Steinway Tower: The Pencil Behind the Piano Hall

Walk along West 57th Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues and look up on the south side of the street. A limestone building of the 1920s, with a colonnaded tower and a steep pyramid roof, stands in front of something that should not fit behind it: a tower so narrow it reads less like a building than a ribbon, striped in terra cotta and bronze, rising far above everything around it.

The front building is Steinway Hall. The tower is 111 West 57th Street, often called Steinway Tower. The two are one story about this street: a piano maker's showroom that stayed, and the sky above it that went up for sale.

The piano hall

Steinway Hall, at 109 to 113 West 57th Street, was built in 1924 and 1925 to designs by Warren and Wetmore, the architects of Grand Central Terminal. The city's Landmarks Preservation Commission, which made it a landmark on the thirteenth of November, 2001, describes a sixteen-storey building with an Indiana limestone front and a set-back colonnaded tower crowned by a steep pyramidal roof and a large lantern, with sculpture by Leo Lentelli and a frieze of medallion portraits of composer-pianists.

Steinway and Sons came to 57th Street because Carnegie Hall, opened in 1891 one avenue block to the west at Seventh Avenue, had made the street a music corridor. The company used the lower floors, including what the commission calls the famed "basement" for artists' concert grand pianos. And the 1916 zoning law had a hand here too: the commission records that Steinway's first plan, on lots on 58th Street, was blocked because the law made that block residential.

The tower

The developer, JDS, gives the tower's height as 1,428 feet and its width-to-height ratio as 1 to 24, and calls it the tallest, most slender skyscraper in the world. That is the developer's claim, and it is widely repeated. The architects were SHoP. The developer lists the facade as terra cotta, glass and bronze, with terra cotta made in 26 custom shapes and 6 colour variations. The terra cotta wraps the narrow east and west faces, and the south side steps back in a series of fine, feathered setbacks as it rises. JDS lists 46 residences in the tower and 14 more inside Steinway Hall, which the tower rises out of.

How does a tower this tall end up on a lot this narrow? Through floor area bought from neighbours. Since the 1961 zoning code, the main control on a building's size has been its floor area ratio: how many times the lot area it may contain. Unused floor area, often called air rights, can move to a neighbouring lot through a zoning lot merger, and a landmark can transfer its unused rights by special permit. Gather enough of it and a thin lot can carry a very tall building.

The row around it

Steinway Tower is one of several very tall, very thin residential towers at the south end of Central Park that people call Billionaires' Row.

• Central Park Tower, at 217 West 57th Street, is 1,550 feet tall. Guinness World Records lists it as the tallest cantilevered building: from about 290 feet up, the tower juts 28 feet east, over the Art Students League's nineteenth-century building next door. Guinness says that was made possible by the developer's purchase of air rights from the League.
• 220 Central Park South, by Robert A.M. Stern Architects, is a limestone-clad tower of about 950 feet facing the park. Trade press reported that its developer, Vornado, paid Extell $194 million in 2013 for a 58th Street parcel and its air rights.
• One57, at 157 West 57th Street, by Christian de Portzamparc, was completed in 2014 at about 1,004 feet.

Each tower solves the same equation differently: a small footprint, floor area gathered from elsewhere, and a shape stretched upward.

What to look for

Stand on the north side of West 57th Street, opposite Steinway Hall, and look up. Start at the limestone front and its pyramid-roofed tower: that is the 1925 landmark. Then let your eye travel up the tower behind it. Watch how the terra cotta stripes on the narrow sides run unbroken up the full height, and how the south face steps back in fine increments, each a little narrower than the last.

Then look west along the street. A few doors along rise the curved blue glass bands of One57. At the corner of Seventh Avenue stands Carnegie Hall, and beyond it the dark glass of Central Park Tower jogs out high up, over the low Art Students League. A street built for music now holds some of the tallest homes in the world, standing on sky bought from the low buildings beside them.

The ground floor of 111 West 57th has been the subject of recent landmark hearings, so expect some work at street level.

57th Street is the last stop of the Midtown walk: twelve stops and a little under four kilometres from the Empire State Building, reading the rules behind the skyline. The same towers are visible from the Pond near the start of the Central Park walk. For how the legal side works, read air rights and the pencil tower.