Big Deck Energy

THE SUN WAS SETTING on May 30, 2020, when French DJ David Guetta began live-streaming a set from Top of the Rock, the observation deck that crowns 30 Rockefeller Plaza in Midtown Manhattan. This was decks cubed, the deckiest of New York deck experiences: Guetta on decks on a deck. Five days earlier Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd after kneeling on his neck and back for nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds. With protests against police brutality sweeping across the country’s major cities, Guetta—the king of commercial dance music, the grand fromage of French touch—spied an opportunity to turn his set, nominally a fundraiser for global Covid relief efforts, into something bigger than a mere distraction for restless ravers bored at home after months of lockdown-mandated tedium. The opening five minutes were strong but unremarkable, a standard mix of snare rolls, heavy beat drops, R&B samples, and fat pipes of synthesized sound that allowed Guetta, his hair cropped into a lawyerly part and his slight frame hidden under what looked like an upmarket take on a wrestling jacket, to roll through some classic dance moves from his perch behind the decks: He threw out a hand heart; he raised the “bring it” fingers for the buildup to the first big drop; he jumped up and down in time to the beat. He did the hand chop, the double thumbs-up, the Christ the Redeemer, the index finger point to no one in particular. With the camera panning across the Empire State Building, Bank of America Tower, and the blue turds of Hudson Yards, Guetta implored the online audience displayed on large video screens before him to give generously: “We are in the most beautiful city in the world, with the most iconic views, and we need you to help! David Guetta dot com slash donate!”

Then, as the 2019 Guetta original “Make It to Heaven” faded into the opening bars of a swirling synth theme, the French maestro stepped forward, microphone in hand, and uttered the most memorable words of his career:

Guetta dropped the mic and the music swelled, Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech playing over the top of a chunky bassline from Swedish electro-duo Axwell & Ingrosso. Finally, Guetta had given the world the collaboration between the American civil rights movement and Scandinavian house music for which it had spent decades pining. The moment went almost instantly viral. Even though the fundraiser ended up being a bit of a disappointment—it raised only $500,000, well short of its $1 million target—Guetta still made a form of history that day. For years to come, whenever the silliness of pop-cultural activism is under discussion, the words “Shout-out to his family” will reverberate as a key reference point.

GUETTA’S MLK SET was notable for another reason: It was the rare event in New York where activity on an observation deck itself, rather than the panorama of Manhattan and its supporting territories, was the object of the public’s gaze. The Frenchman’s heroic synthesis of EDM and ACAB took place near the deck’s southern edge. On the day this summer that I visited Top of the Rock, the tourists were almost all bunched by the uptown barriers, their backs turned to the Empire State Building as they craned and tap-focused to get the perfect view (or, rather, the perfect shot) of the new supertalls crowding the airspace at the foot of Central Park. Like bell ringers riding their ropes, they raised their devices to snap the vista, then lowered them to evaluate picture quality, raised then lowered, raised then lowered, raised then lowered: the modern smartphone sacrament. The south-facing spot that Guetta graced, sadly, is not labeled at all; there’s no plaque memorializing the words “Shout-out to his family,” no fun interactive video display to help visitors pretend they’re the pope of Eurotrash himself, tucked behind the controls and ready to end racism by sampling MLK at 125 beats per minute.

