Tom Wolfe coined the term “Social X-ray” to describe the wealthy Upper East Side wives of investment bankers, women who were impossibly thin and impossibly wealthy. The same description might fit a new generation of New York skyscrapers, the skinny towers piercing through the streets around the edges of Central Park.

They are the architectural embodiment of economic disparity, an expression of former mayor Michael Bloomberg’s desire to attract the world’s deracinated billionaires . They cast shadows on the park and silhouettes above it, and for some it is too much, too fast. But New York is a city of towers and this latest manifestation is a natural evolution of a skyline that has always adapted to economic imperative.

New York’s first skinny skyscraper was the absurdly extruded Flatiron building. Completed in 1902, it set an example but its sharp-corner site made it unusual. Four years later came the attenuated tower of the Woolworth building; it remains one of the most elegant. At first towers were skinny because workers needed to be near a window, but electric light and air-conditioning soon fixed that. Then the trouble was elevators, whose cables could only reach a certain height before becoming too heavy. That has been solved, too.