778-foot Skyline Tower tops out as New York's tallest building outside Manhattan

By Vitali Ogorodnikov | From Future New York Tuesday, October 15, 2019

Skyline Tower. Credit: Binyan Studios

Long Island City’s burgeoning skyline continues to push height limits and set new records, as the queen of Queens finally get crowned. Last Friday, Skyline Tower at 23-15 44th Drive officially topped out at 778 feet and 67 stories, surpassing Brooklyn Point as New York City’s tallest building outside of Manhattan. Commemorative speeches and the sealing of a time capsule, scheduled for opening in 50 years, marked the ceremony organized by the team behind the building, which includes Hill West Architects, Whitehall Interiors, broker Modern Spaces, and developers Risland Holdings LLC, FSA Capital and United Construction & Development Group. Available apartments in the amenity-rich, 802-unit condo are available from $689K for studios, $876K for one-bedrooms, and $1.19M for two-bedrooms.

Skyline Tower from Murray Playground (Ondel/CityRealty)

Height is not the only prominent feature of the sky-scraping tower. The Long Island City skyline, which rose almost from scratch in less than a decade, consists chiefly of luxury rental apartment buildings (which CityRealty reviewed in a recent feature). Condominium projects, which signify maturation of the local real estate market, remain few and in between, and none can match Skyline Tower’s extensive amenity package. The building offers a stone-clad, doorman-attended lobby, concierge and valet services for the parking garage, a fitness center with a sauna and a sunlit, 75-foot indoor pool, a double-height resident lounge with screening areas and a billiards table, a children’s playroom, a rooftop terrace, and more. These factors, combined with a one-stop subway ride to Midtown (the building will hold a dedicated entrance to the Court Square-23rd Street station of the E, G, M, and 7 trains), have contributed to a record-setting apartment sellout.

Skyline Tower, Binyan Studios, LIC, Long Island City, Queens, condo

Skyline Tower. Credit: Binyan Studios

The building stands across from 673-foot-tall One Court Square (former Citibank Building), which reigned as the city’s tallest skyscraper outside of Manhattan from 1990 until Skyline Tower surpassed it in September. Skyline Tower pays homage to its iconic, green-glass neighbor with a facade of somewhat similar, blue-glass curtain wall, an aesthetic that has since become the trademark of many of Long Island City’s new skyscrapers, including nearby Tower 28, a 58-story rental that ranked as the borough’s tallest apartment building since 2017 until now.

Skyline Tower marks the western edge of the Court Square skyline. Low-rise rowhome blocks, which include an official historic district, stretch to the west almost all the way to the waterfront, preserving dramatic unobstructed views of the Midtown skyline even from the lower floors. The penthouse levels offer an observatory-like experience, with sightlines extending as far as Jersey Shore’s Monmouth Beach, Long Island’s Jones Beach and Oyster Bay, Stamford in Connecticut, the Gov. Mario Cuomo (aka Tappan-Zee) Bridge, New Jersey’s Appalachian Highlands, and the skyline of the Rutgers University district in New Brunswick in central Jersey. The viewshed extends past the entire expanse of Brooklyn to offer views of the open ocean on the distant southeast horizon.

Skyline Tower. Credit: Binyan Studios

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The superlative-laden skyscraper ranks as the nation's sixth-tallest apartment building outside of Manhattan and Chicago. It even stacks up reasonably well against competition in Manhattan, as the skyscraper clinches the title of the New York City’s 42nd-tallest building, in a four-way tie with the pyramid pinnacle of One Worldwide Plaza, the gridded parapet of 55 Hudson Yards, and the prismatic Madison Square Park Tower, which reigned as the tallest skyscraper in NoMad until the recent topping-out of 805-foot Madison House.. Incidentally, all of the above-mentioned buildings are visible from the Skyline Tower’s west-facing units.

Friday’s topping-out ceremony follows on the heels of a model unit launch on July 11th, when a Great Gatsby-esque party featured grand speeches, champagne toasts, and costumed actors dressed as Skyline Tower and One Court Square, in the tradition of the famous 1931 Beaux Arts ball.

The topping-out follows several back-to-back, skyline-transforming topping-out celebrations for One Vanderbilt, Central Park Tower, and 111 West 57th Street, all of which took place within the past month. Even Skyline Tower will not hold the outer-borough crown for long, as Brooklyn’s 9 DeKalb is poised to become the city’s first supertall skyscraper outside Manhattan about a year from now. However, given continued demand for residential space in Long Island City, coupled with the successful sellout of Skyline Tower, we would not be surprised to hear a Queens announcement for a supertall of its own. But today, and for years to come, Skyline Tower will continue to reign supreme over the borough that tanks as the most diverse urban area on the planet.