Originally published at: Life in NYC's luxury residential skyscraper not so deluxe | Boing Boing
…
8 Likes
Ms. Abramovich and her husband, Mikhail, retired business owners who worked in the oil and gas business, bought a high-floor, 3,500-square-foot apartment at the tower for nearly $17 million in 2016, to have a secondary home near their adult children.
NYT: “don’t say ‘oligarch family’ … don’t say ‘oligarch family’”.
35 Likes
My heart bleeds cold borscht for these folks.
28 Likes
But folks, the view, the view, THE VIEW!
19 Likes
All the New York smog your eyes can take in!
10 Likes
I’m having a hard time finding a reason to much care about rich people buying apartments they didn’t vet first because it gives them some sort of status. Meanwhile, my gutters are in need of serious repair, the electrical lines in this old house are slated for total rebuild (and no power for an entire day), and I’m still suffering an aching back from shoveling the wet snow of the last couple of days from our driveway.
Life is tough all over. Wah.
34 Likes
But I’m sure you had a nice brunch after all that. 
9 Likes
Yeah, what the hell? When they report on someone who owns a flower shop they don’t say “business owner who worked in the floral business.” That was some good verbal contortion right there.
And, though I hate reading about poorly built buildings, reading about these super pricey ones always makes me feel a little bit better about the level of quality I am able to find for my program. Since we work for low income, sometimes it can feel like the contractors aren’t bringing their a game out of some kind of prejudice. But nope! People just do crappy work at every price point.
21 Likes
Ah yes - ‘worked in the oil and gas business’…
10 Likes
In case anyone starts feeling bad for them and their leaky pipes, this is their view from the bathtub!
15 Likes
The pollution they see out of the building’s windows is nothing compared to the visual pollution imposed on anyone in Central Park looking south. It really is a big “middle finger” to non-wealthy New Yorkers.
It’s one of the many embarrassing style rules for NYT lifestyle pieces, which this basically is. Gotta make the greedpigs in the story more “relatable”. I’m sure there’s also at least one “CPA who works in a bank” and at least one “real estate agent” who also lives in this misconceived and over-priced eyesore.
17 Likes
It’s the address: 432. It resonates at 432 Hz and is cursed. The one eight doors up is fine.
18 Likes
I live in Brooklyn. There are a lot of people in New York who don’t consider living outside Manhattan to be “living in NYC” and who aspire to someday live in a luxury high rise (or in a nicer one than they’re living in now).
Meanwhile I remember watching the first wave of shittily constructed condos in Williamsburg crumble (this one in particular whose facade literally rusted and fell apart) and think that none of these new buildings in Manhattan were built any better.
Point is I don’t think any of these buildings were meant to last more than 15 years. Buy then make someone else’s problem. Covid exodus is making these bills come due sooner than expected.
11 Likes
I don’t think that they mean “Mom & Pop gas station” here. 
15 Likes
Boo hoo
5 Likes
In general I don’t like it when people get ripped off, and for the most part these people did…
But the one particular person that complained about how bad it was starting from before signing the closing papers has significantly less sympathy. So it was bad and you decided to spend millions on it after that? The closing is your last chance to say “this ain’t what I thought I was buying” and then not buy it without needing to sue anyone. If you don’t like the way a property is at closing do not close!
7 Likes
These buildings are almost always engineering stunts, in the same way that Falling Water was. They use new building techniques that haven’t been perfected (or are implemented imperfectly). They do these things for exterior wow-factor, but under ideal conditions, they would have no bearing on the occupants’ quality of life.
So now there’s a 1000 ft defective building in the heart of Manhattan. Who will repair it? Who will demolish it? This seems like the sort of thing where taxpayers will have to pay to pick the thing apart with heavy-lift helicopters, because you can’t implode something this tall and narrow.
6 Likes
I don’t know about NY but in CA a very large percentage of the cost of a building is the actual building permits. More so then the land, or actual materials.
Assuming NY is the same I would hope some portion of the permit cost is intended to be a tear down fee. Of corse knowing how governments spend what they have now not save for later it probably bought tear gas and rubber bullets already.
6 Likes
Hopefully not. I know some building science forensic experts who get called in to be expert witnesses at things like this. Hopefully the developer will bring one or more in to figure out where things went wrong. It’s quite involved, and interesting, looking at each step and figuring out if the work was specced out wrong, or if, had the specs been followed the thing would’ve worked as intended.
Hearing their stories combines my loves of tv crime procedurals, building science, and ultimate justice (most of the time). 
10 Likes
