express elevator, which travels at about 22 miles per hour, goes from the ground to the 100th floor in less than 60 seconds.

2

4 World Trade Center

Year completed:

2013

Height:

977 feet

Cost:

$1.9 billion

Thirteen years after Sept. 11, hundreds of Port Authority employees were the first office workers to return to work at the site.

3

3 World Trade Center

Year completed:

Projected: 2018

Height:

1,079 feet

Cost:

$2.5 billion

New York’s first downtown skyscraper to be erected “core first,” whereby the building’s concrete core — housing elevators, stairs and mechanical and plumbing systems — goes up before the exterior steel frame, an approach long resisted by the city’s unionized ironworkers.

4

30 Park Place

Year completed:

Projected: 2016

Height:

926 feet

Cost:

$450 million

“A lot of buildings don’t have a personality,” Robert A. M. Stern, architect of the tallest new condominium in downtown New York, has said. “You wouldn’t want to go on a second date with them. But you might have a romance with our building.”

5

The Trump Building

Year completed:

1930

Height:

927 feet

Cost:

$13 million ($187.5 million in 2016 dollars)

This and the Chrysler Building were in competition to be the world’s tallest building while both were under construction. Once known as 40 Wall Street, it held the title for barely a month, until a spire was added to the Chrysler Building. Less than a year later, the Empire State Building surpassed them.

6

70 Pine

Year completed:

1932

Height:

952 feet

Cost:

$15 million ($262 million in 2016 dollars)

Vacated by the insurance company American International Group in 2009, the Art Deco building is undergoing a $600 million conversion into a hotel and rental apartments.

7

28 Liberty

Year completed:

1961

Height:

813 feet

Cost:

$138 million ($1.1 billion in 2016 dollars)

When finished, the building, formerly known as 1 Chase Manhattan Plaza, was the largest commercial office structure to go up in the city in a quarter century, the largest banking operation ever located under one roof and the first place in New York to use “1 ... Plaza” as a corporate address.

8

56 Leonard Street

Year completed:

Projected: 2016

Height:

821 feet

Cost:

$700 million

Nicknamed Jenga Tower for its design by the Pritzker Prize-winning architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, the building has cantilevered floors that extend outward in all directions from a central axis.

9

8 Spruce Street

Year completed:

2011

Height:

870 feet

Cost:

$875 million

When the architect Frank Gehry met for lunch with the developer Bruce Ratner, Ratner asked him, “What do you want to build in New York City?” Gehry sketched the building design on a napkin.

10

Empire State Building

Year completed:

1931

Height:

1,250 feet

Cost:

$41 million ($645 million in 2016 dollars)

The building’s Art Deco spire was designed to be a mooring mast and its roof a depot for dirigibles; passengers were to use an outdoor terrace on the 103rd floor and go through customs on the 102nd floor. The updraft around the structure scuttled plans for airship landings.

11

10 Hudson Yards

Year completed:

2016

Height:

878 feet

Cost:

$1.4 billion

The first of 16 towers planned for the new Hudson Yards neighborhood, at a total cost of $25 billion. The building has its own cogeneration power plant and, along with several others nearby, will be connected to both the city’s utility power grid and a microgrid.

12

Chrysler Building

Year completed:

1930

Height:

1,046 feet

Cost:

$20 million ($287 million in 2016 dollars)

After Walter Chrysler’s self-financed building succeeded in becoming the world’s tallest, he refused to pay its architect, William Van Alen. Van Alen sued and eventually received his money, but he never received another major design commission.

13

MetLife Building

Year completed:

1963

Height:

808 feet

Cost:

$100 million ($782 million in 2016 dollars)

In 2005 the MetLife insurance company relocated its 1893 boardroom — including original gold-leaf ceiling, parquet floors, fireplace and chairs — to the building’s 57th floor.

14

Bank of America Tower

Year completed:

2009

Height:

1,200 feet

Cost:

$2 billion

The first commercial high-rise to achieve LEED Platinum certification, the highest level a building can receive for being green. One of the setback roofs houses honeybees.

15

Trump World Tower

Year completed:

2001

Height:

861 feet

Cost:

$300 million ($406 million in 2016 dollars)

Described by Donald Trump, its developer, as the world’s tallest residential building when it was proposed and approved in 1999, the tower was met with vehement opposition. The former Yankee Derek Jeter bought a penthouse in 2001 (which he sold in 2012).

16

601 Lexington

Year completed:

1977

Height:

915 feet

Cost:

$150 million ($592 million in 2016 dollars)

The Citigroup building’s nine-story “stilts” enabled it to accommodate a church on a corner of the site. The roof, angled at 45 degrees, was designed for solar panels that were never installed because the roof did not face the sun directly.

17

Comcast Building

Year completed:

1933

Height:

850 feet

Cost:

Not available

The construction of what is still called Rockefeller Center, comprising 14 buildings originally, employed tens of thousands of workers during the Depression, including the 11 ironworkers famously photographed eating lunch on a beam of 30 Rock (now the Comcast Building), their feet dangling 850 feet above the ground.

18

Bloomberg Tower

Year completed:

2004

Height:

806 feet

Cost:

Not available

Located on the site of what was once Alexander’s department store, this part-commercial, part-residential building includes a courtyard inspired by New York enclosures like Grand Central Terminal and the reading room of the New York Public Library’s main branch.

19

432 Park Avenue

Year completed:

Projected: 2016

Height:

1,396 feet

Cost:

$1.3 billion

Currently the world’s highest residential-only structure, it was inspired by a trash can and designed around what its architect, Rafael Viñoly, has described as “the purest geometric form: the square.”

20

CitySpire

Year completed:

1987

Height:

814 feet

Cost:

$415 million

Because of miscalculations during construction, the building ended up 11 feet higher than the limit set by city planners. Retroactive approval was not granted; instead, developers paid a fine of $2.1 million, some of which was earmarked to renovate dance-rehearsal space at neighboring City Center.

21

One57

Year completed:

2014

Height:

1,004 feet

Cost:

$1.4 billion

In 2012, winds of 80 m.p.h. during Hurricane Sandy led to the partial collapse of the building’s construction crane. Thousands of neighborhood residents and hotel guests were evacuated for six days.

Illustration by Bryan Christie Design. Research assistance: Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat. Text by Camille Sweeney.
The 800 Club Created with Sketch.

In a city obsessed with wealth and status, living at supertall altitude is a privilege that only a few dozen New Yorkers enjoy — at least for now. By Jon Ronson / Photographs by Christopher Anderson

The view from the roof of the Bloomberg Tower, looking down onto Lexington Avenue. Christopher Anderson/Magnum, for The New York Times

“This is the skyline people talk about.” It was a Wednesday evening in late May, and Warren Estis, a real estate litigator, was showing me the views from his penthouse apartment at Trump World Tower, at 47th Street and First Avenue. We were on the 86th floor, which, according to the building’s management, meant we were 810 feet above the ground. “You can see water planes landing on the East River,” he said. “I love the seaplanes when they come zooming in.”

He led me north into the home theater, from which you could see all the way up and across town to the George Washington Bridge and where the deep leather chairs reclined into divans at the touch of a button. Then he led me south, through a lavish open-plan living room, where his partner, Tatyana Enkin, was preparing tea. The two are collectors of glass art, and the living room was dense with it: crystal swans and obelisks and lilac-and-purple baubles of various abstract shapes. LED strip lighting in the ceiling made the room glow blue, then red. “Look at the World Trade Center,” Estis said, pointing downtown. Finally, he led me west.

Trump World Tower is a sleek black slab of a building that looms over the far eastern edge of Midtown Manhattan, and the view back across the island is truly remarkable. “Here you’re sitting in a chair, and you turn and you see everything,” he said. “All the iconic buildings in the city. And it’s different at night. Everything’s lit.”

But as he looked out the window his eyes flickered, a little irritated, at two new supertall condo buildings that tower above his, slightly blighting his west-facing view. To the right in the middle distance was One57, a blandly luxurious gray-blue monolith that rises to 1,004 feet and casts a significant shadow over the south side of Central Park; just to the right of that stood the even loftier 432 Park Avenue, pencil-thin and still unfinished. The design of 432 Park is more attractive than One57’s — it resembles a neat stack of pale Rubik’s Cubes — and its rapid rise has made it perhaps Manhattan’s most noticeable skyscraper. When Estis moved into Trump World Tower in 2002, his year-old home was the world’s tallest residential building. Now 432 Park dwarfs it.

Tatyana Enkin in the 86th-floor Trump World Tower apartment she shares with her partner, Warren Estis. Christopher Anderson/Magnum, for The New York Times

Estis shot its penthouse — which is, at 1,396 feet, currently the highest condominium in the world — a derisive glance. “At a certain point, you’re too high,” he said. “You don’t want to be higher than this,” he added, meaning his own apartment. “Up there you lose the effect. You have to walk to the window to look down.”

