111 West 57th Street

FACTSFact sheet

01Billionaires' street

West 57th Street cuts across Manhattan, in New York, in the United States, two blocks from Central Park. In the 2010s, this stretch became the address of a new species of skyscraper: narrow residential towers that rose high enough to look at the park over the buildings on the block below. The press called the street Billionaires' Row. One57, Central Park Tower and, a few blocks away, 432 Park Avenue are its neighbors.

In Manhattan, going up is a matter of land and of paperwork. Lots are small, and the height you can build depends on the lot area and on the development rights bought from the neighbors. In March 2013, Michael Stern's JDS Development Group and Kevin Maloney's Property Markets Group, with investor Arthur P. Becker, paid US$46 million for Steinway Hall, on the same street. According to Bloomberg, the investors were planning a tower of some 700 feet, about 213 meters, and were counting on Steinway's rights to go higher.

02A tower the width of a volleyball court

What was left for the tower was a strip: an empty lot facing 58th Street and part of the Steinway Hall lot itself. The tower's footprint measures about 59 feet, some 18 meters, in the narrowest direction, and between 75 and 78 feet in the other, depending on the source. That is roughly the length of a volleyball court. On that, SHoP Architects designed 84 floors and 435.3 meters of height, according to the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat.

The slenderness math is simple, and it is what makes the building famous: the tower is about 24 times taller than it is wide. Architectural Record gives the ratio as 1 to 24 and calls it the skinniest skyscraper in the world; New York's Skyscraper Museum gives 1 to 23. For comparison, 432 Park Avenue, the previous record holder in the same neighborhood, comes in at 1 to 15, according to Architectural Record.

Before the tower could be designed, it had to go through the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission. Steinway Hall's facade had been a landmark since 2001, and in September 2013 the commission also designated the ground-floor rotunda and lobby. The project went to a hearing in October 2013 and was only approved after being revised.

03Two walls and a pendulum

A tall building does not need much to stand up against its own weight. The enemy is the wind, which pushes sideways, and in such a thin tower the effect shows up less as a risk of falling and more as sway: the building oscillates, and up at the top people feel it. The engineering, by WSP, tackled this in three combined ways.

The first is two reinforced-concrete shear walls that run the full height of the east and west facades, the tower's narrow faces. They work as the building's spine and dictated the architecture: east and west became more closed, clad in terracotta, while north and south, facing the park and the city, became glass. The thickness of these walls appears as up to 30 inches, about 76 centimeters, in one source, and as 30 to 36 inches on the lower floors, thinning to 16 at the top, in another.

The second, according to The Builders Report, is a set of mechanical floors where bracing walls tie the two side walls to each other and to the core, so that they work together instead of each on its own. The third sits at the top, above the last occupied floor: a tuned mass damper, a large weight that moves opposite to the building's sway and dampens it. The developers give 800 'tons', a unit that in American sources usually means the short ton: about 725 metric tonnes.

The concrete reaches 14,000 psi, about 96.5 MPa, according to the developers. At the base, according to the publication The Builders Report, about 200 tie-downs anchored in Manhattan's bedrock keep the tower from being pulled out of the ground in the strongest winds.

04The project that stalled at the twentieth floor

Excavation began in 2014. In 2015, the project had US$725 million in financing: a US$400 million mortgage from the insurer AIG and a US$325 million mezzanine loan, more expensive and subordinated, from the asset manager Apollo. Among the partners was AmBase Corporation, which had put between US$56 million and US$70 million into the project, depending on the source.

Costs rose. According to the 2026 ruling of New York's highest court, an overrun of about US$57 million threw the loan off balance, and in February 2017 Apollo demanded US$56 million that nobody put in. In March, Apollo split the loan into two tranches, of US$300 million and US$25 million; on June 28 it assigned the smaller one to Spruce Capital, at face value; and on July 7 Spruce foreclosed on the collateral, taking the stake that had belonged to AmBase. AmBase's lawyer told the press that the budget had left out expensive items such as the cranes.

That July of 2017, according to the website 6sqft, the tower was stalled at 20 floors of concrete. The courts allowed the foreclosure in August, and the tower went on until it topped out, in 2019. AmBase spent the following years in court.

05Who raised the tower

There is no public record of how many people worked on the site, either at the peak or in total. The most precise picture of the workers comes from a criminal case. On May 16, 2018, the Manhattan District Attorney's office charged Parkside Construction, a concrete and masonry subcontractor working on this and seven other sites on the island, with stealing more than US$1.7 million in wages from at least 520 workers between 2014 and 2017. Time was clocked by facial-recognition machines on site, and the printed timesheets were then altered to show fewer hours.

The same indictment accuses the company of hiding more than US$40 million in payroll from the state workers' compensation insurer. The 520 workers are the total for all eight sites, not just this one; and, as the prosecutors themselves stressed, charges are not a conviction.

No worker death was recorded in the sources consulted. The Department of Buildings' accident report logged four minor injuries at the address in April and May 2015, among them an electrician struck in the eyes by an electric arc. The accidents the city saw were others: in January 2020, a block of terracotta fell from the tower and pierced the roof of a taxi on 57th Street, with the passenger inside; and on October 29, 2020, in high winds, the crane at the top spun, a cable hanging from the boom struck the facade and glass and aluminum fell into the street. 57th Street was closed, the subway was rerouted and the city stopped the work. Nobody was hurt.

