New York City’s tallest residential building tops out at 1,550 feet

Good morning, and welcome to New York Minute, a new roundup of the New York City news you need to know about today. Send stories you think should be included to tips@curbed.com.

“The building will have this disappearing quality.”

Today, Extell’s Central Park Tower will celebrate its official topping out at 1,550 feet, making it the tallest residential building in New York City. (More on that—including what are sure to be vertigo-inducing views—from us later.)

In advance of that record-setting event, New York’s Justin Davidson spoke with Adrian Smith and Gordon Gill, partners in the architecture firm that designed the supertall, to get their thoughts on building New York City’s next big skyscraper. The building, which is rising along 57th Street close to Eighth Avenue, is a somewhat complicated arrangement of parts—“a seven-floor Nordstrom at the base, a wing to the west, a cantilevered section to the east, and the tower,” as Davidson describes it—and Smith and Gill describe the difficulties of getting it right, and making it work with the city’s historic skyline.

And here’s a quote that’s sure to give some New Yorkers a heart attack:

J.D.: So if the zoning and the neighbors allowed it, could you have gone even taller right here?

A.S.: Oh yeah. Jeddah Tower is twice the height of this one. You could drop that in here, for sure.

And hey, who knows what the future could bring?

The city’s BQE revamp plans will get another review

And another one: The New York City Council announced that it’s hired engineering firm Arup to “provide independent, outside expertise” on the city’s plans to reconstruct the decrepit Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.

Or, at least, they’ll review it when plans materialize: The Department of Transportation first unveiled two separate plans to revamp the ailing roadway—both of which proved extremely unpopular—a year ago, and while several alternative proposals have materialized since then, nothing concrete has been put forth. An expert panel convened by the mayor and DOT last posted an update to the project’s website in June.

Still, the Council says Arup’s input is crucial because, as councilmember Stephen Levin puts it, “it is vital that we thoroughly examine all options on the table and consider new alternatives as needed.” (At least half a dozen of those alternatives are now, apparently, on the table, at last count.)

And in other news…

• Curbed contributor Karrie Jacobs writes about new buildings that are “rebalancing the relationship between architecture and nature” for the New York Times, including NYC projects like Studio Gang’s Solar Carve and Dock 72 at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
• Gov. Andrew Cuomo joined the Billion Oyster Project this weekend to release hundreds of bivalves into the city’s waterways, as part of a larger restoration effort.
• Fans are leaving tributes to Cars frontman Ric Ocasek, who died on Sunday at the age of 75, outside of his Gramercy townhouse (which is currently on the market for just under $14 million).
• Preservationists hope to save a building on East 33rd Street that, allegedly, was home to the world’s first electric elevator. It would be torn down and replaced by a 26-story mixed-use building.
• A member of the de Blasio administration’s commission tasked with reviewing potentially objectionable monuments suggested replacing statues of men—such as ones on Central Park’s Literary Walk—with ones of women. The park currently has no statues that honor real-life historical women.
• And finally, New York has a peek inside the revamped Apple Store on Fifth Avenue—but its new, colorful cube is already here, and it’s … well, we’ll let you be the judge: