I love architecture, skyscrappers and NYC. So of course reading about the history of Manhattan’s observation decks, before the security perimeters, with stunning photography is a keeper.

How great to think that atop 30 Rockefeller Center, the observatory which opened in 1933, originally offered deck chairs for sunbathers and cafe tables for lunchtime workers.

“Your elevation transfigures you,” the French philosopher Michel de Certeau wrote in the late seventies, after a visit to the World Trade Center. “It transforms the bewildering world by which you were ‘possessed’ into a text that lies before your eyes. It allows you to read it, like a solar eye, looking down like a god.”

Great pictures from my favorites skyscrapers in NYC: Empire State, Top of the Rock, Chrysler. See on http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/02/the-views-from-manhattans-observation-decks

It doesn’t include the Freedom Tower visited just in April 2017