In the Brooklyn edition of Monopoly, the deed to Junior’s Restaurant & Bakery costs 220 fake dollars. At the cheesecake chain’s flagship location, on Flatbush Avenue in downtown Brooklyn, the game is on sale for $39.99. My breakfast—two scrambled eggs with American cheese on a roll with home fries, a cup of coffee, a seltzer, and a slice of cheesecake—comes up just shy of that, tip included. In 2014, the owner, Alan Rosen, whose grandfather Harry opened the restaurant in 1950, turned down a $45 million offer to buy the building from JDS Development Group. Two years later, the firm, undeterred, acquired the neighboring Dime Savings Bank and its air rights for $95 million in order to build the Brooklyn Tower, the borough’s first supertall structure. Like its predecessor at 9 Dekalb Avenue, the Tower is literally made of money: Mercury Liberty dimes line the ceiling, a twee reference to the minimum deposit required to create an account when the bank was chartered in 1859.
I, however, am not made of money, which is one of the reasons that I’m eating at Junior’s, and also why I am wearing my most expensive item of clothing, a rather garish Kooples overcoat that my wife gave me for my birthday several years ago, because today I am pretending to be a millionaire. Not one who could afford a $25 million triplex penthouse, the Tower’s priciest listing, but the more modest sort, who might spring for a studio or one-bedroom in the lowest seven figures and would not be above attempting to alleviate an acute hangover from a table at Junior’s. (To be fair, the lower floors are reserved for renters through the affordable housing lottery, not unlike in J. G. Ballard’s dystopian High-Rise [1975].) On the campaign trail with Bill de Blasio in October 2013, Barack Obama, who is worth $70 million, or less than one tenth of what it took to develop the Tower, bought a pair each of cheesecakes and black-and-white cookies at Junior’s. This morning, I appear to be the only millionaire in the dining room.
Although I am not in the habit of eating breakfast, bearing the weight of not one but two assumed identities—millionaire and, somewhat contradictorily, architecture critic—not to mention the effects of an ill-advised, lukewarm Jell-O shot consumed some nine hours prior at the holiday party of a friend who is, in fact, an architecture critic, I capitulate to the usually repressible though ever-present urge to eat cheesecake before noon. Having accepted an assignment to write outside my areas of expertise, I’ll take what comforts I can, for I have the posture of an octogenarian piano teacher; I don’t know a peristyle from a portico; and my preferred mechanism for coping with anxiety is overcompensation, which in this case entails a conceptual gimmick of ludicrous proportions.
The Tower has been compared to Barad-dûr, the infernal fortress of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, at whose apex the Eye of Sauron looks out on all of Mordor, a threatening reminder of the Dark Lord’s omniscience. Apt as the comparison may be, my interest in fantasy has waned since I first held hands with a girl during a midnight screening of The Fellowship of the Ring, and to me the building’s façade resembles nothing so much as a different relic from high school: that amber-tinted, black-lidded plastic cartridge which held lead refills for my mechanical pencil. Seen in this light, the Tower is less of a menacing monument to imminent doom than a superfluous, almost decadent by-product of capitalism gone awry, though maybe these amount to more or less the same thing.
I wonder if Walt Whitman could have heard America singing from so high up; my ears are still pressurized from the elevator ride.
Construction is still in progress (despite anticipated completion dates of winter 2019 or 2021 posted alongside work permits on green plywood sheathing), which is why the Tower’s publicist postpones the press tour to a vague date after my contracted deadline. This is when I decide to become a millionaire. (In 2016, Hungarian artist Andi Schmied posed as “Gabriella,” the wife of a nonexistent billionaire antiques dealer, to gain access to twenty-five penthouses, documenting her fraud in Private Views: A High-Rise Panorama of Manhattan [VI PER Gallery, 2021], but I lack her ambition and hard-to-place accent.) The sales team is happy to accommodate my request to see units in the stated price range ($1.2 million, subsequently inflated by a “flexible” $300,000 when I’m tempted by the prospect of a stand-alone bedroom), so never having done anything like this before, conscious of my inability to convincingly lie, and deluded by the grandeur of investigative journalism, I go about crafting a false identity. I will be a childless bachelor, a divorced or possibly gay inheritor of a not-inconsequential sum bequeathed by a dearly departed elderly relative—if pressed, a grandmother, though mine have been dead since the 1980s. Further imputing the sales associates with the research capabilities and suspicious nature of the reservations desk at an exclusive restaurant or the human resources department of a federal agency, I conclude on the necessity of a pseudonym: As an extremely online writer with a singular name, I fear my scheme is one Google search away from certain failure. So I conduct a search of my own: “architecture critics in literature,” which brings me, eventually, to Austerlitz.
