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Man, the more I read about this building the wilder it gets. (all from wikipedia)
432 Park Avenue has 85 stories above ground: a mezzanine and 84 numbered stories.
The floor numbering system includes mechanical levels near the building’s base, so the top story is numbered as floor 96
11 floors underground?!
The finalized plans called for 147 apartments in total: 122 luxury condominium units of one to six bedrooms between floors 34 and 96, and 25 studio units on floors 28 and 29
1/6th of all apartments are on two floors, perfect for morlocks.
Also if there’s only 147 apartments, I imagine it’s pretty easy to evacuate without even seeing another human. There’s a lot to be said for vertical development in order to increase density and efficiency, but this certainly ain’t it.
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Towering Inferno?
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Yup. It seemed an appropriate tale of hubris, vanity and corner-cutting to reference here. 
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Never sat down and actually watched that one, though I do remember my mom being engrossed by it when it came on cable tv, back when I was a kid.
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Or The Shandor Building from Ghost Busters?
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It might not be great, but it is big 
Like Earthquake and Airport.
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I have somehow managed to avoid seeing pretty much all disaster movies - circa the 1970’s, including the Poseidon Adventure.
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Am I the only one thinking shodden-freude?
Those 11 mechanical floors are probably above ground. That way, the first living space is 12 or so floors up. This is a common pattern in Manhattan. Sometimes the lower floors are commercial or business as well as mechanical. There’s a bigger premium for high level residential (or hotel space) than for income producing properties.
Those 1/6th of the total smaller apartments on those two floors are probably for servants. Housing is sometimes part of the compensation package for drivers, butlers and personal assistants, but it’s often about having someone nearby in an otherwise too expensive area. They are more for the eloi than the morlocks.
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Hmmm… I’m not seeing how a building with 84 above-ground stories could have 96 stories without going below-ground, but maybe I’m connecting the wrong dots. The other interesting thing was that every 12 floors there are two floors that are a double-height mechanical space that is open air (!!!) that serves the 6 residential floors above and below.
I’d never considered support staff being in the studios, that’s very depressing but makes a lot of sense. Hard to have a driver available at all hours if they have to take the subway in from East NY.
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my mom had a high school friend who had a part in it so we all sat around waiting for her fiery death scene, which was epic.
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That’s a very tall tower, so here is an equivalently-small tardigrade playing a very sad tune on a violin to express my emotions.
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i live across the river from this building on the queens side, and whenever it is overcast, the top half of that building disappears. so they are paying all that money for a view of the inside of a cloud. the rich really do live differently.
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That’s a Rafael Viñoly design. His ideas are pretty out there.
Looks like Lend Lease built it. They’re a legitimate general contractor.
I blame it on the Rafael Viñoly design.
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Smoke, on the water
Fyre (Fest) in the sky
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Technically those are two stairs, but they wrap around each other like DNA as they go down. Which I thought were banned in new construction since with that many concrete joints and penetrations for stand pipes mean that the chance of smoke infiltration from one stairway to the other are very high. Perhaps NYC has not updated the laws to conform to the latest edition of the life safety code.
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I thought that the drivers had to sleep in the limos on the parking level?
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If no one lives there, does it really matter that it’s a shitty building? It’s just an especially exotic unit of currency.
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So with all the plumbing problems, they’re drip-tocurrency? I’ll be here all week, don’t forget to tip the waiters.
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