"Staring across the Hudson, the young architect imagined a helicopter lifting a trailer from a dinky New Jersey development and placing it on top of a building somewhere in Manhattan. "It was a fantasy," he tells me, "but it was kind of a crystallization of the way I wanted to live in New York." It was the late 1980s. Tesoro was more than a decade out of architecture school and had been running his own firm for a few years."
"Getting that, even then, would require some finesse. But he had recently worked on a penthouse on Lexington Avenue that ended up being a crash course in development rights - on using the unused space above a building in order to build up. He knew that if he got himself a cheap-enough penthouse and bought the air rights, he could build himselfa home in the sky. Friends called it a pipe dream."
Andrew Tesoro envisioned living in a dramatic, light-filled rooftop dwelling with outdoor space and Hudson River views and planned to achieve it by building atop a Manhattan building. After a helicopter fantasy, Tesoro relied on knowledge of development rights gained from a Lexington Avenue penthouse project, intending to buy air rights and construct upward. He began scouting rooftops in 1988 seeking top-floor units with buildable roofs, terraces, and views. He rejected some options for awkward rooftop layouts or impractical brownstones without elevators. Friends considered the plan a pipe dream, but Tesoro proceeded with a strategic search for suitable sites.
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