Measuring the skyline...
Every tower on this map is a decision somebody once put a number on: a rezoning, a tax deadline, a bond program. Scroll, and the camera visits the projects that redrew New York's profile since 2001. Heights come from the city's own building footprints file (NYC Open Data, CC BY).
Scroll
One World Trade Center reached its full 1,776 feet in 2013; the city's file puts the roofline at 1,408. Insurance proceeds, Liberty Bonds, and federal transit money financed the largest rebuilding project in the city's history: a new hub and four more towers on the 16 acres. Downtown's skyline moved west.
Four of the city's tallest apartment buildings rose on one street in under a decade, One57 first in 2014, Central Park Tower highest with the city's tallest roof at 1,550 feet. There was no rezoning. Assembled air rights and as-of-right zoning on 57th Street allowed every one of them.
The 2005 Hudson Yards rezoning and a city-financed 7-train extension turned a rail yard into a district: 30 Hudson Yards (1,265 ft, 2019), 35 Hudson Yards, 15 Hudson Yards, with more platformed over the western yard still to come. The city built the subway itself and is repaying it from the district's future taxes.
One Vanderbilt (1,401 ft to the roof, 2020) was approved in 2015 under the Vanderbilt Corridor special permit: $220 million of improvements to Grand Central in exchange for floor area. The 2017 East Midtown rezoning extended that trade to 78 blocks.
Two rezonings, 2001 and 2008, primed Queens Plaza and Court Square, and the next two decades delivered the biggest tower cluster outside Manhattan. The tallest here reaches 794 feet in the city's file; Sven, beside it, 760.
The 2005 Greenpoint-Williamsburg rezoning converted two miles of industrial waterfront to residential towers. One Blue Slip (323 ft in the city's file), the first Greenpoint Landing tower, opened in 2018 where a lumber yard stood. North Brooklyn has a skyline of its own now.
Downtown Brooklyn was rezoned in 2004 for office towers that mostly did not come; housing came instead. The Brooklyn Tower (1,035 ft to the roof, 2022) is the borough's first supertall, eighteen years after the vote that made it possible.
The Empire State Building's roof (1,239 ft, 1931) was the city's ceiling for forty years, then again for a decade after 2001. Most of the towers above it arrived after 2014. These are the landmarks; the fuller story is the whole city accreting behind them. The 50-year view, linked above, lets you scrub Manhattan's surviving stock forward from the mid-1970s fiscal-crisis low, year by year.