The 800 Club Created with Sketch.

“This is the skyline people talk about.” It was a Wednesday evening in late May, and Warren Estis, a real estate litigator, was showing me the views from his penthouse apartment at Trump World Tower, at 47th Street and First Avenue. We were on the 86th floor, which, according to the building’s management, meant we were 810 feet above the ground. “You can see water planes landing on the East River,” he said. “I love the seaplanes when they come zooming in.”

He led me north into the home theater, from which you could see all the way up and across town to the George Washington Bridge and where the deep leather chairs reclined into divans at the touch of a button. Then he led me south, through a lavish open-plan living room, where his partner, Tatyana Enkin, was preparing tea. The two are collectors of glass art, and the living room was dense with it: crystal swans and obelisks and lilac-and-purple baubles of various abstract shapes. LED strip lighting in the ceiling made the room glow blue, then red. “Look at the World Trade Center,” Estis said, pointing downtown. Finally, he led me west.

Trump World Tower is a sleek black slab of a building that looms over the far eastern edge of Midtown Manhattan, and the view back across the island is truly remarkable. “Here you’re sitting in a chair, and you turn and you see everything,” he said. “All the iconic buildings in the city. And it’s different at night. Everything’s lit.”

But as he looked out the window his eyes flickered, a little irritated, at two new supertall condo buildings that tower above his, slightly blighting his west-facing view. To the right in the middle distance was One57, a blandly luxurious gray-blue monolith that rises to 1,004 feet and casts a significant shadow over the south side of Central Park; just to the right of that stood the even loftier 432 Park Avenue, pencil-thin and still unfinished. The design of 432 Park is more attractive than One57’s — it resembles a neat stack of pale Rubik’s Cubes — and its rapid rise has made it perhaps Manhattan’s most noticeable skyscraper. When Estis moved into Trump World Tower in 2002, his year-old home was the world’s tallest residential building. Now 432 Park dwarfs it.

Estis shot its penthouse — which is, at 1,396 feet, currently the highest condominium in the world — a derisive glance. “At a certain point, you’re too high,” he said. “You don’t want to be higher than this,” he added, meaning his own apartment. “Up there you lose the effect. You have to walk to the window to look down.”

“It’s like when you go to an art gallery,” Enkin said. “The painting has to be on eye level.”

“What’s the good of being above it all?” Estis said. “You’re missing out on the beauty of the city and the various structures. Here you have the flavor.”

Estis is, much like the man who built Trump World Tower, thickset, restless, plain speaking and motivated by a desire to win. He grew up in Little Neck, Queens, his mother a legal secretary and his father a lawyer for the Veteran’s Administration. At school, they asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up. “Rich,” Estis replied. He was 6. While in college, he rented an ice-cream truck and drove it around on an aggressive schedule — eight months out of the year. Soon after he graduated from law school he had enough money saved to buy his first piece of property: a two-family home in Bay Terrace, Queens. Now 57, he owns approximately 65 apartments and houses throughout Manhattan and Queens, and heads a 79-lawyer law firm.

Enkin, like Trump’s first and third wives, is an ex-model who grew up in the Eastern bloc. She was raised in Soviet Ukraine and worked as a hydrologist in the Siberian gulags before moving to the United States to become a model for the Elite agency and Marc Jacobs. Now 40, she works as an artist’s agent.

By living above 800 feet, Estis and Enkin are two members of an unexpectedly exclusive group in Manhattan. In my estimation, no more than 40 people currently live above that line, scattered among just three buildings (Trump World Tower, One57 and 8 Spruce Street, a Frank Gehry building downtown). But they’re just the vanguard. The city is in the midst of another building boom, one unlike any that has come before. In the past, Manhattan’s tallest buildings were filled with corporate offices; now, the most imposing skyscrapers are built as homes for some of the wealthiest people on the planet. By 2020 there are expected to be at least 14 residential skyscrapers in New York City. Many of them will block out the light for a great expanse of Central Park. A small city is being built in the sky — but for whom? I was curious to learn about them, so I set out to meet as many as I could.

