High Rise

It was, nearly everyone agreed, an ambitious plan: to build a skyscraper - and not just any skyscraper, but one of real architectural merit - in the heart of one of the most famous neighborhoods in America. But the eighties were in full swing; money was there for the asking, and money was there to be made. With the right backing, the right team, and the right site, a brilliant entrepreneur could turn real estate into gold. That kind of alchemy was not lost on Bruce Eichner, an up-and-coming developer with a particularly attractive property in his pocket. 1540 Broadway, in the heart of New York's Times Square, was the sort of project Eichner had long dreamed of, a project as prestigious as it would be profitable, and with it he set out to realize his dreams. Five years and $320 million later, the completed building stood majestically empty, caught between the eighties and nineties, a monument to vast ambitions never realized and the sweat and genius of the men and women who possessed them. How did it happen? High Rise is the unprecedented account of how money, art, passion, politics, and machinery come together to put a building in the ground, and in the skyline of the world's most fascinating, complex, and impossible city. Jerry Adler, a veteran journalist, saw it all happen, and through him we come to know the astonishing cast of characters who conceived and built it: the most famous architects, the richest bank, the most expensive lawyers, along with city planners, real estate brokers, demolition experts, and iron workers. At their center was Eichner himself, a shrewd, charismatic, fast-talking, exasperating leader who, luckily for the rest of us, believed that the unexamined dollarwas not worth making. High Rise definitively chronicles how fortunes are made and lost and how, against staggering odds, a project as intricate, as precarious, and as risky as 1540 Broadway gets built. As cautionary tale, as comedy of clashing egos, it is the record of a great enterprise that happens to be one of the last adventures left in late twentieth-century America.