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Great civilizations revolve around great cities. Athens, Rome and London had their day. For the past half century, New York has been, in many ways, the capital of the world. And there is no more visible symbol of that status than the city's spectacular skyline. There may be taller buildings elsewhere, but no city has more office towers packed into such confined space. But a weakening real estate market, escalating building costs and safety concerns made all too apparent by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks pose the question: Will the city retain its passion for skyscrapers? Today, Newsday continues a series of special reports, to appear occasionally in the next few months, examining the city's strengths, its challenges and the potential solutions that could shape . . . the Next New York.
The foreign tourists looked across the East River. From a waterside path on Roosevelt Island, they could see Manhattan at unusual advantage - the apartments of Sutton Place, the slant- roofed Citigroup Center, the United Nations Secretariat.
"Chrysler Building on the left," said a host, directing the gaze of his guests toward midtown. "Empire State on the right."
Then one of the group said in a reverential half-whisper: "Spires."
It is hard to imagine New York without its awesome upward thrust, without the serrated edge of its skyline, without the unruliness and power and excess and jubilation that its tall buildings - its spires - represent.
No other city has such happy rapport with the high and mighty. No city has more lofty office towers - nearly all of them in the skinny, sardine-can confines of Manhattan - or is so immediately identified by the dazzling Rorschach splash of skyscrapers on the urban horizon. Said architect and essayist Michael Sorkin: "The New York skyline is the greatest collective work of art of all time."
Carol Willis, an architectural historian who teaches at Columbia University and founded the Skyscraper Museum in lower Manhattan, talks about the "frenetic energy" of New York as represented by the skyline. "It goes up and down like a seismograph," Willis said. "The towers go wild and look wild."
That superb mayhem was cruelly rebuked on Sept. 11, 2001.
When they toppled the Twin...