A luxury skyscraper crumbles in New York

The skyscrapers of Manhattan, seen from Weehawken, New Jersey, in November.EDUARDO MUNOZ / Reuters

For decades, New York's vital signs chart has been the skyline of cranes, their steps suspended like storks, and the trail of glass and steel pinnacles they left behind.

This aerial choreography was especially visible in the last decade, when the Big Apple used its penultimate free spaces to build numerous residential skyscrapers;

luxurious mansions in the clouds for a select few.

Like the vertical burials in the novel

, by Luis Martín Santos, growing in height - as a stratigraphy at the same time social and financial - was, and is, the only possible option to thrive in Manhattan, an island sandwiched between two rivers .

But all that glitters is not luxury, and one of those exponents of vertical growth, the skyscraper located at 432 Park Avenue, a stone's throw from glamorous Fifth Avenue and glorious Central Park, its seams are beginning to break for five years. after its inauguration.

Recurrent failures in the elevators and breakdowns of the sanitation system, with millions of dollars spent to repair water leaks and floods, form the rosary of complaints that the unsatisfied neighbors of the building - mostly foreign investors - reel off as if they were the seven plagues of Egypt.

Not to mention the creaking of its walls, squeaky like the frame of a ship.

Common expenses increased 40% in 2019, and insurance, 300% in two years.

Jennifer Lopez owned but sold her apartment right away.

432 Park Avenue was, until recently, the highest building in Manhattan (426 meters), the metonymic district par excellence, as many identify it with the entire city when it is only the trunk of the Apple;

the most obscenely expensive place and also the most cruel, judging by the thousands of homeless who inhabit it.

But it is precisely the height, that almost unnatural bet to conquer space and anchor it to the ground, which explains the defects of the Park Avenue tower, according to

.

This is clear from the first damage assessment, which points out that some of the construction methods and materials used did not meet the due guarantees, nor were they approved by the latest security protocols for buildings 300 meters high.

Hence the fear of engineers and architects that the structural failures of 432 Park Avenue could be reproduced in other constructions of the same period and characteristics.

The sustained stretch that the Big Apple, as a gluttonous teenager, has been giving for more than a century has not been slowed by the pandemic.

The construction sector is one of those that has best withstood the crisis and the one that has pulled the US economy from collapsing altogether.

The feverish activity is evidenced by the scaffolding, the terrestrial reflection of the cranes, especially in Midtown, the area that concentrates the headquarters of businesses and companies.

That is why not even the health emergency has prevented the completion of the arch-exclusive Steinway Tower, on 57th Street, two south of Central Park, and whose works from time to time startle residents by falling materials from stratospheric heights: scares that often force the NYPD to cordon off several blocks around to avoid personal injury, and the neighbors to make a considerable detour to get home.

That between the Park Avenue tower and the Steinway there is a fierce competition in height is as obvious as that everything in New York is pure challenge, and while the former suffers from its bungling, the second, also for residential use, has taken away the record, becoming the highest in the western hemisphere, 30 meters above the cinematic Empire State Building.

Towering over the piano brand's former concert hall, the Steinway will be the world's slimmest tower of flats - 24 times taller than it is wide, 84 stories at 435 meters high - and will house the most expensive apartments New York: 66 million triplex.

The sale of two homes - there is only one per floor, given the

building's

in more than one hundred million dollars to its promoter, after virtual visits by investors.

The area where it stands,

(the row of billionaires), is the new mecca of residential luxury in the city.

But if you go far enough north of Manhattan and squint to see the horizon, you will only see a dance of impossible spiers, and solicitous cranes, fueling the bonfire of the city's vanities.