Once a rickety walk-up with a McDonald’s on the ground floor, the tower at the south end of Madison Park has been stuck in its own construction quagmire for years. In 2006, plans were revealed for a ground breaking slender high-end luxury tower that would change the neighborhood skyline permanently. The Times critic Nicolai Ouroussoff celebrated the tower as a “dazzling addition to a street that includes two of the city’s most celebrated skyscrapers:” The Met Life and the Flatiron Building.
Read on for the story of how the building came about, and why it remains almost entirely vacant.
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