By Jared Ebersole in Video — 16 Jun 2026

Why Brooklyn's First Supertall Looks Like a Villain's Lair

The Brooklyn Tower borrowed its shape from the landmarked Dime Savings Bank, then turned that geometry into the borough's darkest skyline object.

The Brooklyn Tower did get an identity.

That was never the problem.

The problem is that a lot of people decided the identity was evil.

Where it is

The Brooklyn Tower, 85 Fleet Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201

At 1,066 feet, The Brooklyn Tower is Brooklyn's first supertall skyscraper and the tallest building in the borough. Designed by SHoP Architects and developed by JDS, it rises from the site of the landmarked Dime Savings Bank of Brooklyn in Downtown Brooklyn. It is tall enough to change the skyline from miles away, and dark enough that people compare it to fantasy villain architecture without needing much encouragement.

That reaction is funny, but it misses the more interesting part.

The tower did not become strange by accident. It became strange because SHoP tried to make Brooklyn's first supertall feel specific to Brooklyn instead of another interchangeable glass shaft.

The site made that difficult from the start. The Dime Savings Bank was not a leftover building waiting to be cleared. Its exterior and interior are New York City landmarks. The old bank is marble, monumental, and full of classical grandeur: columns, a domed banking hall, gold details, and a hexagonal geometry that gives the interior its unusual shape.

A simpler tower could have avoided the bank entirely. That would have preserved the landmark, but it also would have squeezed the skyscraper onto the leftover portions of a difficult site. Downtown Brooklyn does not offer the clean rectangular lots of Midtown's supertall corridors. The streets hit at angles. The bank sits like a formal object in the middle of a messy urban triangle.

So the new tower does not merely stand next to the bank. It grows out of the same composition.

SHoP's design takes the bank's hexagonal logic and stretches it vertically. The building is built from interlocking, faceted shafts rather than one flat face. That geometry helps the tower respond to the angled site, but it also gives the facade its restless quality. From one block, the tower reads as a sharp black blade. From another, it breaks into stacked setbacks and narrow vertical strips. Keep walking, and it changes again.

That was deliberate.

Manhattan skyline icons are often seen from long, straight avenues or from across rivers. Brooklyn's street grid is less obedient. A tower at Flatbush, DeKalb, Fleet, and Albee Square has to be seen obliquely, in fragments, from streets that do not line up neatly. The Brooklyn Tower's stepped profile turns that irregular viewing experience into part of the design.

Then came the material palette.

SHoP describes the tower's design as drawing from the Dime Savings Bank, but the translation is not literal. The bank is bright, marble, and classical. The tower is bronze, copper, dark glass, and blackened stainless steel. Global Construction Review described its facade as combining blackened steel, copper, and bronze. New Atlas called out the same dark metallic mix.

That palette gave Brooklyn a skyline object unlike anything else in the borough.

It also gave the internet an easy joke.

The Brooklyn Tower has been compared to a villain's lair, a neo-Gothic fortress, and a fantasy citadel. Those comparisons are not entirely unfair. The tower's darkness is amplified by its height, and its faceted crown gives it a theatrical severity that most luxury condo towers try to avoid.

The harder question is whether that identity helped sell apartments.

The building launched into a complicated luxury market. Sales of the condominiums began in 2022, and later reporting described the condo portion as struggling badly. Curbed reported in 2025 that only 23 of 143 condos had sold after a rocky start. 6sqft reported the same figure when sales relaunched under Silverstein Properties, after Silverstein took control of the building's unsold units and the property was marketed with a new address at 85 Fleet Street.

That does not mean the architecture alone caused the slow sales. Interest rates, luxury-market timing, pricing, financing, amenities, ownership changes, and the broader risk of buying into a new supertall all matter. But it does show the gap between creating a skyline symbol and creating a product buyers rush to own.

The Brooklyn Tower is not bland. It is not polite. It does not vanish into the glassy background of Downtown Brooklyn. It takes the geometry of a landmark bank and turns it into a thousand-foot dark vertical object that can be recognized immediately.

That is an achievement.

It is also a risk.

Most high-end residential towers sell serenity: light, glass, views, discretion, a life above the city but not in conflict with it. The Brooklyn Tower sells drama. It looks designed, authored, and almost confrontational. For some buyers, that is the appeal. For others, it may be too much personality for a home.

Either way, Brooklyn's first supertall did not arrive quietly.

It rose from a landmark bank, borrowed its hidden hexagons, wrapped itself in dark metal, and gave the borough a tower that people could argue about from every angle.