“It’s like when you go to an art gallery,” Enkin said. “The painting has to be on eye level.”

“What’s the good of being above it all?” Estis said. “You’re missing out on the beauty of the city and the various structures. Here you have the flavor.”

Estis is, much like the man who built Trump World Tower, thickset, restless, plain speaking and motivated by a desire to win. He grew up in Little Neck, Queens, his mother a legal secretary and his father a lawyer for the Veteran’s Administration. At school, they asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up. “Rich,” Estis replied. He was 6. While in college, he rented an ice-cream truck and drove it around on an aggressive schedule — eight months out of the year. Soon after he graduated from law school he had enough money saved to buy his first piece of property: a two-family home in Bay Terrace, Queens. Now 57, he owns approximately 65 apartments and houses throughout Manhattan and Queens, and heads a 79-lawyer law firm.

Enkin, like Trump’s first and third wives, is an ex-model who grew up in the Eastern bloc. She was raised in Soviet Ukraine and worked as a hydrologist in the Siberian gulags before moving to the United States to become a model for the Elite agency and Marc Jacobs. Now 40, she works as an artist’s agent.

By living above 800 feet, Estis and Enkin are two members of an unexpectedly exclusive group in Manhattan. In my estimation, no more than 40 people currently live above that line, scattered among just three buildings (Trump World Tower, One57 and 8 Spruce Street, a Frank Gehry building downtown). But they’re just the vanguard. The city is in the midst of another building boom, one unlike any that has come before. In the past, Manhattan’s tallest buildings were filled with corporate offices; now, the most imposing skyscrapers are built as homes for some of the wealthiest people on the planet. By 2020 there are expected to be at least 14 residential skyscrapers in New York City. Many of them will block out the light for a great expanse of Central Park. A small city is being built in the sky — but for whom? I was curious to learn about them, so I set out to meet as many as I could.

Stellan Parr in his 453-square-foot studio apartment on the penthouse floor of 8 Spruce Street. Christopher Anderson/Magnum, for The New York Times

Estis and Enkin were the first I got in touch with, and the most hospitable. I lingered around their apartment for hours, until the sun was setting over the Hudson. The spires of the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building suddenly illuminated, bathing the apartment in their light.

“When you’re up there,” Estis said, meaning the 432 Park penthouse, “you’re missing this. You’ll see lights. But not at this level. You never want to be level with, or looking down on, rooftops. There’s no advantage.”

“Apparently that penthouse sold for $95 million,” I said. The buyer has been reported to be the Saudi Arabian retail and real estate giant Fawaz Alhokair (432 Park’s representatives declined to comment). He made his $1.37 billion fortune by bringing outlets of Western retail chains — Topshop, Banana Republic, Zara and Gap — to the Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia and the Caucasus.

Estis shrugged, unimpressed. “They get bragging rights,” he said. Then he affected the smug tone of a 432 Park penthouse purchaser and added: “I paid more money than anyone else in the building. But I may not have the best view.”

The view may not matter in the end. According to Forbes, Alhokair lives primarily in Riyadh, so presumably 432 Park’s penthouse will become just a pied-à-terre for him — or perhaps simply an investment property, destined to remain pristinely and forever empty.

The precise number of people living above 800 feet is impossible to calculate because of the secrecy that now veils so many real estate transactions in New York. This is especially true at One57, where eight of nine condos above the 800-foot-mark have already sold. Buyers protect their identities fastidiously over there, purchasing their condos through shell corporations with impenetrable names that exist solely to mask their identities.

The top floor of 28 Liberty, a 60-story office tower, is home to free Tuesday yoga classes for those who work there. Christopher Anderson/Magnum, for The New York Times

Tracking down the owners was a drawn-out process. I would make a trip to the New York City Registry to fetch the names and addresses of the limited-liability companies that made the purchases and try to contact them that way. For example, the top two floors of One57 make up a single duplex, Apartment 90, which sold for $100.5 million to an L.L.C. named, unhelpfully, P89-90 LLC. (It remains Manhattan’s most expensive single residence.) The lawyer representing the L.L.C., Andrea Riina, emailed me, “Your request was forwarded to the client and declined.”

I had slightly better luck with Apartment 90’s downstairs neighbor, the owner of Apartment 88. In April 2015, it was sold for $47.3 million to Pac Wholly Own L.L.C., which is associated with a Chinese airline, Pacific American. The airline is owned by the HNA Group, which is in turn owned by the billionaire Chen brothers, Feng and Guoqing. After correctly predicting in the early 1990s that Hainan, a balmy island south of Beijing, would become a kind of Chinese Riviera, they started an airline to take passengers there. Soon, they amassed a fortune. According to a 2014 Bloomberg profile, Chen Feng is a “rigorously private” man; apparently his brother is, too. I emailed Guoqing Chen’s assistant several times before she finally responded: “One57 is a company investment program, and Mr. Chen doesn’t live in One57 right now. So, I am afraid Mr. Chen can’t take the interview. Thank you so much for your consideration.” The rebuff knocked out Apartment 86 too. The L.L.C. that purchased it, One57 86 L.L.C., is registered to the same small downtown Manhattan office suite that houses Pacific American airlines.

Apartment 83 is unsold, and the owners of Apartments 85 and 82 — the billionaire retailers and business partners Lawrence Stroll and Silas Chou, respectively — “prefer not to be included in the article,” their assistant wrote. Stroll, who made his money by investing early in Tommy Hilfiger, is Canadian but a resident of Geneva, according to Forbes. Chou — an early investor in Michael Kors — lives in Hong Kong.

I had a good feeling about Apartment 81 (which lies slightly below 800 feet, but I felt I’d earned it). For a start, there was a chance its owner actually lived there. The apartment cost $55.5 million and — according to The Times’s real estate pages from the week of the sale — boasts a “galvanizing 75-foot-long entrance gallery,” a “grand salon,” four bedrooms, a “one-ton bathtub carved from a single marble slab,” “head-on views of the park to the north” and a concierge who can organize everything from “helicopter service to the Hamptons” to use of a quartz stone bed at a spa on a lower floor that has, apparently, certain healing properties. These apartments are marketed in grandiose ways. As Michael Graves, a real estate agent with Douglas Elliman, told The Times in November 2015, “Living on a full floor at One57 is probably the closest thing to being a king in the 21st century.” (To be pedantic, the world’s 15 actual kings are closer to being kings than the residents of One57 are, though there might conceivably be some overlap.)

The purchaser of Apartment 81 turned out to be a Texan named Becky Moores. Unlike her neighbors, she didn’t conceal her identity. She bought it in her own name — well, in the name of the Rebecca Ann Moores Family Trust. She married her childhood sweetheart, John, in 1963. Forty-five years later she filed for divorce, hinting at infidelity. The divorce was messy and public and the payout vast enough to afford her not only Apartment 81 but a $34.3 million apartment on One57’s 54th floor too. The settlement proved less fortuitous for fans of the San Diego Padres. John Moores was the team’s owner, and to pay the settlement he had to sell his majority share. In the process, the payroll plummeted, and the star players Jake Peavy and Adrian Gonzalez were traded off to save money. “Ultimately, the team collapsed,” says Tom Krasovic, a sports reporter at The San Diego Union-Tribune who covered the Padres for years. He seemed confident that Becky Moores would grant me an interview. “I always found her to be a very nice lady,” he told me over the telephone. “She’s very well liked and very approachable with a lot of the media.”

“Bad news,” emailed my contact for Moores. “Rebecca Moores isn’t interested in participating in your story.”

Todd Stone in his artist’s studio on the 67th floor of 4 World Trade Center. Christopher Anderson/Magnum, for The New York Times

Sorting out who lives above 800 feet in Trump World Tower is slightly easier, thanks both to the tabloids and to the fact that it was built before this vogue for secrecy really took hold. Beyoncé and Jay-Z used to live up there. They rented an apartment a few floors above Estis and Enkin for a year, paying a reported $65,000 per month. The former Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter lived there, too. He sold his 5,500-square-foot apartment on the 89th floor, identical in shape and size to Estis and Enkin’s, for $15.5 million in 2012. Nowadays, their neighbors include the widow of a Delta Air Lines pilot who made a fortune in the stock market, a human rights advocate from South Africa who specializes in health care projects for the developing world, the chairman of Assist America (a global medical-emergency service) and a mysterious Asian businessman who purchased the three remaining apartments all at once, paying in cash, according to Enkin. “He’s Japanese,” she said, “but I don’t know exactly what he does.” (According to a resident and city records, his name is Chinh Chu. Chu works in finance and he is, in fact, from Vietnam. He didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

8 Spruce Street stands out among these new buildings because it’s rental-only — none of the units are for sale. Only the top three floors sit above the 800-foot line. The resident of Penthouse South, on the very top floor, agreed to meet me.

