In September 2021, the condo board sued the tower’s developers, claiming they failed “to properly design and build the uilding for its remarkable height,” causing “horrible and obtrusive noise and vibrations” in the pricey homes.įor those with stronger sea legs, Steinway Tower holds 60 apartments-and a storied musical history. Though popular upon its opening, boasting celebrities like Jennifer Lopez as residents, the building has recently been in the news thanks to tenants who are fed up with its quirks. Skinny skyscrapers are becoming de rigueur in New York as architects emulate a style popular in many major Asian cities.Ī nearby tower, 432 Park Avenue, opened in 2015 with similar dimensions and its own swaying issues. Steinway isn’t the first back-and-forth building to go up in Manhattan. Photo by Evan Joseph / Courtesy of Optimist Consulting “The whole trick is to design the buildings so that the building occupants never feel the movement.”Īs wide as a bowling alley is long, the Steinway Tower is crowned by a 300-foot steel decoration. “ can’t not sway,” John Ochsendorf, a structural engineer at MIT who was not involved in the Steinway Towers construction, told Nala Rogers of Inside Sciencein January. (Though posibly unsettling, this movement doesn’t present a safety hazard.) As engineers Rowan Williams Davies and Irwin told the Times in 2015, a 1,000-foot-tall tower might move several inches on a typical windy day and up to two feet on a rare 100-mile-per-hour wind day. Though it’s constructed out of the world’s strongest concrete, per Architectural Digest’s Jessica Cherner, the building-like “all skyscrapers,” in the words of the New York Times’ Michelle Higgins- sways to some degree in the wind. Standing at 1,428 feet, Steinway Tower is now one of the tallest buildings in the Western Hemisphere, topped only by One World Trade Center (1,776 feet), Central Park Tower (1,550 feet), and Willis (formerly Sears) Tower (1,450 feet).ĭespite standing over a quarter-mile tall, the building is just 60 feet wide-the same measurement as the length of a standard bowling alley, according to the Guardian. As CNN’s Lydia Armstrong writes, the 84-story “ Billionaire’s Row” building overlooks Central Park and has already made a “powerful” architectural statement. The world’s skinniest skyscraper has opened in New York City-and it’s so slender that the Guardianhas dubbed it “the coffee stirrer.” With a height-to-width ratio of 24:1, Steinway Tower, at 111 West 57th Street, has swayed its way onto the Manhattan skyline.

City skyscraper