Quote:
Originally Posted by iheartthed
I've seen it happen in NYC, but I don't think it is common.
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It's extremely common in NYC. In fact it occurs practically everywhere. The only limits, really, are NIMBYism and strict height laws.
If you go to a rooftop of a historic neighborhood like Tribeca, Flatiron or Soho, you'll basically see nothing but penthouse additions, almost all constructed over the last 30 years. But they're required to be invisible from the street in historic districts, so they're set-back from pedestrian view.
And countless buildings, really everywhere, are rebuilt with additional floors, but it's hard to tell because they usually rebuild the entire building facade. This has been happening since the 1950's. In fact many postwar modernist buildings are prewar buildings that were rebuilt bigger and in a (back then) more fashionable form. I'd say around half of the postwar wedding cake buildings you see in Midtown are actually rebuilt prewars.
And sometimes the same building is rebuilt three or four times. 340 Madison Ave., in Midtown, was a 1920's midrise office building, then was rebuilt in the 1950's to a larger postwar building, then was "modernized" in the 1980's, then was stripped down to steel and rebuilt again, expanding to an adjacent parcel, just a few years ago.