The protagonist of W. G. Sebald’s final novel, published in 2001, is a specialist in “the architecture and civilization of the bourgeois age” who also goes by a name that is not his own. Born Jacques Austerlitz in Prague, he becomes Dafydd Elias upon arriving, via Kindertransport, in Wales, where he is adopted by a minister and his wife, a biographical detail Austerlitz does not learn until the age of fifteen, once his foster parents have died. Welsh pronunciation is beyond me, and I doubt the popularity of postwar European fiction in the luxury condo business; I can’t pull off Jacques, but I could easily be a Jack.
Jack Austerlitz, I prepare to persuade my imaginary cross-examiner, is a historian who has lived in London for the past few years but was drawn to New York by a teaching position that he hopes to make permanent; since my arrival last summer, I’ve been living on a month-to- month lease in a Prospect Heights building owned by a friend; a closing date next year would suit me just fine. I leave my wedding ring at home and practice saying my new name out loud. (I’ve already changed my voicemail greeting to “This is Jack, leave a message,” in case I miss a call.) Imagining my alter ego a more worldly, abstemious man than I am, I worry that the hangover will somehow blow my cover.
Erupting beyond the hexagonal dome of the bank, which will soon be abutted by a sundeck and three pools, the Tower casts its shadow over a square that should have been called Dimes but instead memorializes vaudeville impresario Edward Albee, the famous playwright’s grand-father. Across Bond Street, on Dekalb, is a Dollar Tree, representative of the “iffy” establishments that line the Fulton Street Mall, though my agent assures me that the neighborhood is changing. Gentrification of downtown Brooklyn has accelerated since it was rezoned in 2004 to create a “24/7 community”; by the 1960s, the central business district had fallen into decline, and in 2007, eminent domain allowed the city to acquire and demolish, on Duffield Street, all but one of the former safehouses for the Underground Railroad. By the end of this year, City Point shoppers will be able to eat to-go orders from Dekalb Market Hall around the corner, en plein air, at the rechristened Abolitionist Place on Willoughby Street. Impacts on adjacent neighborhoods have been even more rapid: In nearby Fort Greene, on the other side of Flatbush past the Apple Store and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, my German psychoanalyst shares a block with Spike Lee.
Nowhere can this redevelopment be seen more clearly than from the Tower’s seventy-first floor, where I am permitted access, no questions asked, except perhaps for a helicopter or the peak of the ninety-third, but both are outside of my price range. One unfinished studio affords a view of both the Statue of Liberty and the Brooklyn Bridge, neither of which has ever looked smaller. I wonder if Walt Whitman could have heard America singing from so high up; my ears are still pressurized from the elevator ride. Faulty operating panels on sixty-eight leave us locked in the stairwell, and so we climb higher, avoiding a descent past the future site of the highest basketball court in the Western Hemisphere, on sixty-six. No amenities—not the movie theater, the dog run, the playground, the coffee stand, the athletic club, nor various lounges, some of which will be open-air to let wind pass through the building—have been completed. I am invited to peek through a glass door, which is stuck, to the marble-clad banking hall, magnificently preserved to be repurposed as a mall. Dimes once saved will soon be spent. The Tower is a work in progress, but so is the skyline, its top—and for now, only—selling point.
Haranguing the 1990s redesign of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France near the end of Sebald’s novel, Austerlitz tells his nameless interlocutor,
I came to the conclusion that in any project we design and develop, the size and degree of complexity of the information and control systems inscribed in it are the crucial factors, so that the all-embracing and absolute perfection of the concept can in practice coincide, indeed ultimately must coincide, with its chronic dysfunction and constitutional instability.
As for the Tower, could I see myself living here? Could I see Jack Austerlitz living here? More importantly, are the dimes in the ceiling of the elevator hall legal tender? Unlikely, on all counts. I guess I’m not the only one passing myself off as something that I’m not.