The best books on the real estate titans who built the New York City skyline

The Empire State Building is not only the world’s most iconic skyscraper but is also my personal favorite. No other building captures the spirit of New York in quite the same way. During the Roaring Twenties, it was built from a cocktail of profit and ego.

The developers engaged in a height competition against Walter Chrysler and his skyscraper. It is a better building because of the competition rather than despite it. Tauranac provides a fascinating account of how Al Smith, former governor of New York, and John Raskob, former General Motors executive, decided to enter the Manhattan real estate game in the hopes of making themselves the skyscraper kings of New York. In the process, they changed New York and world history.

If you stroll through Central Park, as I frequently do, you can’t help but notice the string of supertall, superslim towers lording over Central Park South. Many New Yorkers decry them as creating excessive shadows and driving gentrification. However, viewing them from the park, you can see how they naturally fit into the Manhattan skyline—the skyline that created the world’s greatest city.

Katherine Clarke’s book chronicles the developers who brought forth these ultraluxury towers. It dramatically highlights the game of 3D chess these New York titans must play to realize their skyscraper dreams. Some win, and some lose—but that’s the striver’s tale in Gotham.

From 2000 to 2001, I worked two blocks south of the Twin Towers. During my lunch breaks, I would grab take-out lunches and sit in the plaza of the World Trade Center, with the towers keeping me company. When completed, the Twin Towers generated immense controversy because they were “slum clearance” projects, and a government agency was erecting record-breaking buildings to compete with the private sector.

Gillespie’s book chronicles the creation of the Twin Towers and how the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, a port and transportation agency, suddenly found itself as a real estate titan. The book captures a moment in post-World War II New York that will likely never be replicated. It remains a key history in our post-9/11 world.

When I walk through the streets of Manhattan, I’m constantly awed by the variety and density of its buildings. I wonder how such a city could have ever been built. New cities today lack the soul and character. But when you look at why these buildings exist, you see that they are there for a more mundane purpose: as shelter. The Garment District, for example, was created to house massive sweatshops to clothe America. Gotham’s apartment towers enclose the beds on which residents sleep. 

Many of these structures were built by a group of family-run development companies. The founders of these enterprises invariably began as immigrants trying to hustle their way up the economic ladder. They started as teenagers working in the sweatshops or hawking newspapers and, bit by bit, erected their own real estate empires. Tom Schactman’s book tells how entrepreneurial spirit, along with New York’s rapid economic growth, gave rise to the great real estate dynasties that built the New York skyline.

I came of age in the 1980s. It was the time when I first discovered my love of New York. It was also a time when America was in the heady throws—partially fueled by cocaine—of an economic and real estate boom. More skyscrapers were erected in Gotham than in any other period, even more than during the Roaring Twenties. It was a time when every developer thought that if they bought a well-located lot, they could turn dirt into gold by building a skyscraper—a post-modernist one at that. 

Jerry Adler’s book follows the up and down fortunes of the young and ambitious New York developer Ian Bruce Eichner as he painstakingly assembled a large lot, raised financing, and erected a skyscraper on Broadway in Times Square. And then, just when he thought he had achieved his greatest glory, the real estate market tanked, and his crowning achievement became a ghost building, which he had to forfeit because he was bankrupt. High Rise is not only about how towers rise, but also how Titans fall.