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Event: Floorwide party in penthouses of Gehry's 8 Spruce Street
In The House: A more mature crowd than usually attends these things
Dress Code: Serious summer half-casual with a chance of heavy rains. Suits and dresses, lots of checked-pattern shirts and prints. Fair number of golf shirts. Umbrellas stashed everywhere.
Menu: Everything teeny tiny, like the city below out the windows. One-inch sliders, Lilliputian grilled cheese sandwiches, bay scallops served with thimble-sized glasses of wine, etc.
Music: Three tuxedoed gentlemen playing three grand pianos situated in the respective living rooms of the three penthouses.
Overheard: "There is a piano player in this one. He's just not playing right now."
The largest penthouse (PH North) on the top (76th) floor of Frank Gehry's 8 Spruce Street rents for $60,000 a month. This gets you a 4BR/3.5BA apartment with north, east, and west views of the surrounding city. And because of the undulating nature of the building's facade and windows, you get a good portion of southern views as well, blocked only by the rest of the building south of the apartment. There are two other penthouses on the floor—East and West—that are both 3BR/3.5BA residences. Between the two smaller apartments is a studio (the highest studio apartment in the city?) that is a guest residence included for the use of whoever is renting PH North.
Despite overcast weather last night, the views from the 76th floor are incredible. Rather than make one feel remote from the city, atop one's Olympian perch, the view seems to provide an intimate perspective of the city in which nothing is very far away. City Hall is directly underfoot, the length of Manhattan unfolds to the northeast; the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges are angled like ready chopsticks on a dish of Brooklyn; the spit of Sandy Hook, NJ to the south is a nearby gateway to the open Atlantic Ocean clearly visible before the horizon. Standing at the various windows of 8 Spruce's penthouses are like visiting the city panorama model at the Queens Museum. It seems like it would be hard to resist pointing the city's best features out to visitors with a strong laser pointer.
· New York by Gehry [newyorkbygehry.com]
· Hangover Observations [Curbed]
· 8 Spruce Street coverage [Curbed]
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