Penthouse South is tiny — so tiny it looks as if there has been some mistake. Its 453 square feet are inclusive of literally everything. It’s so incongruous amid the huge penthouses it abuts that it feels almost magical, like the secret railway platform from which the wizards take the train to Hogwarts. It was designed to be a guest or nanny’s room for one of the other penthouses, but building management rented it instead to Stellan Parr — 33, tattooed, soft-spoken and studying to be a physician assistant. He pays rent “in the low thousands.” He is a unique man: perhaps the only person of (somewhat) modest means who lives at such heights in New York. We sat at his kitchen/living room/bedroom table and admired his view, which takes in the Statue of Liberty, the curve of the East River, 1 World Trade Center and the 9/11 Memorial pools. He opened his window a fraction, and we both suddenly experienced debilitating vertigo. He closed it, and the feeling immediately dissipated.

Sometimes, Parr told me, he leaves his room to surprised glances from his neighbors — they have included a basketball player with the Brooklyn Nets and a European who used the $45,000-a-month apartment as a crash pad for the rare occasions he was in town. They have said to Parr, “I didn’t know anyone lived there.”

On a clear day in early May, I was given permission to stand on the 95th floor of 432 Park — which is, at 1,271 feet, the building’s second-highest floor, directly below the $95 million condominium. 432 Park is still partly under construction, and it took much haggling with the building’s owners before they granted me access. The two apartments that make up this floor are currently filled with dust and construction equipment, but once completed they will go on the market at around $40 million each. (This makes them roughly four times the price of, and 25 percent smaller than, Estis and Enkin’s apartment.)

I could see Trump World Tower easily from here, and I recalled Estis’s frequent assertions that his views were better. Now I had the chance to assess his claim. Looking south I could see all the way to the Atlantic. I could see how Manhattan tapered to a point at its southernmost end. Still, from this side of the building, I had to agree with Estis: The 95th floor is too high. There’s too much sky. You do have to walk up to the windows to look down.

But then I walked to a north-facing window and gazed out upon the most expensive view in the world — the view that someone was willing to pay $95 million for. (It really is the view that sells these places. The apartments aren’t that big.) I could see, at once, the whole of Central Park. But I could also see everything happening in it: children playing baseball, picnickers lying on the grass, a sea lion jumping from a rock into the water at the zoo. I could even see the splash. It was overwhelming, awe-inspiring. I felt like Gatsby — removed and superior. And then it was time for me to leave.

Workers at the ‘‘top of the house’’ — the current pinnacle of construction — at 3 World Trade Center. Christopher Anderson/Magnum, for The New York Times

As my elevator descended and my ears popped, it occurred to me that I would almost certainly never take in such a view again. And in fact, maybe nobody will, if these apartments wind up becoming empty investments.

A few weeks later, via email, I received an enormous surprise. For the first time ever, a purchaser of an apartment above 800 feet in one of the mysterious new supertall condo buildings had agreed to speak with a journalist about his purchase. I was to meet him in his Fifth Avenue office on Thursday at 4 p.m.

Howard Lorber is a 67-year-old New Yorker, balding, gregarious, instantly likable. He stood at his 52nd-floor office window, which looks out over — or, I suppose, under — his future home. His apartment will be on the 67th floor, he told me, 850 feet above the ground.

“I point it out to everyone who comes in here,” he said.

I mentioned my calculation that only a few dozen people currently live above 800 feet in the city. Lorber, who works in real estate, did his own calculation and said, “Once 432 Park is filled, there’ll be 40 more.”

On his mantelpiece were photographs of him with Donald, Ivanka and Melania Trump. “I think Donald is fantastic, and he’s going to beat Hillary and be the next president,” he said. There was also a photograph of him with Mitt Romney. “I should take that one down,” he said.

Lorber grew up in the Bronx. His father was an electrical engineer, and Lorber entered the work force by the time he was 13, “flipping pizzas, pumping gas.” He went to college but hated it, so he became a sociology major because someone told him it was the easiest way to graduate. Out in the world, he wasn’t satisfied with the sort of work he could find with a sociology degree, so he went back to college and learned accounting. He became a stockbroker, then moved into insurance. Eventually, he made enough money to buy Nathan’s Famous, the hot-dog company. He’s currently chairman of the real estate firm Douglas Elliman, the very same firm that is now selling the condos at 432 Park — hence, perhaps, his willingness to be interviewed. From time to time during our conversation, he lapsed into a kind of marketing autopilot: “432 Park is an unbelievably striking building, it’s like a masterpiece, it has to be the most talked-about and revered building in New York City. ... ” But I didn’t mind the spiel because — given his expertise — he provided insightful answers to my lingering questions about the supertall boom.

“How come Trump World Tower is so much less expensive than 432 Park?” I asked.

A dentist’s office on the 69th floor of the Chrysler Building. Christopher Anderson/Magnum, for The New York Times

“By New York standards it’s already an older building,” he said. “First Avenue in the 40s doesn’t command the same price as Park Avenue in the 50s. It just doesn’t. Everyone wants to live in the middle, as opposed to the ends. I guess Central Park is the equivalent of living on the water in the Hamptons. Then there are the ceiling heights, the amenities. ... ” (432 Park will have a restaurant, a fitness center and several floors of studios that the owners of the larger apartments can purchase as offices or for staff accommodation. When I walked into Lorber’s office, he was complaining to one of his associates about the price of these studios. “Seven hundred feet for $3 million, to house your staff?” he was saying. “I don’t think it’s such a good idea.” Still, he has reserved one for himself.)

I recounted to him my lack of success at One57, how I was impeded in part by the impenetrable L.L.C. names. “People do it for privacy,” he said.

“Well,” I said, “it worked.”

“If you’re wealthy,” he said, “with the world as it is, with ISIS saying they want to go after billionaires, there’s really almost no reason not to buy in an L.L.C.”

I asked him about all the emptiness up there. Will those apartments purchased as investments by foreign billionaires really remain forever vacant?

“It depends on the people,” he replied. “Some foreigners just want to get their money out of the countries they’re in. They may or may not rent them, but it’s not about making money. It’s more a matter of wanting stability, to be in a safe haven, which they believe New York City is. Look around the world. Look at all the turmoil. Argentina’s bankrupt, Brazil’s in trouble. In China the prices probably went down 20 to 30 percent last year.” But this, he added, was more an issue for One57 than for 432 Park. “One57 is geared more to foreigners; 432 Park is mostly domestic.”

“How come?” I asked.

“It ended up that way,” he said. “One57 has a hotel in it. 432 Park doesn’t. I think the foreigners like the idea of having a hotel. The locals like the privacy and the security of not having a hotel. And also, in fairness, One57 was on the market first. So they had the first shot at those people.”

This last statement made me realize just how tiny a group this is — these foreign billionaires happy to spend tens of millions on New York City apartments they may never visit. It’s a very small community, the superrich. In fact, when Lorber asked me who else I had interviewed for the story, and I mentioned Warren Estis, he broke into a huge smile and said: “I know Warren very well! He’s a client of the company! He’s a fun guy!”

Servcorp, a work space on the 85th floor of 1 World Trade Center. Christopher Anderson/Magnum, for The New York Times

It’s no surprise that Donald Trump seems to loom over life at 800 feet. Years before he coasted to the Republican nomination on a tide of populist anger, he was the first to give the superrich the chance to purchase these aloof Manhattan palaces in the sky, these physical embodiments of how the extremely wealthy operate at a remove from society. And now, in a way, his campaign is exploiting the rage this divergence has caused.

When I was at Estis and Enkin’s apartment we got to talking about Trump and the hostility that follows him around. Trump World Tower was itself constructed amid much acrimony and division — a chaotic and upsetting experience for some neighbors and a bonanza for others. Taking advantage of the city’s idiosyncratic “air rights” process, Trump quietly bought rights from the owners of several low-rise neighboring buildings — a church and a Japanese cultural center among them — until he had enough to build one gigantic tower. He undertook his maneuver with such stealth that none of the other neighbors, not even Walter Cronkite, knew what was unfolding in their backyards. When Trump’s plans were finally revealed, Cronkite made an emotional petition to the city appeals board, calling the design “demeaning” to the United Nations. “How can we allow an institution as important to the world and New York as the U.N. to be forever dwarfed by this outsize and illegal tower?”

A Trump executive, Abraham Wallach, responded by reminding the media that Cronkite himself lived in a 50-story high-rise at U.N. Plaza. “People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones,” he said.

Before setting off for Trump World Tower, I emailed the Rev. Robert J. Robbins, formerly of the Church of the Holy Family, to ask what the church did with its unexpected $10 million air-rights windfall from Trump. He declined my interview request, citing “Mr. Trump’s present high profile” as the reason. One of Estis and Enkin’s neighbors refused to let The Times photograph their apartment because they didn’t want their name associated with Trump’s in the current climate. For that reason, I felt concerned about mentioning his name to Estis and Enkin. But I needn’t have worried. They are huge fans of his and intend to vote for him.

