On top of the world
New York has never been so successful. Just look down
ANYONE who buys into the increasingly popular “death by gentrification” narrative should pop into Manhatta, the new Danny Meyer restaurant on the 60th floor of 28 Liberty St. downtown. From there, even the most jaded soul will gape hung-jawed at the reborn World Trade Center, the Frank Gehry-designed 8 Spruce St., the new Seaport Pier 17 and a thriving, park-lined South Street that was once a dumping ground for spoiled fish and dead bodies.
Aridiculous Harper’s magazine essay this month about New York’s supposed decline cited “wholesale destruction of the public city” by real-estate interests. In the piece titled “The Death of a Once Great City: The Fall of New York and the Urban Crisis of Affluence,” Kevin Baker decried NewYork as “boring” and “increasingly devoid of the idiosyncracy, the complexity, the opportunity, the roiling excitement that make a city great.”
It’s a deranged statement about a metropolis where more streets, neighborhoods, parkland and waterfront areas are safer and more desirable to the public than ever before.
An unprecedented boom in rooftop and high-floor viewing sites drives the happy truth home.
If you don’t believe NewYork of 2018 represents a spectacular advance over the old, ascend to any of 40-plus hotel and office rooftop lounges and look around. Or, soon, to a 1,000-foot high outdoor observation deck at 30 Hudson Yards on Tenth Avenue that will be the highest in the western world.
Those aren’t empty, oligarch-owned apartments or endless bank branches and “drug stores” — they’re totems of a 21st century town that’s never been home to as many people (8.5 million at last count) with so many great things to wake up to every day.
The Leaf Bar & Lounge atop the Hyatt Hotel in downtown Flushing takes in all of the dynamic, Asian-inflected neighborhood’s new developments. Roof lounges at the Bowery 50 Hotel in Manhattan and the Wythe and William Vale hotels in Williamsburg display everything from the once-scary, now thriving Lower East Side to the previously moribund Brooklyn Navy Yard, today home to everything from film studios to rooftop horticulture.
Our view venues were once regarded as mainly for tourists. Today’s are more for locals.
At a recent visit to Bar SixtyFive, the Rainbow Room’s new outdoor cafe, I heard a lot more Brooklyn accents than foreign. Many existing and under-construction Manhattan office towers, including skybound One Vanderbilt next to Grand Central Terminal, feature once-rare outdoor terraces for hard-working desk jockeys. Aetna is moving its headquarters from Connecticut to 91 Ninth Ave. partly for the new building’s alfresco decks on every floor. Ads for just about any new apartment building include pictures of happy residents lounging on open-air decks. Residents are crazy about them, especially those who only recently made New York their home. A friend who lives on Fulton Street recently watched several Chinese families on her building’s roof raise glasses to toast the World Trade Center a few blocks away.
For a world-capital city, New York was long embarrassingly low on open-to-thepublic views. We had the Empire State Building’s and 30 Rockefeller Plaza’s observation decks, but the loss of Windows on the World, and the closings of several Midtown restaurants, left us with precious few high perches from which to enjoy the skyline, the harbor and the boroughs beyond.
Today’s new towers proclaim New York’s extreme turnaround from the rotten-apple days. New data by NYPD CompStat showed a decline in homicides from last year’s 167 to 161 through July 22 in 2018. The 4.4 million New York City residents with jobs last year was the all-time high. Our 4.5 percent unemployment rate is the lowest since 1976. Nearly 63 million visitors came here last year, up 2.3 million over 2016. (Presumably they were drawn by more than pharmacies and ATMs.)
Nowhere is all this more gloriously on display than from high-up vantage points. They reflect a city rightly in awe of itself, no matter how much sniping the idea draws in some capitalism-hating precincts. They celebrate a mostly marvelous urban transformation that residents, workers and visitors thrill to see with their own eyes. scuozzo@nypost.com