304 E 20 Street is a modest apartment building in New York’s Gramercy Park neighborhood, distinctive for heavy flat arches above the windows and for the pedimented dormers at the 8th floor.
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.)