“He’s truly impressive,” said Estis. “He gives off an aura of presence and he usually has very positive things to say to the individual he’s talking to. He makes you feel good about yourself. He’ll praise you.”

“How has he praised you?” I asked.

Looking east from 56 Leonard Street, currently under construction. Christopher Anderson/Magnum, for The New York Times

“One time I ran into him at the U.S. Open, and he was with a well-known name in New York real estate,” Estis said. “We shake hands, and he turns to the builder-developer and says, ‘Warren’s probably one of the best lawyers in New York City.’ ” Estis beamed. “As I said, it makes you feel good.”

Trump does like to say things that make people feel good, though the question of their veracity is often tricky. Trump World Tower’s public-relations agency repeatedly assured The Times that Estis’s apartment lay 810 feet above the ground. But then I called Marshall Gerometta, an expert in skyscraper heights at the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat.

“Only the top residential unit is above 800 feet,” he said. That’s the 90th-floor penthouse, four floors above Estis and Enkin. His figure, he told me, came from a 3-D image of the building on Google Earth. When I raised doubts about his methods, he said that he had “checked dozens of buildings this way against the actual blueprints, and it’s usually within a couple of feet of accuracy. I’m kind of the go-to guy on this.” (This is true: The Council on Tall Buildings is a respected source.)

“Is Trump known for exaggerating his buildings’ heights?” I asked.

Gerometta replied that he didn’t know about that, but he did know this: Trump was probably one of the first builders to skip floor numbers in order to inflate the total count. “What he markets as the 90th floor is often actually the 72nd floor, just to make it sound more impressive.”

“The Donald,” Gerometta said, laughing, “likes to exaggerate.” (Trump World Tower continues to dispute Gerometta’s figures but has not produced blueprints or other evidence to the contrary.)

For Estis and Enkin, the precise altitude of their apartment is ultimately immaterial. At sunset we sat at a west-facing window. The evening light filled the room, and Enkin had opened a bottle of Champagne. I suddenly remembered recent demonstrations at various Trump-owned skyscrapers across New York City.

“Was there an anti-Trump protest outside this building a couple of weeks ago?” I asked them.

Enkin smiled. Then she shrugged and said, “You only see the top of their heads.” ♦

Jon Ronson is the author, most recently, of “So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed.” He last wrote for the magazine about social-media public shaming.

Christopher Anderson is a Magnum photographer and a recipient of a Robert Capa Gold Medal Award.

Winging It Created with Sketch.

Manhattan’s airspace may look empty, but it teems with life. By Helen Macdonald / Illustrations by Brian Rea / Animation by Pablo Delcan

Illustrations by Brian Rea. Animation by Pablo Delcan.

Dusk is falling over Midtown on a chilly evening in early May. I Google the weather forecast once again on my phone — it’s still north-northeasterly winds and clear skies — then pull on my coat and walk down Fifth Avenue toward the Empire State Building. The line for the observation deck snakes around the block, and I’m the only person in it wearing a pair of binoculars around my neck, which makes me a little self-conscious. For an hour I inch forward, up escalators, through marble halls, past walls of soft gold wallpaper, before squeezing into a crowded elevator and emerging on the 86th floor. At over a thousand feet above the city, there’s a strong breeze and a spectacular sea of lights spilling out far below. It’s so astonishing a view I almost forget to breathe.

Behind the tourists pressed against the perimeter fence, there’s a man leaning back against the wall. Above him the stars and stripes flap languidly in the night air. I can’t see his face in the gloom, but I know this is the man I’ve come to meet because he’s holding a pair of binoculars that look far better than mine, and his face is upturned to sky. There’s an urgency to the way he stands that reminds me of people I’ve seen at skeet shoots waiting for the trap to fire the next target. He’s tense with anticipation.

This is Andrew Farnsworth, a soft-spoken 43-year-old researcher at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and I’m joining him here in hope of seeing a wildlife phenomenon that twice a year sweeps almost unseen above the city: the seasonal night flights of migrating birds. I can’t help thinking this is an absurdly incongruous place for a nature-viewing expedition. Apart from the familiar exceptions — pigeons, rats, mice, sparrows — we tend to think of wild creatures as living far from the city’s margins, and nature as the city’s polar opposite. It’s easy to see why. The only natural things visible from this height are a faint scatter of stars above and the livid bruise of the Hudson running through the clutter of lights below. Everything else is us: the flash of aircraft, the tilt of bright smartphones, the illuminated grids of windows and streets.

Skyscrapers are at their most perfect at night, full-fledged dreams of modernity that erase nature and replace it with a new landscape wrought of artifice, a cartography of steel and glass and light. But people live in them for the same reason that they travel to wild places: to escape the city. The highest buildings raise you above the mess and chaos of life at street level; they also raise you into something else. The sky may seem like an empty place, just as we once thought the deep ocean to be a lifeless void. But like the ocean, this is a vast habitat full of life — bats and birds, flying insects, spiders, windblown seeds, microbes, drifting spores. The more I stare at the city across miles of dusty, uplit air, the more I begin to think of these supertall buildings as machines that work like deep-sea submersibles, transporting us to inaccessible realms we cannot otherwise explore. Inside them, the air is calm and clean and temperate. Outside is a tumultuous world teeming with unexpected biological abundance, and we are standing in its midst.

Above us, LED bulbs around the base of the spire cast a soft halo of pale light up into the darkness. An incandescent blur of white skips across it. Through binoculars it resolves into a noctuid moth, wings flapping as it climbs vertically toward the tower. No one fully understands how moths like these orient themselves while migrating; there’s speculation that they might navigate by sensing Earth’s magnetic fields. This one is flying upward in search of the right airflow that will allow it to travel where it wants to go.

Wind-borne migration is an arthropod specialty, allowing creatures like aphids, wasps, lacewings, beetles, moths and tiny spiders hoisted on strands of electrostatically charged silk to travel distances ranging from tens to hundreds of miles. These drifting creatures are colonizers, pioneers looking for new places to live, and they’ll make a home wherever they find one. Place a rose bush out on the arid environment of a top-floor balcony and soon wind-borne sap-sucking aphids will cluster on its stems, followed by the tiny wasps that parasitize them.

Insects travel above us in extraordinary numbers. In Britain, the research scientist Jason Chapman uses radar systems aimed into the atmosphere to study their high-altitude movements. Over seven and a half billion can pass over a square mile of English farmland in a single month — about 5,500 pounds of biomass. Chapman thinks the number passing over New York City may be even higher, because this is a gateway to a continent, not a small island surrounded by cold seas, and summers here are generally hotter. Once you get above 650 feet, he says, you’re lofted into a realm where the distinction between city and countryside has little or no meaning at all.

During the day, chimney swifts feast on these vast drifts of life; during the night, so do the city’s resident and migrating bats, and nighthawks with white-flagged wings. On days with northwest winds in late summer and early fall, birds, bats and migrant dragonflies all feed on rich concentrations of insects caused by powerful downdrafts and eddies around the city’s high-rise buildings, just as fish swarm to feed where currents congregate plankton in the ocean.

It’s not just insects up there. The tallest buildings, like the Empire State, 1 World Trade Center and other new supertowers, project into airspace that birds have used for millenniums. The city lies on the Atlantic flyway, the route used by hundreds of millions of birds to fly north every spring to their breeding grounds and back again in the fall. Most small songbirds tend to travel between 3,000 and 4,000 feet from the ground, but they vary their altitude depending on the weather. Larger birds fly higher, and some, like shorebirds, may well pass over the city at 10,000 to 12,000 feet. Up here we’ll be able to see only a fraction of what is moving past us: Even the tallest buildings dip into only the shallows of the sky.

Though you can see migrating raptors soaring at altitudes well over 800 feet over the city during the day, most species of diurnal birds migrate after nightfall. It’s safer. Temperatures are cooler, and there are fewer predators around. Fewer, not none. Just before I arrived, Farnsworth saw a peregrine falcon drifting ominously around the building. Peregrines frequently hunt at night here. From high-rise lookout perches, they launch flights out into the darkness to grab birds and bats. In more natural habitats, falcons cache the bodies of birds they’ve killed among crevices in cliffs. The ones here tuck their kills into ledges on high-rises, including the Empire State. For a falcon, a skyscraper is simply a cliff: It brings the same prospects, the same high winds, the same opportunities to stash a takeout meal.

Illustrations by Brian Rea. Animation by Pablo Delcan.

We stare out into the dark, willing life into view. Minutes pass. Farnsworth points. “There!” he says. High above us is a suspicion of movement, right at the edge of vision where the sky dissolves into dusty chaos. I swing my binoculars up to my eyes. Three pale pairs of beating wings, flying north-northeast in close formation. Black-crowned night herons. I’ve seen them only ever hunched on branches or crouched low by lakes and ponds, and it’s astounding to see them wrenched so far from their familiar context. I wonder how high they are. “Those are pretty large,” Farnsworth says. “When you look up into the light, everything looks bigger than it is, and closer than it is.” He estimates that the herons are about 300 feet above us: nearly 1,500 feet in the air. We watch them vanish into darkness.

