160 E 22nd Street is a brash condominium tower cantilevered over a pair of holdout townhouses on Third Avenue. It’s an astounding sight: 16 stories of grey limestone and glass suspended 25 feet over the fragile-looking (and nearly vacant) mid-block buildings.
It looks odd, but the final structure is an improvement over three earlier plans, which had been ridiculed as “Fortress of Solitude,” “Green Monster,” and “The Thing That Ate Gramercy.”
Owners of the holdout buildings weren’t willing to sell their sites, but they did sell air rights. The moral of this real estate tale: If you can’t buy, cantilever.
(The Curbed NY blog has start-to-finish coverage. Also see The New York Times’ The Hangover: Cantilevered Buildings of New York.)
160 E 22nd Street Vital Statistics
- Location: 160 E 22nd Street at Third Avenue
- Year completed: 2014
- Architect: Perkins Eastman
- Floors: 21
- Style: Postmodern
160 E 22nd Street Recommended Reading
- The New York Times They Didn’t Use a Shoehorn (January 20, 2008)
- The New York Times The Hangover: Cantilevered Buildings of New York (January 10, 2014)
- Street Easy NY listing (includes floor plans)
- City Realty review
- Curbed NY blog
- 160 E 22nd Street website
- Emporis database