As recently as two years ago, only five towers in New York City topped 1,000 feet. Now, there are that many “supertall” towers in the works on 57th Street alone, and roughly two dozen either under construction or on the drawing boards across Manhattan and in Brooklyn.

The city has not seen such an epochal shift on the skyline since the postwar boom, and before that, the Jazz Age.

This upheaval, fueled by advances in engineering and an influx of foreign money, and enabled by lenient zoning codes, has left residents, politicians and developers themselves scrambling to adapt the city’s changing profile.

The 1,396-foot tower at 432 Park Avenue, between 56th and 57th Streets, is the city’s second tallest and is almost three years old, but ads for rival towers managed to omit it from their photos.
The 1,396-foot tower at 432 Park Avenue, between 56th and 57th Streets, is the city’s second tallest and is almost three years old, but ads for rival towers managed to omit it from their photos. - Flip through a high-end magazine right now and one will see page after page of ads for new luxury developments in New York, many of them for towers on Billionaires’ Row, the area between the southern edge of Central Park and 56th Street, that push above the clouds and the madness of the city. Those ads, however, tend to ignore the towering competition down the block. The views they proffer don’t show the nearby buildings already reaching skyward, or give any indication that there will soon be others. Whether the omissions are by accident or design depends on whom you ask. “It’s like the Who song,” said Jonathan Miller, president of the appraisal firm Miller Samuel. “You can see for miles and miles and miles. Until you look into your neighbor’s building.” At the launch party for 520 Park Avenue this fall, above the herringbone floors and next to the well-equipped kitchen inside the showroom, renderings of the future tower, at 60th Street, hung like works of art. One looked southeast, as if photographed by an angel (or more likely a drone) floating over the park. It captured the Bloomberg Tower, the future 520 Park Avenue itself, the Citigroup Center, the GM Building, even the Chrysler spire in the distance. © Ángel Franco/The New York Times

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“New York was asleep at the wheel the past 20, 30 years in terms of design and the skyline,” said David Williams, principal of Williams New York, a real estate branding company with two projects on the eastern edge of 57th Street. “Now, I can’t think of a city in the world that has seen so much being built on a single boulevard. From coast to coast, it’s New York chutzpah.”

Among many New Yorkers, the towers are anathema, casting shadows on Central Park and darkening the streets and sidewalks below.

The Municipal Art Society is among the numerous civic groups challenging the rise of the towers as a distortion of half-century-old zoning codes that did not anticipate the ability to build so high. By buying neighbors’ air rights and building up rather than out, developers have created what the society has called the Accidental Skyline.

“As the technology has improved, our civic processes haven’t,” Mary Rowe, the group’s executive vice president, said.

Whether creating subway overcrowding or shadows on public spaces, these high-rises could have unintended consequences on the cityscape, and not just in Midtown Manhattan. Beyond the two dozen buildings in the works, the art society has identified areas ranging from 125th Street to Second Avenue on the Upper East Side, the Flatiron district and Downtown Brooklyn that are ripe for development. The society wants City Hall to intervene.

The administration of Mayor Bill de Blasio, in its effort to encourage development for the sake of creating new affordable housing, has so far declined to take up the issue of updating this aspect of the zoning codes. Though numerous Manhattan City Council members want to restrict the sales of air rights that make these supertall buildings possible, the city planning commissioner, Carl Weisbrod, reaffirmed their value at a Council hearing last month.

“This often leads to a more interesting streetscape and pedestrian experience,” Mr. Weisbrod said, “as well as an incredibly dynamic, iconic skyline that is the envy of the world.”