06The house of pianos

Steinway Hall was designed by the firm Warren & Wetmore and built in 1924 and 1925 for Steinway & Sons, which followed New York's musical life as it moved to 57th Street after Carnegie Hall opened, in 1891, according to the Landmarks Preservation Commission. It is a 16-story neoclassical building, with an Indiana limestone front and a tower with a pyramidal roof. On the ground floor, a domed rotunda served as the showroom.

In the 2013 sale, the piano maker was given up to 18 months to move out. The rotunda and the lobby were restored, and the upper floors of the old building became apartments in the same condominium as the tower. On February 9, 2026, the auction house Bonhams opened its American headquarters there, in 42,000 square feet, and reopened the rotunda to the public after a decade closed.

That same year, the fight over money moved to a higher level. On May 28, 2026, the Court of Appeals, New York State's highest court, ruled 4–3 that a lender with sole discretion to assign a loan is still bound by good faith, and sent back to the trial court AmBase's claim that Apollo assigned the tranche to Spruce in order to strip it of its investment. The tower, which spent years with more than half of its apartments unsold, reached April 2026 with 58 of 59 units sold, according to The Real Deal.

MYTHSWhat people say and what the record shows

• What people say

  It is the tallest building in New York.

  What the record shows

  In 2026, it was the third-tallest in the city and the fourth-tallest in North America, according to the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat. Its record is for slenderness, not height.

• What people say

  It has the heaviest damper in the world, bigger than Taipei 101's.

  What the record shows

  The comparison mixes units. The tower's 800 'tons', if they are American short tons, as is the usage in the US, come to about 725 metric tonnes; the Taipei 101 pendulum weighs 660 metric tonnes, and the one in Shanghai Tower, in China, about a thousand.

• What people say

  The east and west facades are blank walls, with no windows at all.

  What the record shows

  The concrete walls that hold up the tower sit on these facades, which is why they are more closed and clad in terracotta. But there are glazed strips between the piers; the continuous glass is on the north and south faces.

• What people say

  More than 500 of the tower's workers had their wages stolen.

  What the record shows

  The Manhattan District Attorney speaks of at least 520 workers cheated by the subcontractor Parkside, but that adds up eight different sites, of which this is one.

• What people say

  It uses the strongest concrete in the world.

  What the record shows

  The phrase comes from the developers' material. Concrete of up to 14,000 psi, about 96.5 MPa, is ultra-high-performance, but the world-record claim has no independent confirmation.

QUESTIONSFrequently asked questions

SOURCESSources

1. Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, The Skyscraper Center, "111 West 57th Street" — skyscrapercenter.com
2. The Skyscraper Museum, "Supertall!", "111 West 57th Street" — skyscraper.org
3. Sara Hart, "A Cliff Dweller's Guide to Tall Skinny Buildings", Architectural Record, 2021 — architecturalrecord.com
4. The Builders Report, "111 West 57th Street" — thebuildersreport.com
5. SHoP Architects, "111 West 57th" — shoparc.com
6. "SHoP Architects-designed NYC skyscraper tops out", Construction Specifier, 2019 — constructionspecifier.com
7. NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission, Steinway Hall, Designation List 331, LP-2100, 2001 — s-media.nyc.gov
8. NYC Department of Buildings, construction accident report, 12 months through September 2015 — nyc.gov
9. Manhattan District Attorney, press release on Parkside Construction, 16/05/2018 — nyc.gov
10. New York Court of Appeals, 111 W. 57th Inv. LLC v 111 W57 Mezz Inv. LLC, 2026 NY Slip Op 03376, 28/05/2026 — caselaw.findlaw.com
11. "A supertall order: New York's high court decision in Steinway Tower lawsuit…", amNY, 2026 — amny.com
12. "World's skinniest skyscraper at 111 West 57th Street stalled at 20 stories by soaring costs", 6sqft, 2017 — 6sqft.com
13. "Foreclosure moves ahead at Billionaires' Row supertall 111 West 57th Street", 6sqft, 2017 — 6sqft.com
14. "How 111 West 57th went from Billionaires' Row dud to darling", The Real Deal, 2026 — therealdeal.com
15. "Stop Work Order Issued After Spinning Crane Sends Large Slabs Of Metal Falling Onto Midtown Street", CBS New York, 2020 — cbsnews.com
16. "Debris falls from spinning crane atop 'skinniest' building in world", Fox 5 NY, 2020 — fox5ny.com
17. Bonhams, press release on its new American headquarters at Steinway Hall — bonhams.com
18. "NYC Tallest Condo Corridor Gets New Entrant With Steinway", Bloomberg, 2013 — millersamuel.com

Images

• Fig. 01 — The tower seen from Central Park in May 2023: Benoît Prieur · CC0
• Fig. 02 — In January 2020, still under construction, with the crane attached to its side, seen from Columbus Circle next to One57: Jim.henderson · CC BY-SA 4.0
• Fig. 03 — Billionaires' Row seen from the south in December 2020: Central Park Tower on the left and, on the right, 111 West 57th Street still with its crane: Itrytohelp32 · CC BY-SA 4.0
• Fig. 04 — The terracotta and bronze piers of the facade, seen from 57th Street in 2021: Kidfly182 · CC BY-SA 4.0
• Fig. 05 — Steinway Hall, from 1925, on 57th Street in May 2026, with the tower behind it: Ajay Suresh · CC BY 4.0
• Fig. 06 — The Steinway Hall rotunda in February 2026, reopened to the public: Epicgenius · CC BY-SA 4.0