There were suddenly, with the exception of a tiny fort converted into an aquarium, no buildings at all

In the upper part of Manhattan the masses of concrete were mostly sixty feet high, or seventy; in the centre of the island, they were a hundred and fifty or two hundred. But as the island narrowed towards its southern tip, they were four hundred feet high, five hundred, cramming closer and closer together, bulking up higher and higher as they loomed southward pressing inexorably toward the island's tip - until at the very tip, at the very end of the most crowded island in the world, at the very spot in the entire world in which buildings should have been crowded most closely together, there were suddenly, with the exception of a tiny fort converted into an aquarium, no buildings at all. At a point at which a single square foot of land was worth thousands of dollars, at which the value of an acre was computed not in millions of dollars, but in the tens of millions, there sat 967,032 square metres of land - 22.2 acres - vacant except for grass and trees, pathways between them, benches, and a broad, breezy waterfront promenade.

R. Caro, The power broker (1974), 647-8