In the 2010s, the developers Harry Macklowe and Gary Barnett raced to build what would become the first of midtown Manhattan’s super-tall, super-skinny luxury high-rises such as now populate West 57th Street. Each sought to outdo the other in terms both of height and the buildings’ offered amenities. Soon many other elevator-packed buildings followed, transforming the very fabric of a once-boisterous neighborhood that was full of tourists and theatergoers but also local life. Writing in Books & the Arts’s June print section, Karrie Jacobs remarks, “The buildings are so tall that they’re hard to miss, but so skinny that they look more like a row of smokestacks. They possess a dystopian weirdness that suggests…they were designed more by software than by human architects—and that the software might have made a miscalculation or two.” Walking along West 57th Street, Jacobs gives us a tour, examining how these pencil-thin towers have altered not just the city’s skyline but its street life too. “What happens to a midtown Manhattan street when it’s remade for people who don’t live or work there,” Jacobs asks, “and who come and go intermittently via the massive black Suburbans and Escalades that are perpetually idling near the front doors?” Read “What’s the Deal With Manhattan’s Pencil-Thin High Rises?”