73 books like The Empire State Building

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,… show more.

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… show more.

Climate fiction, or “cli-fi” as it is now known, lets readers imagine the world about which scientists are warning, a world where climate-fueled extremes upend humanity’s everyday existence. This book tells the story of a Midwestern math whiz who studies “worst-case scenarios” for a living. When one of those scenarios collides with his own life, action, adventure, and love follow.

Let me start by saying I adore every book by bestselling author Jennifer Belle, from her debut, Going Down, to her latest, The Seven-Year Bitch. Belle is witty, wonderful, and truly New York, New York. Here I will discuss High Maintenance, her top-of-the-charts, five-star love story between a woman—and an apartment. Protagonist Liv Kellerman is engrossing. Upon leaving her husband and a fabulous penthouse, Liv relocates to a hovel in Greenwich Village that is certainly from the “beat” generation. In her efforts to be top floor again, she becomes a realtor in the cutthroat Manhattan market. You won’t want to put this one down.

I am definitely recommending some very big books here! 

This one is easily recognizable because of the size of its spine, but it’s also incredibly interesting – an economic, social, and political history of New York City from its founding to consolidation, I think the best thing about this book is all the subjects it covers which I knew nothing about. 

New York City during the American Revolution comes to mind. So does the early history of New York’s apartment buildings. There’s a reason this book won a Pulitzer Prize. 

I like the sequel too (called Greater Gotham, only by Wallace), but prefer this book, I think, because I know the post-1898 history better while much of this book was novel to me.

This book is so light-as-air that I’ve read it several times and forgotten it entirely in between readings, so it’s always new again. Two 21-year-old friends from Iowa travel to New York City for a summer working at Tiffany’s in 1945, just as World War II is ending. It’s a summer of jewelry, dating, Broadway shows, riding on open-top buses, and a plane that crashes into the Empire State Building.

It’s the perfect beach read; you can probably polish it off in one sun-drenched afternoon.

Bizarre, misshapen, and sweet, this is the Roald Dahl book I find most alluring. A much-beloved tale, the plot sounds phantasmagoric in distillation: a house-sized peach sprouts overnight from a tree outside the shack where young James is essentially kept imprisoned by two cruel aunts; the boy tunnels into the fruit’s pit, befriends the band of enormous talking insects within, and the whole gang embarks on an adventure where the peach bobs out to sea, is carried through the air by hundreds of seagulls, is attacked by creatures who live on clouds, and eventually comes to rest on the spire of the Empire State Building. Intrigue, humor, and rambunctious versifying abound—and the once-forlorn James is not only unvanquished but happy. Nice ending.

Impeccable artwork, precision storytelling, and singularly unique invention are all packed into this amazing book experience. The basic concept is brilliant and mind-bending, and actually maybe even a little bit mind-melting. On top of that is an additional treat of wonderful and whimsical glimpses into a magical undersea world, obviously painted with true passion for the subject matter.