There used to be one tower worth queueing for and now there are five. Which deck gives which view, why the Chrysler Building cannot be gone up at all, and the free vantage points that beat most of the paid ones.
Manhattan is the place the skyscraper was worked out, and the reasons are geological as much as commercial: hard bedrock to build on, water on both sides so no room to spread outwards, and the arrival of two inventions at once — the steel frame, which meant walls no longer had to carry the building, and the safe lift, which meant anyone would willingly go up twenty floors.
What follows covers the buildings worth looking at and, at the end, the question most visitors actually want answered: which tower to pay to go up, now that there are five of them competing.
The race
Most of the city's best-loved towers went up in an extraordinary burst around 1930, as three separate projects raced for the title of tallest in the world while the economy collapsed around them.
The Chrysler Building won first, by cheating slightly. Its architect had a 185-foot steel spire assembled inside the building's crown in secret, and then raised it into position in about an hour and a half — enough to beat the rival tower at 40 Wall Street, which had already announced itself as the winner. At 1,048 feet the Chrysler became the first structure built by anybody taller than the Eiffel Tower.
It held the record for about a year. The Empire State Building opened in May 1931 and took it comfortably, then kept it for roughly four decades.
The Empire State Building
Built in about thirteen months at the depth of the Depression, at a pace of several floors a week, on Fifth Avenue between 33rd and 34th Streets. Art Deco, limestone, and so thoroughly the shape people draw when they draw a skyscraper that it is easy to forget how strange it looked in 1931.
There are two observation levels: the 86th floor, which is open to the air and the main event, and the 102nd, which is enclosed, much smaller, and costs extra. A substantial museum was added in a renovation a few years ago, covering the construction and the building's place in the city, and it is genuinely good rather than a corridor of panels on the way to the lift.
Two stories about the building are told constantly and both are usually told wrong.
In July 1945 an aircraft flew into the north side in heavy fog, between the 78th and 80th floors, killing fourteen people. It was a B-25 Mitchell bomber — a twin-engined medium bomber — not a B-52, which did not exist until the 1950s. The fire was out within about forty minutes, which says something about how the building was made.
The other is the lift. The crash severed the cables of a lift carrying an operator named Betty Lou Oliver, and she fell some seventy-five floors to the basement. She survived, which is extraordinary and is the longest survived lift fall on record — but she was very badly injured, not unscathed, and what saved her was air compressing in the shaft and severed cable coiling beneath the car, rather than any safety brake working as designed.
The Chrysler Building, which cannot be gone up
This is the single most useful fact in this article, because the building appears on every list of things to see and sets up a disappointment.
There is no observation deck at the Chrysler Building and has not been one since 1945. The viewing floor closed, became a restaurant, and that closed too. Nothing above the ground floor is open to visitors, and in recent years even the lobby has sometimes been restricted.
What can be seen is worth seeing. The lobby — when it is open, in business hours — is dark African marble, onyx, chrome and amber, with a vast ceiling mural of aeroplanes and the building itself. It is one of the finest interiors in New York and takes five minutes.
And the exterior is best appreciated from a distance rather than the pavement beneath it. Standing a few blocks north on Lexington Avenue on a bright day shows the whole crown: seven tiers of steel arches with triangular windows, the eagle heads at the 61st floor, and the winged ornaments at the 31st, modelled on Chrysler bonnet caps. From directly below, the thing that makes it famous is invisible.
One correction while here: the Chrysler company left the building in the 1950s and has since passed through several owners — the German merger that older accounts mention ended in 2007, and the name now belongs to a different multinational entirely.
Rockefeller Center
A complex of Art Deco towers and plazas built through the 1930s between 48th and 51st Streets, and the most successful piece of city-making in Manhattan — privately built, and yet the nearest thing midtown has to a public square.
The sunken plaza with the gilded Prometheus above it becomes an ice rink in winter and a café in summer. Atlas with his armillary sphere stands on Fifth Avenue opposite St Patrick's. The Channel Gardens run between two buildings called La Maison Française and the British Empire Building, which is where the name comes from — the planted strip between them stands in for the English Channel. Radio City Music Hall is on the Sixth Avenue side, still home to the Rockettes, and runs tours. The famous Christmas tree, considerably larger than older accounts suggest, is put up in the plaza each year.