Estis and Enkin were the first I got in touch with, and the most hospitable. I lingered around their apartment for hours, until the sun was setting over the Hudson. The spires of the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building suddenly illuminated, bathing the apartment in their light.

“When you’re up there,” Estis said, meaning the 432 Park penthouse, “you’re missing this. You’ll see lights. But not at this level. You never want to be level with, or looking down on, rooftops. There’s no advantage.”

“Apparently that penthouse sold for $95 million,” I said. The buyer has been reported to be the Saudi Arabian retail and real estate giant Fawaz Alhokair (432 Park’s representatives declined to comment). He made his $1.37 billion fortune by bringing outlets of Western retail chains — Topshop, Banana Republic, Zara and Gap — to the Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia and the Caucasus.

Estis shrugged, unimpressed. “They get bragging rights,” he said. Then he affected the smug tone of a 432 Park penthouse purchaser and added: “I paid more money than anyone else in the building. But I may not have the best view.”

The view may not matter in the end. According to Forbes, Alhokair lives primarily in Riyadh, so presumably 432 Park’s penthouse will become just a pied-à-terre for him — or perhaps simply an investment property, destined to remain pristinely and forever empty.

The precise number of people living above 800 feet is impossible to calculate because of the secrecy that now veils so many real estate transactions in New York. This is especially true at One57, where eight of nine condos above the 800-foot-mark have already sold. Buyers protect their identities fastidiously over there, purchasing their condos through shell corporations with impenetrable names that exist solely to mask their identities.

Tracking down the owners was a drawn-out process. I would make a trip to the New York City Registry to fetch the names and addresses of the limited-liability companies that made the purchases and try to contact them that way. For example, the top two floors of One57 make up a single duplex, Apartment 90, which sold for $100.5 million to an L.L.C. named, unhelpfully, P89-90 LLC. (It remains Manhattan’s most expensive single residence.) The lawyer representing the L.L.C., Andrea Riina, emailed me, “Your request was forwarded to the client and declined.”

I had slightly better luck with Apartment 90’s downstairs neighbor, the owner of Apartment 88. In April 2015, it was sold for $47.3 million to Pac Wholly Own L.L.C., which is associated with a Chinese airline, Pacific American. The airline is owned by the HNA Group, which is in turn owned by the billionaire Chen brothers, Feng and Guoqing. After correctly predicting in the early 1990s that Hainan, a balmy island south of Beijing, would become a kind of Chinese Riviera, they started an airline to take passengers there. Soon, they amassed a fortune. According to a 2014 Bloomberg profile, Chen Feng is a “rigorously private” man; apparently his brother is, too. I emailed Guoqing Chen’s assistant several times before she finally responded: “One57 is a company investment program, and Mr. Chen doesn’t live in One57 right now. So, I am afraid Mr. Chen can’t take the interview. Thank you so much for your consideration.” The rebuff knocked out Apartment 86 too. The L.L.C. that purchased it, One57 86 L.L.C., is registered to the same small downtown Manhattan office suite that houses Pacific American airlines.

Apartment 83 is unsold, and the owners of Apartments 85 and 82 — the billionaire retailers and business partners Lawrence Stroll and Silas Chou, respectively — “prefer not to be included in the article,” their assistant wrote. Stroll, who made his money by investing early in Tommy Hilfiger, is Canadian but a resident of Geneva, according to Forbes. Chou — an early investor in Michael Kors — lives in Hong Kong.

