Skyscrapers & Views
Four competing observation decks, the Art Deco towers that fought for the skyline in 1930, and the building that replaced the ones that fell.
8 placesEmpire State Building
Built in 410 days during the Depression and empty for years afterwards. The 86th-floor deck is open air, which is what the newer decks in Midtown are not.
Chrysler Building
The best Art Deco tower in the world, and you cannot go up it. The lobby is open, the crown is not, and it is still worth the detour.
Top of the Rock
The deck to pick if you are only doing one, for the simple reason that the Empire State Building is in the photograph rather than under your feet.
One World Observatory
The tallest building in the western hemisphere, at a height of 1,776 feet chosen for the year rather than the engineering. Fully enclosed, with a harbour view no other deck gets.
Summit One Vanderbilt
Less an observation deck than an art installation you happen to be a thousand feet up inside. Mirrored floors, a glass lift over the street, and a lot of people photographing their own shoes.
The Edge
A triangular deck sticking eighty feet out of the side of a Hudson Yards tower, with a glass floor and an angled glass wall you can lean against over a thousand feet of nothing.
Flatiron Building
Six feet wide at the point, twenty-two storeys tall, and built on a triangle nobody else could use. You cannot go inside, and you do not need to.
Woolworth Building
The Cathedral of Commerce — tallest building in the world for seventeen years, paid for in cash out of a five-and-ten-cent chain, with a lobby most visitors never see.