In some ways this is a surprise, since every observation deck in Manhattan today needs its tricks and baubles, its art installations and engineered epiphanies, to drag the public into the elevator. The view from Top of the Rock, like the vistas on offer at most of the city’s other tower-top observatories, stretches from Jersey to Long Island, up the Hudson and down to the Atlantic, with the entire length of Manhattan’s arthritic finger, bent at the joint around Thirty-Fourth Street, visible from all points of the deck’s two open-air upper levels. But the view itself is not enough; to stand at an altitude of 850 feet and breathe in the trashless air over Manhattan will not keep the modern deckgoer content. No, the deckgoer needs more: distractions, photo ops, “experiences.” At Top of the Rock the work of experience-manufacturing falls to The Beam, a new attraction that allows visitors to re-create “Lunch Atop a Skyscraper,” the “iconic” 1932 publicity shot of ironworkers enjoying their midday meal while perched on a steel girder high above the city’s formicine grid. Signs throughout the deck’s three levels direct visitors toward “THE BEAM EXPERIENCE,” which is so thrillingly rich it includes not one beam but two: a moving beam on the deck’s upper level and a stationary beam below it. The former rises twelve feet, rotates, then returns its strapped-in riders to the ground, where they can retrieve the photos of them lunching atop a skyscraper, 2024 style (no actual eating involved); the latter does nothing. The day I visited I saw an elderly couple awkwardly following the directions of the in-house photographer as they posed for happy snaps on the static beam. “Give each other a hug—aaand three, two, one. Do a peace sign or a thumbs-up—aaand three, two, one. Do you want to push each other?” And before the couple could reply: “Aaand three, two, one.”

There’s something almost endearingly shitty about The Beam, as there is about Top of the Rock generally, the unobstructed views on offer from its upper deck notwithstanding. The elevator to the summit is a lacquered-wood deco pillbox lit up with a ceiling animation of Rockefeller Center that has all the stars-and-lasers dynamism of a pretrailer movie theater chain promo; the gift shop is a miserable vestibule filled with NYPD merch. The Weather Room, the observatory’s main café, smells like hospital. In any other era this battered, three-floor warren of out-of-order escalators and carpet runners to nowhere would have a threadbare charm, but in today’s New York, Top of the Rock seems like a ruin-in-waiting. Across Manhattan the competition for observing eyeballs is intensifying, and the new decks in town boast artillery that a twelve-foot rotating beam simply can’t match.

NO CITY VENERATES its rooftops quite as deeply as New York does. The zinc slopes and huddled chimneys of Paris’s nineteenth-century toiture are built for free-running rather than lounging; Athenians and Istanbulites enjoy their vistas from hilltops rather than rooftops; Hong Kong has the views but not the roofs, with the crystal tapestry of its skyline most often enjoyed from behind a window. The rooftop scene in Bangkok is booming but lacks variety; any time you’re trying to gain elevation over Benjakitti Park you invariably end up in some doof-doof expat hellhole called Sky Bar or Mojjo or Vertigo & Moon. New York, by contrast, has accessible roofs in abundance, and the density of the city is at just the right level to make the perspectives on offer from its many canopies and belvederes and terraces endlessly varied and interesting, whether they are enjoyed within the thicket of Manhattan itself or from the outer boroughs, from which the great island’s towers punctuate the horizon with a thousand exclamation marks.

The city of working rooftops is now, increasingly, a city of decks as well. In recent years old stalwarts of the New York observatory scene like Top of the Rock and the Empire State Building—among the first skyscrapers in history to invite the paying public to enjoy the views on offer at their peaks—have been joined by fresh decks at One World Trade, Hudson Yards, and One Vanderbilt, opposite Grand Central. On the one hand, this oversupply of decks seems dangerously inflationary: How many “experiential” observation platforms can a single city handle? The cost of accessing these platforms only heightens the sense that a bubble is forming in the Manhattan observatory market: I spent $93.63 to ascend the Empire State Building, $46.82 to get to the Top of the Rock, $35.49 reaching the peak of One World Trade Center, $50.09 for my “Summit Experience” at One Vanderbilt, and $65.32 to “step into the sky” at Edge, which crowns the supertall at 30 Hudson Yards. Eventually, surely, there will be too many sky verandas chasing too few tourist dollars. On the other hand, observation is good business, for now at least: In a soft commercial real estate market, viewing galleries may be the one viable reason developers have left to justify going high. Whereas New York’s everyday rooftops serve the buildings below, observation decks seem increasingly designed to validate their supporting structures—or at the very least market them to a development-weary public.

