Billionaires’ Row review: A book of tall tales
A look southward from New York City’s Central Park, writes Katherine Clarke in Billionaires' Row: Tycoons, High Rollers, and the Epic Race to Build the World's Most Exclusive Skyscrapers, reveals the “physical manifestation of tens of billions of dollars in global wealth.” The display comes in the form of a cluster of “supertalls,” a series of ultra-thin condominium towers that cast some very long shadows indeed. The second part of the collective name that gives Clarke’s book its title comes from how closely together the buildings are clustered on and about 57th Street in Manhattan.
As for the first part, it was blindingly clear well before computer magnate Michael Dell set a New York real estate record in 2012 by purchasing the six-bedroom penthouse at supertall One57 for $100.47 million, that mere millionaires were as shut out of this market as the homeless people sleeping on the now shady park benches below. Even New York, a city iconic for the vast chasm between its richest and poorest inhabitants, had never seen anything like Billionaires’ Row.
Clarke is a Wall Street Journal reporter, a specialist in high-end real estate with extraordinary access to market insiders, and a fine writer. In Billionaires’ Row she has crafted her own supertall, a remarkable work for our times, carefully built layer by layer, and as captivating as it is disturbing. Cowboy developers, the ultimate risk-takers in what Clarke fairly calls the “blood sport” of skyscraper production, provided her with stories about fortunes made, fortunes—and marriages—lost, and last-minute Hail Mary financial passes that sometimes saved the day. (Notably, their numbers do not include Donald Trump, the most famous New York real estate mogul of all time but never a major player in the supertall world.)
But it’s the sales staff who gave Clarke most of the eye-popping details about crazy rich people (of all ethnicities). Many of the prospective buyers’ stories are primarily displays of raging ego—they are no different from the developers in that regard—but some speak volumes above time and place. The supertalls began to rise in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis as the uber-wealthy around the globe sought safe havens—for themselves and their money—and appreciating assets in an era of zero interest rates. The number of Russian billionaires, to cite one of Clarke’s pertinent stats, tripled between 2009 and 2012, making them prime client material for luxury condos. One oligarch insisted the windows in his unit be replaced with bullet-proof glass, citing fear of a helicopter attack.
But nothing seems to capture the tiny client demographic’s desires—and its ability to purchase them—better than the Chinese family who, having already secured a Manhattan condo, were about to finalize the purchase of a $15-million Greenwich, Connecticut, mansion when they presented a final demand. They wanted the seller to include her cat, because the buyers’ daughter had become entranced with it during a visit. As the agent involved told Clarke, she essentially had to say to the seller, “$15 million or your cat,” and wait for whatever was coming. Fortunately for all involved, probably including the cat, the seller immediately responded: “Thank God. I hate that cat. She can have it.”
Those are the screwball comedy anecdotes that propel Clarke’s narrative, making it a compulsive page-turner. But layered throughout are the granular details of financing and “assemblage.” The latter is the term for the intricate process of collecting enough adjoining land and air rights in the right neighbourhood—in compliance with New York’s byzantine rent-stabilization and rent-control laws—for such mammoth constructions to break ground, all the while facing rivals’ attempts to thwart the assemblage via strategic purchases.
And then there are the technological and design breakthroughs that permitted what one developer called the “penis envy” underlying the race to the sky. The developers of supertall (and superslender) 432 Park Avenue trooped off to the University of Western Ontario’s Boundary Layer Wind Tunnel Laboratory, to see what their potential problems might be. They eventually decided to leave five unenclosed open spaces, each two storeys high, in their tower to allow the wind to pass through without excessively swaying the units.
It’s the final layer, though, that makes Billionaires’ Row soar high, as Clarke, with understated grace and nuance, continually shows how the world of skyscrapers has changed over the past century. She opens her book with future developer Harry Macklowe’s memory of his gleeful eight-year-old self on a visit to the Empire State Building’s observation deck in 1945. Clarke doesn’t stress it then, but that image returns time and again as the private nature of the supertalls—no public access at all—makes clear that the power and exclusivity of wealth in the second Gilded Age exceeds the first age.
The condos in the supertalls, 44 per cent vacant at last count, are as much temples of wealth as actual residences. They are, in fact, the world’s most expensive safety deposit boxes, rooms holding nothing more than (presumably) metaphorical stacks of cash, topping the Manhattan skyline and looming over the mortals below.
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