Your Highness

If Guy Debord is to be believed, Karl Marx once said, at some totally unspecified moment, “Men can see nothing around them that is not their own image; everything speaks to them of themselves. Their very landscape is alive.” Either way, it’s a good line—and one that happens to double as a critique of New York City’s newest observation decks, Edge at 30 Hudson Yards and SUMMIT at One Vanderbilt. Edge also boasts the option of City Climb, which allows ticket holders to scale the skyscraper’s upper crown, dubbed the Apex. (The climb is secured by safety harnesses, thereby avoiding the tragedies that have marred Hudson Yards’ other main attraction.)

Edge and SUMMIT do not advertise a new vantage on the city so much as a vision of the self as reflected in the city’s image. Promotional tweets sum this up perfectly: SUMMIT enables you to “see yourself from new angles,” while Edge is “a place for dreamers and believers,” affirming visitors as such upon entry. The opportunities for self-discovery facilitated by the view are myriad to say the least. For $185, City Climbers can be suspended, godlike, from The Apex, basking in the sureness that they alone in that moment are “higher than anyone else in New York City.” Strictly speaking, the claim, publicized on Edge’s website, is untrue—City Climb takes you to 1,271 feet, while the occupied top floor of residential 432 Park Avenue clocks in at 1,286—and yet, this is irrelevant. Some might imagine being humbled, feeling small against the vastness of New York from above. But not the Edge visitor, who the official Twitter account says will “feel like the king of the world.”

The self revealed in the teetering heights of urbanity is probably preferable to other, more plebeian selves. From a thousand feet in the air, New York isn’t dirty or smelly. It isn’t crowded, it isn’t loud or rife with inequality. It almost seems as though the city from high above is itself defined by the individual experience of the observer, so it stands to reason that below would lie the non-experiential city, identical for everyone and everyone identical, where quotidian sea-level views make of us neither dreamers nor kings. And while skyscrapers are associated with density from a planning perspective, density up here is the least of your concerns—the only city-dweller who matters at, say, the Apex, is you. Developers in New York frequently battle over air rights, formal entitlement to the empty space above existing real estate—these observation decks offer visitors a momentary monopoly.

While such New York attractions are hardly a new phenomenon—breathtaking views can also be had at the One World Trade Center Observatory, not to mention the classic Empire State Observatory, which opened in 1931, and Top of the Rock at Rockefeller Center—the advertised character of recent installments set them apart. And the old guard has taken notice: Rockefeller Center owner Tischman Speyer recently petitioned the city for permission to install a “ride-like experience” that would take visitors from the 69th floor up to a new “infinity observation deck,” where they would sit astride steel beams like the tower’s builders once did. SUMMIT’s immersive installation Air, a mise en abyme perfectly calibrated for Instagram, promises “a resetting of your senses” so that you will “emerge into a boundless, structureless world.” Such transcendence certainly has one up on Top of the Rock’s limited- run #NYCFiltered exhibit, which touts “a color infused perspective on NYC” but whose effect is far from the psychedelia of Air.

On some level, this emphasis on experience and self-discovery seems like dogged overkill; after all, human experience is individual to a great, if not totalizing, degree. Shouldn’t a jaw-dropping view of a city rich with interesting architecture and historical significance be enough of a draw itself? If Edge and SUMMIT are any indication, the answer is no. Today’s observation decks are not about the observed, but the observer. Marx probably never actually said that thing about the landscape. Evidently, he didn’t need to.