At almost every tower-top aerie in New York nowadays, before they even make it to the elevators, visitors must battle through an exhausting sequence of bombastic rooms promoting the work of the relevant property’s developer. “This building broke boundaries, redefining what is possible,” thunders a film shown on a floor-to-ceiling screen in one of the unavoidable pre-elevation antechambers at Summit One Vanderbilt; at other points of the procession the design of the tower, a generic bundle of glass shards that tapers to a predictable spire, is described as “iconic.” The developer propaganda at Edge is even more overt. “Hudson Yards is a testing ground for ideas to help cities improve sustainability,” one especially grating patch of wall text claims. Meanwhile, on the way to the elevators, there’s a whole room-sized video installation that celebrates the lack of disruption to West Side rail service while Hudson Yards was being built: “10 YEARS OF CONSTRUCTION AND THE TRAINS NEVER STOPPED,” the flashing screens trumpet (okay, Goebbels). At the Empire State Observatory, the purgatorial holding rooms on the lower floors repeatedly tell visitors that they’re standing in “the greatest building in the world” (the rare defensible claim in deckland), but the desperation on display in the gallery advertising the tower’s amenities for prospective leaseholders, which includes giant photos of the “tenant-only” fitness center, conference center, and bar, suggests there aren’t nearly enough tenants buying the hype. It’s all profoundly antipoetic, but these promo rooms—anchors tying the sky-bound deckgoers to the leaden earth-bound business of load factors, demised premises, and kick-out clauses—serve a kind of purpose. With office vacancy rates throughout Manhattan still well above prepandemic levels, architects and developers seem at a loss to articulate the basic purpose of the very tall buildings they remain determined to put up. The latest generation of decks arrives at the perfect juncture to address this crisis of faith; the post-pandemic city has relegated the trunk of the tower to a subordinate role and made the observatory the main character. Could this be the future of the New York high-rise—to act as an amusement ride, a family rec center, a glorified selfie set? To re-create Times Square in the sky?

THE NEW DECKS are high and getting higher. The upper deck at Top of the Rock sits at a relatively wimpy seventy floors, while the most popular deck at the Empire State Building is eighty-six floors up. Summit One Vanderbilt’s outdoor perch is on the ninety-third floor, while both One World Trade Center’s One World Observatory and Edge—a vast triangular balcony that juts from the tallest building at Hudson Yards like an evil slice of pizza lifted into the heavens by some kind of mutant subway rat with wings—rise past one hundred stories. The newer attractions all make a claim to primacy: One World Observatory caps “the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere”; Edge sports the “highest outdoor platform in New York”; One Vanderbilt is, less impressively, “the tallest building in Midtown Manhattan.” The nature of the view changes with increased height. At Top of the Rock the vista has some of the jazzy laterality of an Yvonne Jacquette painting: The upper deck is dwarfed by several of the surrounding structures, which makes the viewer feel enmeshed in the city rather than removed from it, and the crawl of humans at street level Midtown’s managed riot of double-parked UPS trucks, bobbing couriers, and sweat-drenched TaskRabbiters—remains within squinting distance.

But at a hundred floors the skyline is drained of its variety. The urban shrubbery below, while still dense and vertical, seems curiously thinned out, two-dimensional. The deckgoer here does not approach the city at an angle but from a zenith, looking straight down in the manner of a satellite image or a striking drone. The urban spectacle at this height is reminiscent not of Jacquette’s slyly kinetic midair still lifes but of Google Street View, an impression that the deck designers seem eager to encourage. The rat-borne pizza slice at Edge, for instance, includes a wedge of clear glass flooring that allows visitors to gape at the streets, lower-level rooftops, and air-conditioning ducts more than one thousand feet below. One World Observatory, just a decade old but already showing its age, has a crappier version of this feature that replaces actual glass with a plan-view video of the tower’s encircling blocks. (In reality, a glass floor at the top of One World Trade would show nothing but the floor directly below, since the building is a faceted glass prism with no protrusions; the observatory’s “Sky Portal” is better understood as an aerial view of some stuff nearby.) Whether deliberately or not, the idea of the city these decks offer is as a zone to be mapped, abstracted, surveilled at a literal and figurative distance. As the decks climb higher this sense of the observiverse as a city apart will only grow; whereas the stylites of Byzantine Christendom ascended their pillars to get closer to God, the neo-decks of New York invite their visitors to escape the streets underneath.