I had a good feeling about Apartment 81 (which lies slightly below 800 feet, but I felt I’d earned it). For a start, there was a chance its owner actually lived there. The apartment cost $55.5 million and — according to The Times’s real estate pages from the week of the sale — boasts a “galvanizing 75-foot-long entrance gallery,” a “grand salon,” four bedrooms, a “one-ton bathtub carved from a single marble slab,” “head-on views of the park to the north” and a concierge who can organize everything from “helicopter service to the Hamptons” to use of a quartz stone bed at a spa on a lower floor that has, apparently, certain healing properties. These apartments are marketed in grandiose ways. As Michael Graves, a real estate agent with Douglas Elliman, told The Times in November 2015, “Living on a full floor at One57 is probably the closest thing to being a king in the 21st century.” (To be pedantic, the world’s 15 actual kings are closer to being kings than the residents of One57 are, though there might conceivably be some overlap.)

The purchaser of Apartment 81 turned out to be a Texan named Becky Moores. Unlike her neighbors, she didn’t conceal her identity. She bought it in her own name — well, in the name of the Rebecca Ann Moores Family Trust. She married her childhood sweetheart, John, in 1963. Forty-five years later she filed for divorce, hinting at infidelity. The divorce was messy and public and the payout vast enough to afford her not only Apartment 81 but a $34.3 million apartment on One57’s 54th floor too. The settlement proved less fortuitous for fans of the San Diego Padres. John Moores was the team’s owner, and to pay the settlement he had to sell his majority share. In the process, the payroll plummeted, and the star players Jake Peavy and Adrian Gonzalez were traded off to save money. “Ultimately, the team collapsed,” says Tom Krasovic, a sports reporter at The San Diego Union-Tribune who covered the Padres for years. He seemed confident that Becky Moores would grant me an interview. “I always found her to be a very nice lady,” he told me over the telephone. “She’s very well liked and very approachable with a lot of the media.”

“Bad news,” emailed my contact for Moores. “Rebecca Moores isn’t interested in participating in your story.”

Sorting out who lives above 800 feet in Trump World Tower is slightly easier, thanks both to the tabloids and to the fact that it was built before this vogue for secrecy really took hold. Beyoncé and Jay-Z used to live up there. They rented an apartment a few floors above Estis and Enkin for a year, paying a reported $65,000 per month. The former Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter lived there, too. He sold his 5,500-square-foot apartment on the 89th floor, identical in shape and size to Estis and Enkin’s, for $15.5 million in 2012. Nowadays, their neighbors include the widow of a Delta Air Lines pilot who made a fortune in the stock market, a human rights advocate from South Africa who specializes in health care projects for the developing world, the chairman of Assist America (a global medical-emergency service) and a mysterious Asian businessman who purchased the three remaining apartments all at once, paying in cash, according to Enkin. “He’s Japanese,” she said, “but I don’t know exactly what he does.” (According to a resident and city records, his name is Chinh Chu. Chu works in finance and he is, in fact, from Vietnam. He didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

8 Spruce Street stands out among these new buildings because it’s rental-only — none of the units are for sale. Only the top three floors sit above the 800-foot line. The resident of Penthouse South, on the very top floor, agreed to meet me.

Penthouse South is tiny — so tiny it looks as if there has been some mistake. Its 453 square feet are inclusive of literally everything. It’s so incongruous amid the huge penthouses it abuts that it feels almost magical, like the secret railway platform from which the wizards take the train to Hogwarts. It was designed to be a guest or nanny’s room for one of the other penthouses, but building management rented it instead to Stellan Parr — 33, tattooed, soft-spoken and studying to be a physician assistant. He pays rent “in the low thousands.” He is a unique man: perhaps the only person of (somewhat) modest means who lives at such heights in New York. We sat at his kitchen/living room/bedroom table and admired his view, which takes in the Statue of Liberty, the curve of the East River, 1 World Trade Center and the 9/11 Memorial pools. He opened his window a fraction, and we both suddenly experienced debilitating vertigo. He closed it, and the feeling immediately dissipated.

Sometimes, Parr told me, he leaves his room to surprised glances from his neighbors — they have included a basketball player with the Brooklyn Nets and a European who used the $45,000-a-month apartment as a crash pad for the rare occasions he was in town. They have said to Parr, “I didn’t know anyone lived there.”

