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Comment by TriangleEdge | Hacker News Reader

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Then I'll be the first person to tell you that I'd love to live on the 90th floor of a building...

I don't have a family yet and am going to live in an apartment regardless, so why not have one with a great view?

I've little experience with "[being sent] to work in tall buildings" besides staying in hotels in the non-penthouse suites and it seems to me that usually the view you get is of a street and a building across said street.

Obviously tall buildings make sense in places like New York where there are more people who want to live there than available dwelling units.

> a street and a building across said street

I guess different cities have different distributions of building heights, but living in NYC I feel like this is accurate living on any floor <10 and inaccurate on any floor >=10 (roughly). Even in the densest neighborhoods the fraction of tall skyscrapers is pretty low so if you're 10 stories up you'll usually be able to see pretty far even though you're still surrounded by much taller buildings.

NYC has the advantage of "additional" coastline with the water around the main island and the "internal island" of Central Park.

I feel that other cities might tend much more to the 'walls of nearly identical height buildings'.

You would not have a hard time filling a 90th floor apartment if it meant taking the elevator down to their job.

Since our ape brains evolved millions of year ago, we've always been fascinated with big, tall things.

Stone henge, pyramids, etc

It's not rational, but it is pretty fucking cool

I think Oklahoma is just trying to prove everything isn't bigger in Texas.

It feels almost facile pointing this out since it's a 60 year-old classic that was a #1 hit of one of the world's biggest bands, but the Rolling Stones "Get Off Of My Cloud" is a song about living on the 99th floor of a downtown building to get away from the pestering and hubbub of crowds and the press. I remember being fascinated by the idea as a kid and wanting to live somewhere very high. I concluded at least at the time in the late 80s that it was not possible anywhere in the world to live on the 99th floor of a building, but it was possible to live on the 92nd floor of the John Hancock Center. I have not gotten rich enough to do so and probably never will, but some part of me will still always want to.

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