I feel less like a naturalist and more like an amateur astronomer waiting for a meteor shower, squinting expectantly into the darkness. I try a new tactic: focusing my binoculars on infinity and pointing them straight up. Through the lenses, birds invisible to the naked eye swim into view, and there are birds above them, and birds higher still. It strikes me that we are seeing a lot of birds. An awful lot of birds.

For every larger bird I see, 30 or more songbirds pass over. They are very small. Watching their passage is almost too moving to bear. They resemble stars, embers, slow tracer fire. Even through binoculars those at higher altitudes are tiny, ghostly points of light. I know that they have loose-clenched toes tucked to their chests, bright eyes, thin bones and a will to fly north that pulls them onward night after night. Most of them spent yesterday in central or southern New Jersey before ascending into darkness. Larger birds keep flying until dawn. The warblers tend to come earlier to earth, dropping like stones into patches of habitat farther north to rest and feed over the following day. Some, like yellow-rumped warblers, began their long journeys in the southeastern states. Others, like rose-breasted grosbeaks, have made their way up from Central America.

Something tugs at my heart. I’ll never see any of these birds again. If I weren’t this high, and the birds weren’t briefly illuminated by this column of light cast by a building thrown up through the Depression years to celebrate earthly power and capital confidence, I’d never have seen them at all.

Farnsworth pulls out a smartphone. Unlike everyone else holding screens up here, he’s looking at radar images from Fort Dix, in New Jersey, part of a National Weather Service radar network that provides near-continuous coverage of airspace over the continental U.S.A. “It’s definitely a heavy migration night tonight,” he says. “When you see those kinds of patterns on radar, in particular, those greens,” he explains, “you’re talking about 1,000 to 2,000 birds per cubic mile potentially, which is almost as dense as it gets. So it’s a big night.” After days of bad weather for birds wanting to fly north, with low cloud and winds in the wrong direction, a bottleneck of migrants built up, and now the sky is full of them. I watch the pixellation blossom on the animated radar map, a blue-and-green dendritic flower billowing out over the whole East Coast. “This is biological stuff that’s up in the atmosphere,” Farnsworth says, pointing one finger to the screen. “It’s all biology.”

Meteorologists have long known that you can detect animal life by radar. Just after World War II, British radar scientists and Royal Air Force technicians puzzled over mysterious plots and patterns that appeared on their screens. They knew they weren’t aircraft and christened them “angels” before finally concluding that they were flocks of moving birds. “That was their contamination, right?” Farnsworth says of radar meteorologists. “They wanted to filter all that stuff out. Now the biologists want to do the reverse.” Farnsworth is one pioneer of a new multidisciplinary science, fit for an era in which weather radar has become so sensitive it can detect a single bumblebee over 30 miles away. It’s called aeroecology, and it uses sophisticated remote-sensing technologies like radar, acoustics and tracking devices to study ecological patterns and relationships in the skies. “The whole notion of the aerosphere and airspace as habitat is not something that has come into the collective psyche until recently,” Farnsworth says. And this new science is helping us understand how climate change, skyscrapers, wind turbines, light pollution and aviation affect the creatures that live and move above us.

At 10 o’clock, cirrus clouds slide overhead like oil poured on water. Ten minutes later, the sky is clear again, and the birds are still flying. We move to the east side of the observation deck. A saxophonist begins to play, and in concert with this unlikely soundtrack we begin to see birds far closer than before. One in particular. Though it is overexposed in the light, we detect a smear of black at its chest and a distinctive pattern on its tail: a male yellow-rumped warbler. It flickers past and disappears around the corner of the building. A little while later, we see another flying the same way. Then another. It dawns on us that it this is the same bird, circling. Another one joins it, both now drawn helplessly toward and around the light, reeling about the spire as if caught on invisible strings. Watching them dampens our exuberant mood. The spire is lit with pulsing rivulets of climbing color like a candle tonight to mark the building’s 85th anniversary. And these birds have been attracted to it, pulled off course, their exquisite navigational machinery overwhelmed by light, leaving them confused and in considerable danger. After being mesmerized in this way, some birds drag themselves free and continue their journey. Others don’t.

New York is among the brightest cities in the world after Las Vegas, only one node in a flood of artificial illumination that runs from Boston down to Washington. We cherish our cities for their appearance at night, but it takes a terrible toll on migrating songbirds: You can find them dead or exhausted at the foot of high-rise buildings all over America. Disoriented by light and reflections on glass, they crash into obstacles, fly into windows, spiral down to the ground. More than 100,000 die each year in New York City alone. Thomas King, of the New York pest-control company M&M Environmental, has had calls from residents of high-rise buildings asking him to deal with the birds colliding with their windows during migration season. He tells them that there’s no solution, but they can talk to their building manager about turning the lights off. It helps. Programs like the New York City Audubon’s Lights Out New York have encouraged many high-rise owners to do the same, saving both energy and avian lives.

Every year the “Tribute in Light” shines twin blue beams into the Manhattan night as a memorial to the lives lost on Sept. 11. They rise four miles into the air and are visible 60 miles from the city. On peak migration nights songbirds spiral down toward them, calling, pulled from the sky, so many circling in the light they look like glittering, whirling specks of paper caught in the wind. On one night last year, so many were caught in the beams that the few pixels representing the “Tribute” site glowed superbright on the radar maps. Farnsworth was there with the Audubon team that got the lights shut off intermittently to prevent casualties. They switched off the “Tribute” eight times that night for about 20 minutes at a time, releasing the trapped birds to return to their journey. Each time the lights went back on, a new sweep of birds was drawn in — the twin towers made ghosts of light visited over and over by winged travelers intermittently freed into darkness before a crowd rushed in to take their place. Farnsworth is a lead scientist in BirdCast, a project that combines a variety of methods — weather data, flight calls, radar, observers on the ground — to predict the movements of migrating birds throughout the continental United States and forecast big nights like this that might require emergency lights-out action.

The flow of birds over the observation deck continues, but it’s getting late. I make my farewell, take the elevator back down the building and wander uphill to my apartment. Though it’s long past midnight, I’m wide-awake. Part of what high-rise buildings are designed to do is change the way we see. To bring us different views of the world, views intimately linked with prospect and power — to make the invisible visible. The birds I saw were mostly unidentifiable streaks of light, like thin retinal scratches or splashes of luminous paint on a dark ground. As I look up from street level, the blank sky above seems a very different place, deep and coursing with life.

Two days later, I decide to walk in Central Park, and find it full of newer migrants that arrived here at night and stayed to rest and feed. A black-and-white warbler tacking along a slanted tree trunk deep in the Ramble, a yellow-rumped warbler sallying forth into the bright spring air to grab flies, a black-throated blue warbler so neat and spry he looks like a folded pocket handkerchief. These songbirds are familiar creatures with familiar meanings. It’s hard to reconcile them with the remote lights I witnessed in the sky.

Living in a high-rise building bars you from certain ways of interacting with the natural world. You can’t put out feeders to watch robins and chickadees in your garden. But you are set in another part of their habitual world, a nocturne of ice crystals and cloud and wind and darkness. High-rise buildings, symbols of mastery over nature, can work as bridges toward a more complete understanding of the natural world — stitching the sky to the ground, nature to the city.

For days afterward, my dreams are full of songbirds, the familiar ones from woods and back lots, but also points of moving light, little astronauts, travelers using the stars to navigate, having fallen to earth for a little while before picking themselves up and moving on. ♦

Helen Macdonald is the author of “H Is for Hawk” and a contributing writer for the magazine.

Brian Rea is an illustrator and artist based in Los Angeles.