On a clear day in early May, I was given permission to stand on the 95th floor of 432 Park — which is, at 1,271 feet, the building’s second-highest floor, directly below the $95 million condominium. 432 Park is still partly under construction, and it took much haggling with the building’s owners before they granted me access. The two apartments that make up this floor are currently filled with dust and construction equipment, but once completed they will go on the market at around $40 million each. (This makes them roughly four times the price of, and 25 percent smaller than, Estis and Enkin’s apartment.)

I could see Trump World Tower easily from here, and I recalled Estis’s frequent assertions that his views were better. Now I had the chance to assess his claim. Looking south I could see all the way to the Atlantic. I could see how Manhattan tapered to a point at its southernmost end. Still, from this side of the building, I had to agree with Estis: The 95th floor is too high. There’s too much sky. You do have to walk up to the windows to look down.

But then I walked to a north-facing window and gazed out upon the most expensive view in the world — the view that someone was willing to pay $95 million for. (It really is the view that sells these places. The apartments aren’t that big.) I could see, at once, the whole of Central Park. But I could also see everything happening in it: children playing baseball, picnickers lying on the grass, a sea lion jumping from a rock into the water at the zoo. I could even see the splash. It was overwhelming, awe-inspiring. I felt like Gatsby — removed and superior. And then it was time for me to leave.

As my elevator descended and my ears popped, it occurred to me that I would almost certainly never take in such a view again. And in fact, maybe nobody will, if these apartments wind up becoming empty investments.

A few weeks later, via email, I received an enormous surprise. For the first time ever, a purchaser of an apartment above 800 feet in one of the mysterious new supertall condo buildings had agreed to speak with a journalist about his purchase. I was to meet him in his Fifth Avenue office on Thursday at 4 p.m.

Howard Lorber is a 67-year-old New Yorker, balding, gregarious, instantly likable. He stood at his 52nd-floor office window, which looks out over — or, I suppose, under — his future home. His apartment will be on the 67th floor, he told me, 850 feet above the ground.

“I point it out to everyone who comes in here,” he said.

I mentioned my calculation that only a few dozen people currently live above 800 feet in the city. Lorber, who works in real estate, did his own calculation and said, “Once 432 Park is filled, there’ll be 40 more.”

On his mantelpiece were photographs of him with Donald, Ivanka and Melania Trump. “I think Donald is fantastic, and he’s going to beat Hillary and be the next president,” he said. There was also a photograph of him with Mitt Romney. “I should take that one down,” he said.

Lorber grew up in the Bronx. His father was an electrical engineer, and Lorber entered the work force by the time he was 13, “flipping pizzas, pumping gas.” He went to college but hated it, so he became a sociology major because someone told him it was the easiest way to graduate. Out in the world, he wasn’t satisfied with the sort of work he could find with a sociology degree, so he went back to college and learned accounting. He became a stockbroker, then moved into insurance. Eventually, he made enough money to buy Nathan’s Famous, the hot-dog company. He’s currently chairman of the real estate firm Douglas Elliman, the very same firm that is now selling the condos at 432 Park — hence, perhaps, his willingness to be interviewed. From time to time during our conversation, he lapsed into a kind of marketing autopilot: “432 Park is an unbelievably striking building, it’s like a masterpiece, it has to be the most talked-about and revered building in New York City. ... ” But I didn’t mind the spiel because — given his expertise — he provided insightful answers to my lingering questions about the supertall boom.

“How come Trump World Tower is so much less expensive than 432 Park?” I asked.