Mostly, though, they direct visitors back to the cameras on their own phones; the views exist not to be enjoyed but photographed and packaged into an “immersive visual journey” (One World Observatory) for pre-exit purchase. The path to heaven ends not in salvation but at the redemption desk. Unusual things used to happen at the summit of this city’s skyscrapers: One thinks of Philippe Petit’s high-wire walk between the Twin Towers in 1974 or of Depression era pole sitter Alvin “Shipwreck” Kelly’s stunt for National Donut Dunking Week in 1939, which saw him consume thirteen coffee-soaked crullers while standing on his head atop a pole at the peak of the fifty- six-story Chanin Building on Forty-Second Street. Now the pinnacles of the city’s tallest buildings are just another grid post-in-waiting, mere grist for the bucket list economy. In truth, observing doesn’t really happen on these observation platforms. The primary mode of the deckgoer in New York today is not attentive but responsive: The deck exists not to facilitate the appreciation and study of the surrounding cityscape nor to inspire a sense of private wonder at the vastness of urban creation but as a platform for a collective orgy of feeling. The job of the deckgoer is to be wowed, poked, stimulated; not for nothing, one imagines, is the deck at Hudson Yards called Edge.

Cum control remains off the menu of on-deck amusement at Edge, at least for now, but over at Summit One Vanderbilt the routes to climax are legion—and they’re frequently set to an on-site DJ series that nods pleasingly to the historic contribution of the deck daddy himself, David Guetta. On the deck’s first floor (“Transcendence 1 – Reflect – Affinity”), there’s an entrance hall in which all the nonwindow surfaces are mirrors (an exhibitionist’s paradise), a Yayoi Kusama floor installation of “reflective cloud-like forms” that look like pearls of mercury ejaculate, and a chamber filled with silver balloons in which visitors are allotted ten minutes to play with the balls (naughty!). The second floor (“Transcendence 2 – Levitation – Unity”) includes Air: An Immersive Experience by Kenzo Digital, a heroically silly video installation (from an artist with no relation to the LVMH luxury brand or its online marketing) that claims “air reveals shared consciousness” and that displays a bank of clouds on a huge screen over a soundtrack of whistling wind. It’s all so cheap and empty, with “immersions” as thin as the atmosphere at one thousand feet, and all so thumpingly unarousing: With their shiny surfaces, putative “artiness,” and eagerness to please but never to offend, these sky-high amusements exemplify a kind of monocultural kitsch that is the opposite of sexy. But the gimmicks do numbers on the ’gram, and the daytrippers love them. The day I visited, the balloon grotto echoed to an elated percussion of titters and oohs, and there were more people stopping for selfies in front of Air than by the windows that looked onto the stretching city opposite.

On the third and final floor, via a crammed and sweaty outdoor terrace, visitors can live the contrast between the pompous idea of weather presented inside and the actual experience of weather, which is just, well, weather. (On this particular day: overcast, with a high of 81 and humidity at 59 percent.) If there is transcendence on offer at the city’s next-gen observation decks, it’s not likely to strike in their mobbed cloud rooms and migraine-inducing mirror halls; the sole moment of quiet reflection I enjoyed at Summit One Vanderbilt was after locking myself in the stall of the top-floor men’s toilet, an ample orange-tiled compartment offering gloriously uncrowded views of Manhattan’s East Side. In the crevasses slashing the concrete glacier below, a barely visible procession of cars and humans moved through Midtown with liturgical solemnity, patiently marking time until the release of Kenzo Digital’s next video essay on the natural elements.