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Right now in New York, there are four new skyscrapers whose construction has recently crested the 800-foot mark; together they employ 2,800 people in more than two dozen trades. Here, twelve workers on two of those projects talk about what it’s like to do heavy labor at the top of the world. Photographs by Jack Davison / Interviews by Camille Sweeney

Jonathan Schulterbrandt / 28, Lather, 3 World Trade Center Lathers install rebar in concrete and work with wire and metal mesh to create ceilings and walls. “You never realize how cold and windy it gets up here. Or how strong the sun gets in summer. It’s us against the elements. I never get tired of looking, though. My favorite view is toward the south and east. You see the beautiful curvature of the Verrazano Bridge.” Jack Davison for The New York Times
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Scott Small / 55, Laborer, 3 World Trade Center On construction sites, the laborer is a jack-of-all-trades whose tasks range from preparing and cleaning a work site to erecting scaffolding and operating power tools. ‘‘I’m a mason tender, which means I follow the ironworkers. I give them material and polish their boots. Ha, ha! I make sure they get their work done. I love working up here. Makes me feel like I’m building America back up. I love the view and the freedom. Beats working in a hole.’’ Jack Davison for The New York Times
Dennis O’Lenick / 56, Hod Hoist Carpenter, 3 World Trade Center Hoists are the exterior elevators that carry workers and construction material up and down the building. “I’ve been doing this since 1978. To me the most surprising thing after all these years is that a bomb could go off next to me and I wouldn’t be surprised. Stuff happens all the time. We climb the buildings to install the hoists. Then we do the reverse and climb down them to take the hoists down. Fighting the elements takes a toll on you. The high winds. But the height doesn’t bother me. I’m constantly tied off.” Jack Davison for The New York Times
Roosevelt Gainey / 22, Lather, 3 World Trade Center ‘‘Probably my favorite thing about my job is I like the work ethic. I used to be a monotonous, lazy person, just doing the same old thing, lying around on the couch. Here it’s sink or swim. I’m harnessed in about 30 percent of the time. I got over my fear of heights pretty quick. Looking straight down becomes more natural. I have to say though, I love going on roller coasters, but hanging off the sides of buildings? No, not so much.’’ Jack Davison for The New York Times
Derek Dixon / 51, Ironworker, 3 World Trade Center Structural iron-and-steel workers — whose construction jobs are considered among the most dangerous — put up a building’s beams, girders and columns. ‘‘I’ve worked all over: L.A., San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, Puerto Rico. I do production welding. I also worked on Tower 1, and you can’t get a better view anywhere in the world. The best part for me is looking at the finished product. I think, We made that, Tower 1. It’s like the feather in the cap.’’ Jack Davison for The New York Times
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Myriam Giraldo / 30, Plumber, 10 Hudson Yards ‘‘I wanted to be an air traffic controller. But I got into this, and I never would have imagined I would fall in love with it. When I’m up at the top and the wind is blowing at me and I’m on a lift six inches from the edge and I’m holding a piece of four-inch pipe or it’s thundering and raining or I’m testing the pumps to the water towers and I’m thinking, Hey, I’m just doing my job, it’s kind of cool.’’ Jack Davison for The New York Times
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Jesse Gillespie / 22, Plumber, 3 World Trade Center Journeymen plumbers connect the systems that send water to supply tanks and maintain storm drainage. “I work on every top floor. When the crane has a load, they blow an air horn. One time I was up on the deck at the top, and I heard the horn and looked up. The crane was carrying a beam that weighed thousands of pounds. I remember thinking, That could just plummet. Right then, the sun was shining off the Freedom Tower, and the beam lined up perfectly with the tower and made the shape of a cross. It was a momentary thing, but I’ll never forget it. I worked over there too. This is a historic place. It makes me feel good to know I’m helping rebuild it. It’s a permanent mark in the city. Twenty, 30 years from now I’m gonna be walking by and say to my kids, my grandkids, ‘I helped build that.’ ” Jack Davison for The New York Times
Mark A. Williams / 54, Operating Engineer/Surveyor, 3 World Trade Center Operating engineers are the first workers on a construction project and the last off. Among other duties, they make sure everything is level and square on each floor, using cables to keep the building in shape and in place as it goes up. “I’m the guy responsible for the building being exactly where it is. I have to come within an eighth of an inch a thousand feet in the air. As we go up, the building starts to sway. I’m up with the ironworkers, and we get winded out a lot. About twice a week, with winds up to 30, 40, 50 miles per hour. When that happens, we’re not erecting steel. We stop. We catch up. We do all the other stuff.” Jack Davison for The New York Times
Howard Ashman / 52, Laborer, 3 World Trade Center “I’ve worked on some tall buildings. I also worked on Yankee Stadium. Sometimes when you’re up here the breeze is blowing and the building dances. It doesn’t matter if you’re working on the 6th floor, or the 60th floor — it’s the same: You can have an accident. As a building’s going up, everything about the environment’s constantly changing. I always tell the guys, ‘Watch out — where you stepped yesterday may not be there today.’ ” Jack Davison for The New York Times
Michael Alcidio Dinis / 28, Carpenter, 3 World Trade Center Carpenters on a site perform a variety of jobs, including the construction of the forms to mold the concrete core of a building. “I build the core. My best moments are working on the corners. It’s the most suspense, the most hairy. Sometimes I’ve worn a GoPro. I’m working with the concrete and rebar. I go bare-handed a lot. Even in winter. I don’t like to use gloves. When you get up high, going down for lunch takes too long so I bring my own lunch, which I make. Like fajoida and white rice, Portuguese stew. I share it with the laborers. There’s so much interesting stuff to see from up here. I sit and eat up here and look down at the Williamsburg Bridge. Someday I want to open a restaurant.” Jack Davison for The New York Times
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Xavier DiMiceli / 57, Ironworker, 3 World Trade Center Ornamental ironworkers install metal windows and erect curtain and window walls that cover a building’s steel or reinforced concrete. ‘‘The wind up here is a whole other animal. You gotta dress like you’re going skiing. And I do ski. Wearing anything less is no good. I’m a working foreman. Some foremen don’t work, they just point. That’s not me. I couldn’t have done any other work. Too boring. I’ll be doing this till my son’s out of college. And then, who knows?’’ Jack Davison for The New York Times
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Corbett Melfi / 56, Ironworker, 10 Hudson Yards “I grew up in Brooklyn, spent summers upstate. We climbed trees, fire escapes, rode the subways on the top. I come from five generations of ironworkers. It’s in our blood. My grandfather ran the union. He and my great-grandfather fixed the antennas at the Empire State Building. My father worked on the twin towers. I see our job as a piece of art. We put up the skeleton, the bones. It’s hard physically, emotionally. But I work in a gang of six guys, way up high, no floors. We’re so in sync, we can work without any verbal communication. I love the rawness of it, the steel, the beauty of it.” Jack Davison for The New York Times

Jack Davison is a photographer. His last work for the magazine was photographing parrots used to treat PTSD patients.

Camille Sweeney is a journalist and a co-author of “The Art of Doing.”

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The violent physics that transpire just outside every skyscraper window. By Gareth Cook / Illustrations by Brian Rea

Illustrations by Brian Rea. Animation by Pablo Delcan.

A winter gale enjoys an easy approach to Manhattan from the north-northeast. As the wind moves over the Hudson River, the waves put up a weak fight against the air at altitude. Coming off the water, though, the wind hits the trees and buildings of Hudson Heights, and the mounting obstacles create huge vortices of air that join the increasingly turbulent flow. At West 110th Street, the wind tumbles into Central Park and then, skimming over oak and beech trees, it picks up speed while some of the great gyres it conveys spin down and vanish. Yet when the wind leaves the park at West 59th Street, it still contains tumultuous traces of its history, of the trees, the buildings and water it has traversed. The wind, it can be said, has memory.

At last, the wind happens upon one of the supertall towers south of the park and reveals a far more wicked talent. It strikes the building’s face and rushes for the edges, whipping off the corners and spiraling tightly, creating a columnar vortex that sucks at the tower’s side and goes careering downwind. If air is moving quickly, these vortices form to a beat, pulling first one way, then the other. The gale is coming out of the north, but this force acts on the perpendicular, along the east-west axis, rocking the structure. Specialists call this the crosswind effect, and in certain circumstances, the rocking hits a building’s “natural frequency.” Imagine, says Derek Kelly, an engineer, that the hand of God were to reach down and gently pluck one of the skyline’s spires: The skyscraper would vibrate back and forth, like a guitar string. That is a building’s natural frequency. If it matches the crosswind tugs, the two are in resonance; the oscillations grow, like a child kicking on a swing. East then west, east then west. When a gale rolls in, a supertall will lean back, but it’s nothing compared with the potential power of the crosswind effect.

Today’s engineers have conquered gravity: With enough structural steel and high-performance concrete, a tower will soar. The more dogged foe is wind. While gravity pulls down, wind can come from any compass point. It can apply pressure or suction, or alternate between the two. The wind, unlike gravity, changes from city to city, from season to season. Most harrowing of all is the wind’s dynamism. It is changed by everything it touches, and the wind even shapes itself, with every current pulling on all its neighbors. Gravity is plodding and obvious, but give wind a chance, and it will gather itself together and riot.

When Citicorp Center, with its slanted top, was completed in 1977, it didn’t look as if it should be able to stand. At 915 feet, the structure was supported entirely by four nine-story columns, leaving an impressive hollow at its base. The structural engineer William LeMessurier was hailed, but the next year an engineering student pointed out that the building (now called 601 Lexington) might indeed fall — in a strong-enough wind. Welders rushed to make emergency reinforcements and, with Hurricane Ella threatening, the city contemplated evacuating the area. Ella turned out to sea, though, and Midtown was spared.

In the world of tall buildings, a novel kind of specialist has come to prominence: the wind engineer. As towers grow taller, they climb into more powerful winds, and lighter construction techniques can leave them more vulnerable. Developers have begun putting up very slender skyscrapers, like 432 Park Avenue in New York, and these are particularly sensitive to the aerial environment. When a wind engineer like Kelly looks at such a building, he understands that it is airborne, with one end pinned to underlying bedrock, the rest riding the winds of Manhattan.

