Angled building photos, like the one to the left, of 105 Madison Ave., seem perfectly natural to me.Frontal shots -- like the one just below, where Madison runs into 23rd St. at the base of that tall, skinny condo -- are fine if they're not too closed-in or artificial.
I don't know if this one looks artificial because of the composition or because The Pencil Dick* makes everything at its feet look like a plastic Toy Town.At any rate, it turns out that The Pencil Dick is one of those rare buildings it makes sense to look at sideways, as it is below.
* Developers invent neighborhood names to market them to plastic people, so damned if I'll help them out and use the names they give their luxury towers. To me, the new Gehry tower is "the Gehry tower," not "The Spruce Goose" or whatever they've changed it to now. "The Trump SoHo" is the "Trump Is Such a Whore" building.
And the skinny luxury tower featured here (my runner-up superfinger long ago) is not "One Madison," or whatever it was before it went bankrupt, it's "The Pencil Dick."
When I think of the slick, arrogant Wall Street types who move into these towers to celebrate their financially engineered potency, I'm reminded of a TV wrestler who mocked his steroid-pumped opponents as "two-bit pencil-neck freaks," all beefed up to mask the little weasel inside.
So sure, they can afford to live in a towering phallic symbol, but... it's a pencil dick!
