Another New York lay mere blocks away: a city of crowded subway cars and diners and panhandlers and mounds of sidewalk garbage piled high. But the supertall’s residents, whoever they were, wherever they were, did not know that place. Their building contributed to the density of urban life but insulated them from that life’s complications. They were in the city but not of it.

This, I soon discovered, is precisely the living condition supertalls are designed to engineer: one that maximizes the privacy of the super-wealthy and whose highest priority is that privacy’s protection. “Modern culture is a garden culture,” Zygmunt Bauman wrote in Modernity and the Holocaust. “It constructs its own identity out of distrust of nature. In fact, it defines itself and nature, and the distinction between them, through its endemic distrust of spontaneity and its longing for a better, and necessarily artificial, order.” The garden culture was rampant here: literally, via the appendage of this public apron to the building’s entrance, but more powerfully, and figuratively, through the clearing of a moat to buffer the building’s inhabitants from the city’s inconveniences—to offer them a city free of weeds.