Kelly is a principal at RWDI, one of North America’s top wind consultants. The company’s client list includes 432 Park Avenue and 111 West 57th Street, a 1,428-foot skyscraper set to be among the slimmest in the world. (Imagine a one-foot ruler, stood on end and stretched to roughly twice its height.) When testing shows too much sway in an initial design, a near certainty with slender supertalls, RWDI offers a “shaping workshop.” The architect, developer and engineer make the trek from their home metropolis to the company’s headquarters in Guelph, Ontario, with dibs for the day on a wind-test tunnel and a cadre of model makers so that ideas can be tried in the tunnel and improved upon. The goal is to find ways that the building might, as these specialists say, “confuse the wind.” Designers of airplane wings want a smooth rush of air, to generate lift; designers of buildings want to divide the wind and leave it in disarray.

Illustrations by Brian Rea. Animation by Pablo Delcan.

Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, at 2,717 feet the planet’s tallest man-made structure, is asymmetrical, winding down from the top in a series of steps, like an expanding spiral staircase. The crosswind effect depends on a building’s width, and so at each level on the Burj, the wind beats at a different frequency: confused and frustrated, like a toddler kicking wildly on a swing that won’t get going. Another favorite weapon of wind confusion, seen on many skyscrapers, is cut corners, which disrupt suction forces along the side. Pinnacles and antennas are subjected to the kind of scrutiny given America’s Cup yachts. In the case of 432 Park Avenue, the design team used five gap layers, each two floors in height, where the facade opens to allow air to pass through, sapping vortices. These horizontal bands give the tower a visual rhythm, but they are there because of the wind. In the natural world, wind sculpts sand dunes and cuts the snow, carving rings where it has whipped around a tree. It leaves its marks on buildings too.

In February 2014, the white-haired Uruguayan architect Rafael Viñoly delivered a lecture, sponsored by the Skyscraper Museum, on 432 Park Avenue. A tall building can be made eminently safe, capable of withstanding hurricanes and earthquakes, but no amount of beefing up its steel and concrete skeleton can force it to hold still. Which raises the question: For a penthouse in the $100 million range, how much sway is too much? Viñoly described a project-team trip, arranged by RWDI, to a facility in St. John’s, Newfoundland, that houses a marine simulator, a covered platform on six hydraulic jacks mocked up as a ship’s bridge. Now they would simulate a penthouse: Out with the ship’s controls, in with chairs, a sofa and a coffee table. Through the windows, rolling North Sea waves were replaced with a 360-degree vantage of the city from a suitably astonishing height. As Viñoly described the feel of the building behaving badly, before final engineering, he rocked the lectern. “If you’re standing here, your cup of tea moves,” he said. “And if you are tacky enough to have a chandelier, your chandelier also moves.”

If shaping and structural tweaks reach their limit, engineers can reduce motion further by installing “tuned mass dampers” near the apex. One version consists of an enormous mass on a suspension system with pistons that resist the mass’s movement. The damper acts as a pendulum, but set just off the building’s natural frequency, meaning that whenever the tower lurches, the mass drags, out of sync, steadying it. The 1,667-foot Taipei 101 is damped with a 728-ton ball that does double duty as a tourist attraction. From the observation deck, the ball appears to swing in heavy winds, though actually the tourists are also in motion.

Hidden at 432 Park Avenue, some 1,300 tons of combined mass stroke away on two dampers. The building’s engineer, Silvian Marcus, the U.S.A. director of building structures at WSP/Parsons Brinckerhoff, visited one of the top floors with a group and asked if anyone felt anything. No, they said. He rested a laser pointer on the floor, aimed it up and stood back. The dot wandered as the tower flexed. “They said, ‘It’s unbelievable; we feel nothing,’ ” Marcus told me. With high-end damping, most people will not sense motion in normal weather. For supertall residential skyscrapers, tuned mass dampers are the rare luxury amenities that go unseen.

Very tall buildings are a recent invention, and the public has not yet developed an intuitive sense for them. “We still have this innate understanding that a building we enter will remain stationary,” says Melissa Burton, the global head of civil structures for BMT Fluid Mechanics. “It scares us when it moves.” You can choose to make a home in the clouds, comfortably isolated from the elements, but you can never escape the wind. The walls, and everything they contain, will always be in motion. Most of the time, this will fall beneath your notice. Yet someday a storm will come, the wind will riot and you will feel its touch. ♦

Gareth Cook is a contributing writer for the magazine and a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist.

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Night after night, the Rainbow Room still pays homage to the glamour of an old New York. Photographs by Matthew Pillsbury / Text by Susan Dominus

Setting up for Saturday night at the Rainbow Room. Matthew Pillsbury for The New York Times

You immediately feel, upon entering the Rainbow Room at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, its self-conscious desire to dazzle: the chandelier, spreading like a crystal awning, the double-height windows showcasing 30-mile views. At a time when hoodies and white sneakers are the stuff of fashion, that effort to impress is still seductive, perhaps especially to tourists in an otherwise-indifferent city. Dining there, dancing there to a live orchestra, is like inhabiting the essence of some idealized version of New York, while also existing wholly above it, at a party higher than in any other town. Even from the men’s bathroom, you can take in the view from 65 stories high, gazing out at a city both dizzying and diminished in size. Freshly glamorous in the ’30s and ’40s, the Rainbow Room is now a faithful representation of glamour. It’s nothing if not old-fashioned, a glittering monument to another time’s optimism, or the optimism we project onto an era that we know, in retrospect, had prosperity in its sightlines. Over the years, the Rainbow Room has faded, closed, been revived, closed again and opened once more, a polished stage set for a debutante’s ball, for a marriage proposal, for a wedding. There, a young couple with high hopes for their future can dance on a floor that has, for decades, rotated, carrying them, through some mysterious, enduring mechanism, around and around and around.

A private event at the Rainbow Room, May 2016. Matthew Pillsbury for The New York Times

Susan Dominus is a staff writer for the magazine. She last wrote about flexibility in the modern workplace.

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A photographer renowned for his artistic vision looks out from New York’s tallest towers. Photographs by Thomas Struth

10 Hudson Yards, 878 feet. Begun: 2013. Projected completion: 2016. ‘‘For a long time, New York was known as the City of Dreams,’’ Thomas Struth says. ‘‘This is more from the perspective of the construction workers, the maintenance people. It is almost as if the triangle of Lower Manhattan were being held by the rope that comes down from the top.’’ Thomas Struth for The New York Times
1 World Trade Center, 1,776 feet. Begun: 2006. Completed: 2014. ‘‘This is the site that made me accept this job. It’s like a coliseum, but it doesn’t actually work like one.’’ Thomas Struth for The New York Times
One57, 1,004 feet. Begun: 2009. Completed: 2014. ‘‘The facade is such a simple idea — just a pattern.’’ Thomas Struth for The New York Times
432 Park Avenue, 1,396 feet. Begun: 2011. Completed: 2015. ‘‘You can almost see the shape of Manhattan.’’ Thomas Struth for The New York Times
10 Hudson Yards. ‘‘It’s a very strange tension between inside and outside, with no facade yet.’’ Thomas Struth for The New York Times
As seen from CitySpire: Central Park Tower, 1,550 feet, foreground. Begun: 2014. Projected completion: 2019. Background, 220 Central Park South, 950 feet. Begun: 2014. Projected completion: 2017. ‘‘It’s like urban surgery — a boy’s toy world.’’ Thomas Struth for The New York Times
Chrysler Building, 1,046 feet, as seen from the MetLife Building. Begun: 1928. Completed: 1930. ‘‘It’s in the clouds, like a Magritte painting. Slightly surrealistic.’’ Thomas Struth for The New York Times
1 World Trade Center, as seen from 4 World Trade Center. ‘‘The original World Trade Center Building was sunny and optimistic. The new building has something stubborn, truculent, defiant about it. They put a crown on it.’’ Thomas Struth for The New York Times
Behind the scenes with the renowned photographer Thomas Struth as he makes pictures at the tops of New York’s tallest buildings. by jacob krupnick

Thomas Struth is a photographer based in Germany who often examines the relationships between people and their modern environments. His photographs have been shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Museo del Prado in Madrid and others.

