The world's skinniest skyscraper is complete and ready for residents. Manhattan's newest skyscraper — 111 West 57th Street, also known as Steinway Tower — is officially open. Unfortunately, the planners chose aesthetics over practicality, and now one of New York’s tallest building sits unoccupied. At 1,428 feet tall and barely wider than a tennis court, Steinway Tower is the thinnest skyscraper ever constructed in human history. The engineering alone pushed the limits of what concrete, steel, and physics will allow, and the story of how this building got built and what happened to the people who built it is one of the strangest in the history of construction. When most people look at this specific skyscraper, they think about it falling over sideways. When the wind blows, the building may tip — that's the obvious fear, but it's not actually the problem. The problem with Steinway Tower is that it was trying to pull itself out of the ground. Here’s what that means. When wind hits a tall, thin building, it doesn't just push horizontally. The forces transfer down through the structure and create what engineers call uplift, which is a vertical pulling force at the base. In an extreme case, it's like trying to yank the building straight up out of the earth. For a normal wide skyscraper, the building's own weight keeps it planted because there’s enough mass spread across enough ground that the physics work out fine. However, Steinway Tower is so thin that its footprint is tiny. There's nowhere near enough weight at the base to resist the forces being generated at the top. So, the engineers had to invent a solution. They drilled 200 steel anchors into the bedrock beneath Manhattan. That's nearly 100 feet straight down. Each anchor is essentially a giant bolt connecting the base of the building to the rock of the earth. Together, they act like the roots of a tree, holding the structure in place against forces that would otherwise tear it free. Once the foundation problem was solved, the team ran straight into the next problem: the walls. In a normal skyscraper, the structural core is thick, and that thickness carries the load, but in a building as thin as this one, every inch of wall you dedicate to structure is an inch you can't sell. On Billionaire's Row in Manhattan, every single inch of floor space is worth thousands of dollars. The thinnest skyscraper in the world, the miracle of engineering on Billionaires Row is now being reported as a safety hazard. For buyers already on the fence, that's a deal breaker.