The main tower, 30 Rockefeller Plaza, holds the Top of the Rock observation deck across three levels, which reopened in 2005 after being shut for nearly twenty years. The building itself has been renamed twice since most guidance was written: it was the RCA Building, then the GE Building, and is now the Comcast Building. Accounts describing RCA as a going concern are some decades behind — the company ceased to exist in 1986.
Also worth correcting, since people still try to book it: the Rainbow Room on the 65th floor is no longer a restaurant that can simply be reserved. It closed, reopened as a private events space, and offers only very limited public dining.
The newer towers
One World Trade Center, 2014, is the tallest in the western hemisphere at 1,776 feet, with an enclosed observatory near the top.
Hudson Yards, on the far west side, is a district of towers built over a railway yard, and holds the Edge deck.
One Vanderbilt, 2021, stands immediately beside Grand Central and holds Summit.
And along 57th Street is the phenomenon nobody writing twenty years ago could have predicted: Billionaires' Row, a line of extremely tall, extremely thin residential towers, some of them barely wider than a terraced house and over a thousand feet high. They are an engineering curiosity and a political argument — many of the flats are investments rather than homes, and the towers throw long shadows across Central Park. Nothing in them is open to the public, but they have changed the skyline more than anything since the 1930s.
Which deck to pay for
There are now five, they are all expensive, and for most trips one is enough. The differences are real:
Top of the Rock is the photographer's answer. It is the only deck with a clear view of both the Empire State Building and Central Park, and the top level has no glass in the way at all. If the aim is the picture everyone recognises — the Empire State in the middle distance with the park stretching north — this is the one, and no other deck can produce it.
The Empire State Building is the one to choose for the building itself rather than the view. Open air at the 86th floor, by far the best exhibits, and the historical weight of the place. Its limitation is obvious once stated: from the top of the Empire State Building, the Empire State Building is not in the view.
Edge at Hudson Yards is the highest outdoor deck in the hemisphere, juts out from the side of the tower, and has angled glass walls and a glass floor panel to stand on. Good for vertigo and for the Hudson; furthest from everything else.
Summit One Vanderbilt is the least conventional — mirrored rooms, art installations, glass-floored ledges projecting from the building, and a glass lift that runs up the outside. More an experience than a viewpoint, and reactions divide sharply. It is the easiest to reach, being directly above Grand Central.
One World Observatory is fully enclosed, with no open air at all, and is the only one in Lower Manhattan — so it is the one for the harbour, the Statue of Liberty and the bridges rather than for midtown.
Practical points that apply to all of them: book a timed slot in advance, go about an hour before sunset if the aim is to see the city in daylight and then lit up, and check the forecast, because haze and low cloud ruin the whole thing and nobody refunds a view. Queues at all five are longest in the middle of the day.
The views that cost nothing
Worth saying plainly: the best view of the New York skyline is not from inside it.
The Staten Island Ferry is free, runs day and night, and gives the whole of Lower Manhattan rising out of the water. The Brooklyn Bridge walkway, taken from the Brooklyn side towards Manhattan, is the classic approach. The Brooklyn Heights Promenade and the waterfront parks at Dumbo face the skyline directly across the river and cost nothing at all.
And back at ground level, the plaza at Rockefeller Center, the Chrysler lobby, the lobby of the Empire State Building and the whole of the Grand Central concourse are all free to walk into.
One for the architecture-minded
Among the midtown office blocks on Sixth Avenue at 52nd Street is a dark granite tower designed by Eero Saarinen — his only skyscraper, finished in 1965, and the first tall building anywhere framed in reinforced concrete rather than steel. Its vertical piers run unbroken from pavement to roofline, which is why it looks heavier and more severe than its glass-box neighbours. It was built for CBS and known as Black Rock, though the broadcaster sold it and moved out some years ago. Not an attraction, and a satisfying thing to recognise while walking past.
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