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A daredevil photographer and a safety guru team up to capture an unprecedented view of the city. By Taffy Brodesser-Akner / Photographs by Jimmy Chin and George Steinmetz

Chin (left) and Walsh seen from the south, with Midtown Manhattan in the background. George Steinmetz for The New York Times

The thing you have to keep reminding yourself when you look at the pictures is that Jamison Walsh is not a thrill-seeker. Growing up, he never cared about climbing trees or the other daredevil stuff kids got into. He worked construction in high school, “anything to make a little money,” and his first job after college was as a special-ed teacher. Now he’s a safety liaison, training people who need to climb heights for their work, helping to keep them secure — a “Joe Schmo who goes to work every day”; that’s what he says about himself. So when he got the call to lead the adventure photographer Jimmy Chin’s climb up the 1 World Trade Center spire for a magazine cover shoot, he didn’t tell anyone about it. He didn’t post about it on Facebook. He simply put it in his calendar. He even did another job in Trenton earlier that day. All these new buildings, which have to be scaled and inspected and worried about? “More work,” he says, and laughs. As we ascend to the 800-foot mark more regularly, as we plant ourselves up there for good, business for Jamison Walsh is booming.

Jimmy Chin wasn’t all that concerned with safety, to be honest; he was more concerned about the unknowns of rigging the first shots. He wanted to convey the “airiness” of being up that high; he wanted to convey the awe he knew that he would feel — the awe that motivates everything he does, whether photographing free climbers in Yosemite for National Geographic or dangling from unclimbed sandstone towers in Chad. He was mostly thinking that shooting straight down the spire “might not give you a sense of the actual spire,” and how can you show how big the world is from up there with just one shot? He wanted the camera to swing out a little, and he was thinking of the best ways to do that. He settled on a long monopod, a six-foot pole, and that’s about all he could think about. He had returned from China a few days before, coming home jet-lagged from another big shoot. The safety issue felt like a nonissue to him. This guy was part of the first ascent of the sharkfin at Meru, in the Himalayas. He skied from the summit of Everest. He’d never climbed a skyscraper, but 1,776 feet in the air is nothing for him; 1,776 is usually what he calls a good start. And anyway, he had his very own safety liaison.

Climb the spire of 1 World Trade Center in virtual reality with the professional mountaineer, filmmaker and photographer Jimmy Chin. by jimmy chin and ben c. solomon

Do you know that 818 people died from falling or slipping or tripping on the job in 2014, which is the most recent year the Bureau of Labor Statistics has data from? Because Jamison Walsh does. Do you know that falling is a leading cause of job-site death, “which is very hard to believe because safety is one of the key factors on every job site and it’s only getting harder and harder to not do something safe?” Walsh knows that, too. Chin sat and listened to Walsh at the base of the spire as they got ready, slithering into harnesses and clicking in D-rings. Walsh gives these speeches all the time, and it’s not always the case that people listen carefully. It’s hard to convey to workers at construction companies or on TV shoots — Walsh does his trainings anyplace that requires someone to ascend four feet or higher for work — just how real that 818 statistic is, how it doesn’t even address the people who fall and injure themselves; these are just the ones who died. It is hard to drive into them how you have to be serious and meticulous every single time, the first and the fifth and the five-thousandth. Walsh tries to make it personal. He talks about his own family, how he wants to see them at the end of every day. He hopes that his trainees are thinking about their families. “Everyone has something they’re going home to.”

All the time Walsh was lecturing, and during the entire six hours they were up there together, Chin was thinking what a good teacher Walsh must have been, back in Walsh’s previous life, at that Philadelphia public school. But the school district was a mess, Walsh says, and when he was laid off four years ago, he didn’t look very hard for another teaching job. A relative told him about FallProof, a company that teaches fall prevention, to head off lawsuits (and falls).

Jamison Walsh climbing the 1 World Trade Center spire. Jimmy Chin for The New York Times

Chin couldn’t help noticing how patient Walsh was, how they seemed to speak the same language despite having such extraordinarily different backgrounds. For a minute, Chin could imagine Walsh doing both things, the climbing and the teaching. You know that old physics theory about a multiverse? In which there are infinite numbers of concurrent universes for every moment of the past and present and future? In the multiverse, there stands Jamison Walsh, patiently teaching the special-needs population of the city, and there is Chin skiing down Everest right this minute, every minute, thinking that that is probably the craziest thing he will ever do.

This wasn’t Walsh’s first time up the spire; it wasn’t even his second. The other times, he was on the clock for safety checks and needed to just get the job done — making sure the ladders and all the fall protection were in “tiptop shape” for the people who would be climbing later to service the weather barometers and the beacon for airspace, and eventually the array of antennas for local television that will be installed this summer, antennas similar to the ones that used to be on the World Trade Center. But this time, up there for hours with the sole purpose of letting the time pass, letting the light change and the clouds move for Chin’s camera, he was able to really contemplate it, you know?

They grew chatty over the hours. Walsh asked Chin about Everest, the only mountain he’d heard of that Chin had climbed and photographed. Walsh told Chin about the rooftop he’d recently been on in York, Penn., how he could see the mountains around him. They talked about the view from nearly 1,776 feet. They high-fived about what giants they were. Walsh tried to FaceTime with his poor wife, who gets nervous about what he does, who sighs with relief every time he walks through the door at the end of the day. “We’re up here!” he said into the camera. Chin will tell you that Walsh seemed a little giddy up there. The excitement took Walsh by surprise. “It was undescribable,” Walsh said. Yes, being a safety liaison is mostly just a regular job, but sometimes regular jobs can burst your heart.

Looking east, toward Brooklyn, as Jimmy Chin (left) and Walsh climbed the spire. George Steinmetz for The New York Times

There they hung, harnessed King Kongs, dangling off the building. As late afternoon descended and Chin’s shutter clicked, Walsh watched the city, trying to wrap his head around the beauty of it. “It’s simply whatever God produced,” he said, trying to convey what it was like. “It’s amazing.” He looked over at the Statue of Liberty, which was ant-size, and he looked over at Jersey City, for God produced Jersey City as well, and he watched the sunset. He thought about Sept. 11 up there. How could you not? At the base of the spire, construction workers had graffitied memoria for those they lost in the attack into the steel. Far down below were the footprints of the old towers and the reflecting pools, and people surrounding them at all hours, paying respects, wondering how we’ve moved on so quickly that right next door there’s a new tower now, taller even. If you were to believe in a multiverse, you could imagine that somewhere in a parallel universe, the people in the twin towers are still there doing their jobs as on any given day, scurrying through the halls with their papers and their tasks, at their terminals. But if you believe in a multiverse, you could also imagine that day when the people descended suddenly and unwillingly, how they jumped and fell — that day is happening on a loop forever, too. One World Trade Center rose up in spite of all that happened, and in our audacity or our hubris, we’re going higher. As Walsh says, business is good.

You couldn’t even see them from the ground that spring day, Walsh and Chin. The sky darkened, and the city lit up, and Walsh looked up past Chin, past the crow’s nest, and saw that there was not much left to go before the climb was complete. Eventually they came down off the spire, and they both signed the base. That night, Chin went to get a cheeseburger, something he can never do in the Himalayas. And that night, Walsh took the train back to Pennsylvania, and he walked through the door of his home once again, and his wife sighed relief and asked him about his day. ♦

Taffy Brodesser-Akner is a contributing writer for the magazine. She last wrote a Letter of Recommendation for airport spas.

Jimmy Chin is a photographer, filmmaker and adventurer. He is a co-director of the award-winning documentary “Meru.”

George Steinmetz specializes in aerial photography. His last work for the magazine was photographing his voyage to Venezuela.

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The allure of the observation-deck selfie. Photographs by Brian Finke / Text by Sam Anderson

Brian Finke for The New York Times
Brian Finke for The New York Times
Brian Finke for The New York Times
Brian Finke for The New York Times
Brian Finke for The New York Times
Brian Finke for The New York Times

Why do we go to high places? What do we want from them?

We want to see.

What do we want to see?

A large part of what we want to see, it turns out, is ourselves seeing.

The photographer Brian Finke captured people capturing people — themselves and others — on top of New York’s highest public observation decks: the Empire State Building, Top of the Rock and One World Observatory. Together, these skyscrapers attract around 10 million tourists a year. They are spikes of capitalist triumph: symbols of wealth, strength, power, transcendence.

But humans are sensitive creatures. Even though these platforms are not, in the grand scheme of things, all that high — 850 feet, 1,250 feet — the air is measurably thinner up there. Our lungs have to work a tiny bit harder to smuggle oxygen into our bloodstreams. We know, viscerally, that we’re unlikely to survive a fall from such an inhuman height. It is both terrifying and giddy. We feel we are standing, temporarily, in a band of the sky; we are only visitors in this elevated realm, and won’t stay long. Still, we reach up higher. We hold our cameras out at arm’s length, or even beyond arm’s length with selfie sticks, straining for every last inch of perspective, so that in the resulting photo, right there in the foreground of the panoramic expanse (the park, the river, the rival skyscrapers, the harbor), is the familiar spectacle of us: our Hawaiian shirts, our sunglasses, our babies packed snugly into their elephant-print slings, our tender, terrestrial faces. ♦

Brian Finke last photographed a series of desk lunches for the magazine. His fifth book of photographs, “Finke,” will be published this month.

Sam Anderson is a staff writer for the magazine. He last wrote a Letter of Recommendation for looking out the window.