If you looked south from Central Park in New York City at any time in the last decade and knew a few things about both architectural and financial history, you would be correct to feel a certain sense of dread. The crowding of supertall “pencil towers” — often containing a single apartment per floor — has been one of the more grotesque indications of the extreme inequalities of our century. Many of these towers are only partly inhabited, and the units on the higher floors sway so sharply in the wind that they’re apparently acutely uncomfortable to live in anyway.

But this isn’t necessarily why you’d have felt such trepidation. The tallest residential building in the world, Central Park Tower, completed in 2020, stands right at the foot of the park. It’s now the tallest building in the western hemisphere, if you ignore the gratuitous spike on top of One World Trade Center. Yet a tallest building record usually only means one thing: there’s going to be a financial crash any minute now — a method of prediction nicknamed the “skyscraper index.” And sure enough, when Central Park Tower was receiving its first residents, COVID-19 sent the stock markets into meltdown.

The first building to give credence to the skyscraper index — leaving aside the Tower of Babel — was the Empire State Building back in 1931. It was a gratuitously, pointlessly tall building, reaching the height it did solely to be taller than the previous record holder, the Chrysler Building, opened the year before. The crowding of incredibly tall towers into the Midtown Manhattan grid happened at the peak of the financial “exuberance” that culminated in the Wall Street Crash of 1929, though the length of time it took to build meant that some of the towers were actually opening at the moment of meltdown. This was the case with the Empire State Building, which was such a failure at first that it was nicknamed the Empty State Building. Rather tellingly, the New Deal and Great Society eras made no attempt to eclipse the Empire State and Chrysler buildings, with no edifice coming close in the 1940s, ’50s, or ’60s. It was only in the ’70s, as finance, insurance, and real estate began their advance to command the American economy, that towers began to reach and surpass these heights.