Brooklyn, once a borough for small to mid-rise buildings is starting to add a few high-rises to its resume. 388 Bridge Street will have 53 stories and 378 units, of which 234 of them will be rentals. The other 144 will be condos that are expected to be up for sale sometime this coming spring. Near completion, the building seems to pierce the sky as you’re looking at the borough’s silhouette from a distance. But it isn’t the first building to go up and dominate Brooklyn’s skyline.
In comparison, The Avalon stands at 42 stories, and the Brooklyner stands just 2 stories under 388 Bridge Street - at 51 stories. Also there are a few other projects going on around the corner, so-to-speak, that will surpass 388 Bridge Street. Particularly the Avalon Willoughby West and The Hub by developers Dattner Architects, who will both stand close to the 600 foot mark. If Brooklyn continues this pace, and Queens follows suite, we will have a triangle of high-rises that speak for the individual boroughs prosperity itself and talk even bigger volumes for New York City.
Skyscrapers were originally considered a remedy for the problem expansion proposed in taking up space horizontally. There’s only so much space next to us before it starts getting overcrowded. Developers quickly realized that eventually that this space will run out and started building up. Personifying “the sky's the limit”, we now see high-rises and skyscrapers being placed in places where the space is available to expand sideways. But this is to maximize the efficiency and space of the region. Bit by bit these monoliths were put in place, slowly becoming a definition to the volume of people the city has, and being that they’re not cheap, sometimes a whopping $1.4 Billion, it began symbolizing the thriving economy of these locations. We can take Dubai as an example where skyscrapers and high-rises are trophies that display the wealth of the region. New York City’s Manhattan is another great example of how population and economy can be expressed through the sheer numbers of high-rises, skyscrapers, and towers it has in it. Chicago, another gotham and force to be reckoned with, contains at least 50 skyscrapers itself.
