Page 12 of King’s Ransom

‘What? Uh, no, can’t say that I have,’ he replied distractedly, throwing a look to his co-pilot. ‘This’ll be a quick flight, maybe twelve minutes, so I can’t see that being necessary.’

Then we took off and sped over the glittering expanse of the Hudson toward the Manhattan skyline.

(A quick word about New York City.

I’d been there once before, following a cheating husband who had a second family there, but I hadn’t stayed for long.

Some people love New York City, others hate it.

It’s definitely a buzzing place and there’s always something to do or see—Broadway shows, Times Square, the Naked Cowboy, rats, uncollected garbage—but the main reason for people’s polarised views is probably because New York City houses a lot of people in a relatively small space.

The island of Manhattan has a population of 1.6 million while the other four boroughs—the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island—add another 6.8 million, giving the greater New York metro area a population of an astonishing 8.4 million people.

For local New Yorkers, this makes everyday life a Darwinian death struggle to get where they’re going through all the crowds of other headstrong New Yorkers trying to get where they’re going. They yell at each other often.

For tourists, this makes local New Yorkers look like obnoxi­ous assholes.

For me, it just makes New York City a really fascinating social experiment: can an oversized group of Type A personalities live in close proximity to each other and not tear each other apart?)

The towers of midtown Manhattan whooshed by beneath us—a bit too close for my liking—as the chopper zoomed toward the long open rectangle in the middle of the city that was Central Park.

Winter had taken away the park’s usual green glow.

Today, it was brown and white: leafless trees and dormant grass, all covered in a dusting of snow.

Urban canyons dropped away below us.

Cabs, buses and pedestrians looked tiny from this high up.

Then suddenly our destination rose before us.

A super-high, and super-slender, shining gold tower.

(A single NYPD helicopter hovered near its roof, but there were no news choppers. New York City has strict airspace controls.)

Officially called ‘59West’, the skyscraper we were approaching was an astonishing 98 storeys tall and one of a handful of recently built ‘pencil towers’ or ‘supertalls’ that had sprouted near the southern end of Central Park and become known as Billionaires’ Row.

With residences spanning whole floors and views to every horizon, these super-skinny skyscrapers seemed to defy the laws of physics, but advances in steel and in wind-resistant weighting systems had made them possible.

Looking like chopsticks stabbing up into the sky, the supertalls of Billionaires’ Row had instantly redefined the New York skyline, soaring far above the two iconic buildings that for almost a century had dominated the city: the Empire State and Chrysler buildings.

(Early criticism, of course, had been fierce.

They were literal ivory towers that allowed the super-rich to live above the masses.

Critics were naturally thrilled when faults in the new towers came to light.

Like the garbage chute in 432 Park Avenue: when garbage bags dropped from the upper floors hit the bottom of the vertical shaft, they made booms so loud they sounded like explosions to residents on the lower floors.

Or when it was revealed that one of the towers swayed sickeningly in high winds.

Indeed, wind was the natural enemy of towers such as these. This tower, I saw, like 432 Park, had double-storey open-air ‘blow-through floors’ positioned every twenty-five storeys, so the wind could pass through the building’s body.)

Residences in the supertalls were some of the most expensive not only in New York but in all of America.

Michael Dell bought the top two floors in One57 for over $100 million. A Saudi retail magnate nabbed another in 432 Park for $88 million.

Kenneth Griffin’s purchase of four entire floors in 220 Central Park South for a whopping $238 million was the most expensive price paid for a home in the United States.