A generation ago, the New York skyline was a global icon, shaped more or less like a suspension bridge stretched between the Empire State and the Twin Towers, making it possible to, say, pop out of some unfamiliar subway station, gaze up toward the clouds and orient oneself along the skyline’s north-south axis. Today, the skyline is vastly more complex, far-flung and difficult to picture, and it’s common to hear complaints that the city has lost its bearings.

Should New York regulate its skyline?

....

Cities like London and St. Petersburg in Russia have enacted rules over the years to protect what are sometimes called view cones, sheds or corridors. New York has just one legally designated view shed, and it’s only sort of protected. I’m talking about the panorama of Lower Manhattan across the East River, from the Brooklyn Heights Promenade. During the 1970s, residents of the Heights successfully lobbied the city to safeguard that vista. Authorities were starting to talk about redeveloping the Brooklyn waterfront at the foot of the Heights, raising fears about derelict warehouses giving way to high rises.

Instead, the waterfront became Brooklyn Bridge Park, one of the glories of 21st century New York.

The Heights’s “Special Scenic View District” did nothing, however, to regulate what could be built on the Manhattan side of the East River to screw up that panorama from the Promenade. So now New Yorkers suffer One Manhattan Square, a glassy, 81-story, Z-shaped condo complex, close-talking the Manhattan Bridge, completed in 2019, the most out-of-scale intrusion on the downtown skyline since the New York Telephone Company’s tower on Pearl Street, from 1975 — voted among the ugliest buildings in the world — started blighting views of the Brooklyn Bridge.

....