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Originally Posted by NYguy
^ The Woolworth is another building I like to use as an example.
Not a poor excuse at all, and in fact, that argument was brought up in the case of 15 Penn Plaza. The view of the Empire State Building can be blocked by anything (the much smaller tower I mentioned earlier). One Vanderbilt will block the view of Chrysler from some angles, but does that mean the City should freeze development to preserve that view? Of course not. London isn't New York, a city defined by it's skyscrapers. And New York shouldn't stop building because a view of one in particular could be "blocked". What if that argument was used in the time of Woolworth. We would never have gotten the Empire State Building in the first place. It's not a practical argument to be had in New York. You can argue about the quality of what's getting built, as Amanda Burden did when she chopped 200 ft off the height of the Tower Verre (something that had no bearing on views of the ESB). But whether or not something can be built is decided by other factors.
And by the way, it can be argued that those blocks around the ESB should have been developed years ago with larger buildings, but that's just not where the business district was. But imagine if the planned Met Life tower had gotten built to its planned height, and not cut short as it was.
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I think you're reducing the arguments against you and therefore missing the point. No one's arguing that everything should be preserved and height shouldn't be built. Building skyscrapers is great, and it's tremendous for the city. But there's something to be said for protecting certain views of the most iconic skyscrapers in the history of skyscrapers. The ESB is a New York City and world icon. NYC's not gonna have many skyscrapers like that in the future. Let's be honest, what new building going up in NYC now (or within the next two decades) will compete with the Burj Khalifa, or even the Ping An building in China? The ESB is a large part of NYC's global appeal, and the city will lose a heck of a lot by not preserving that as much as possible. I'm not saying it has to stand out over all of midtown. But it definitely would be a tragedy if it was lost in a cluster of towers.