INSULTING TO THE CITY’S collective intelligence as this all may be, there’s at least some comfort in knowing that fresh heights of imbecility await, that the New York deck experience is moving always forward, climbing higher, getting dumber. On Eighth Avenue and Forty-Fifth Street, a whole-block pit is being filled with what will eventually become the 1,067-foot form of The Torch, a supertall hotel that will be crowned by a lambent observation spiral and, once completed, seems almost certain to snatch the title of New York’s stupidest construction away from Thomas Heatherwick’s Vessel. Though the project’s name and crown are designed to pay tribute to the Statue of Liberty, the torch is nevertheless an odd visual reference to evoke in an era closely associated, pyrologically speaking, with the white supremacist’s tiki torch and the burning cop car. The tower’s bottom half, a standard glass-sheathed fifty-one-story block, will house 825 rooms and, one imagines, the usual insipid assortment of “upscale” retail and hospitality venues—a Nordstrom here, a Marcus Samuelsson seafood vehicle there. But the real action is in the upper half, a spindly, 260-foot, reflective glass stem enveloped at its apex in a spiral staircase that functions as a public observation deck. The public won’t reach the very top, though; the structure’s vertex will be reserved for VIPs, replicating a form of exclusive access pioneered by the Empire State Building, whose 103rd floor observation deck, the attendant on the 102nd floor told me, is reserved for “celebrities and TikTokers.” Even the clouds, it seems, have a premium subscription tier.

The observatory is the torchiest part of The Torch, but with its conical form, helical stairs, and protective glass barriers, the viewing deck suggests not a torch but the Vessel itself. Where Heatherwick’s suicide trap resembles the vertical spit of a shawarma, the top of The Torch looks like a freshly wrapped gyro: The design does not suggest Lady Liberty so much as the spinning meat stands of Astoria. Perhaps the developers will eventually apply a dusting of paprika over the top to complete the picture; perhaps a giant pita hoisted into the heavens, well beyond the reach of the ordinary stiffs who toil in the city below, is exactly the architectural comment on the cost-of-living crisis that New York needs right now. Once visitors have tired of the scenery at the peak of this sky gyro, they will have the choice of descending via elevator or a drop ride built around The Torch’s central stem, which will plummet riders three hundred feet in ninety seconds. Conceptually, the marriage of a torch with a drop doesn’t sound like a very good idea, unless the objective is to set fire to the city below. But perhaps, in a way, this is the observation deck’s true, unspoken calling: to re-center reality on the ground, in all its horror, beauty, and filth.

Ejected back to earth and still clammy with the ecstasy of their forty-five minutes atop the greatest building in the world, a line of stunned Brazilians and trembling Scandinavians filed out of the Empire State Building one recent night and was almost immediately greeted, one block south, by the sight of a seminaked man bent over in a bus shelter, pants pulled down and ass cheeks visible, releasing a volcanic stream of vomit onto the sidewalk. The tourists giggled nervously as they skipped past, their eyes suddenly even wider. Almost certainly the image that will stay with them from their time under the moonlit sky is not of Manhattan’s bioluminescent scroll but of the human moon—ass thrown into the glass, glutes flattened but rolling up and down the pane in time with the guttural eurgh of each heave, crack disturbingly exposed—that concluded the experience. In bare-buttocked form this puker gave the tourists an important lesson: In New York, ews are the soul of views, and the real wows and whoas of the city belong not to the skies but to the streets. Whatever airy fib the decks tell at altitude about the place to which they’re anchored (“What we build revitalizes our city,” lies one of the PR plaques at Summit One Vanderbilt), a chundering reality check is always available back at street level; the iconic and the emetic are never far apart.