How do you take the measure of a New York City more physically transformed than at any time since the 1920s? The new glass “downtowns” that have exploded in the last decade and a half in Long Island City and over in Jersey City. Hudson Yards’ crystalline shafts to the far west. Residential towers marching in lock step along the Queens and Brooklyn edges of the East River. The skinny supertalls slicing into the view of Central Park.

There has never been a better time to give Gotham a fresh look, and so I headed to the exalted altitude of New York’s first supertall: the Empire State Building, which has just spent $165 million and four years meticulously revamping the experience of getting to — and appreciating — the views from its two vertiginous observatories on the 86th and 102nd floors. Simultaneously, its designers have tried to banish the things visitors hate about the observation-deck trek: the lines, the crowds, the congestion.