“By New York standards it’s already an older building,” he said. “First Avenue in the 40s doesn’t command the same price as Park Avenue in the 50s. It just doesn’t. Everyone wants to live in the middle, as opposed to the ends. I guess Central Park is the equivalent of living on the water in the Hamptons. Then there are the ceiling heights, the amenities. ... ” (432 Park will have a restaurant, a fitness center and several floors of studios that the owners of the larger apartments can purchase as offices or for staff accommodation. When I walked into Lorber’s office, he was complaining to one of his associates about the price of these studios. “Seven hundred feet for $3 million, to house your staff?” he was saying. “I don’t think it’s such a good idea.” Still, he has reserved one for himself.)

I recounted to him my lack of success at One57, how I was impeded in part by the impenetrable L.L.C. names. “People do it for privacy,” he said.

“Well,” I said, “it worked.”

“If you’re wealthy,” he said, “with the world as it is, with ISIS saying they want to go after billionaires, there’s really almost no reason not to buy in an L.L.C.”

I asked him about all the emptiness up there. Will those apartments purchased as investments by foreign billionaires really remain forever vacant?

“It depends on the people,” he replied. “Some foreigners just want to get their money out of the countries they’re in. They may or may not rent them, but it’s not about making money. It’s more a matter of wanting stability, to be in a safe haven, which they believe New York City is. Look around the world. Look at all the turmoil. Argentina’s bankrupt, Brazil’s in trouble. In China the prices probably went down 20 to 30 percent last year.” But this, he added, was more an issue for One57 than for 432 Park. “One57 is geared more to foreigners; 432 Park is mostly domestic.”

“How come?” I asked.

“It ended up that way,” he said. “One57 has a hotel in it. 432 Park doesn’t. I think the foreigners like the idea of having a hotel. The locals like the privacy and the security of not having a hotel. And also, in fairness, One57 was on the market first. So they had the first shot at those people.”

This last statement made me realize just how tiny a group this is — these foreign billionaires happy to spend tens of millions on New York City apartments they may never visit. It’s a very small community, the superrich. In fact, when Lorber asked me who else I had interviewed for the story, and I mentioned Warren Estis, he broke into a huge smile and said: “I know Warren very well! He’s a client of the company! He’s a fun guy!”

It’s no surprise that Donald Trump seems to loom over life at 800 feet. Years before he coasted to the Republican nomination on a tide of populist anger, he was the first to give the superrich the chance to purchase these aloof Manhattan palaces in the sky, these physical embodiments of how the extremely wealthy operate at a remove from society. And now, in a way, his campaign is exploiting the rage this divergence has caused.

When I was at Estis and Enkin’s apartment we got to talking about Trump and the hostility that follows him around. Trump World Tower was itself constructed amid much acrimony and division — a chaotic and upsetting experience for some neighbors and a bonanza for others. Taking advantage of the city’s idiosyncratic “air rights” process, Trump quietly bought rights from the owners of several low-rise neighboring buildings — a church and a Japanese cultural center among them — until he had enough to build one gigantic tower. He undertook his maneuver with such stealth that none of the other neighbors, not even Walter Cronkite, knew what was unfolding in their backyards. When Trump’s plans were finally revealed, Cronkite made an emotional petition to the city appeals board, calling the design “demeaning” to the United Nations. “How can we allow an institution as important to the world and New York as the U.N. to be forever dwarfed by this outsize and illegal tower?”

A Trump executive, Abraham Wallach, responded by reminding the media that Cronkite himself lived in a 50-story high-rise at U.N. Plaza. “People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones,” he said.

Before setting off for Trump World Tower, I emailed the Rev. Robert J. Robbins, formerly of the Church of the Holy Family, to ask what the church did with its unexpected $10 million air-rights windfall from Trump. He declined my interview request, citing “Mr. Trump’s present high profile” as the reason. One of Estis and Enkin’s neighbors refused to let The Times photograph their apartment because they didn’t want their name associated with Trump’s in the current climate. For that reason, I felt concerned about mentioning his name to Estis and Enkin. But I needn’t have worried. They are huge fans of his and intend to vote for him.

“He’s truly impressive,” said Estis. “He gives off an aura of presence and he usually has very positive things to say to the individual he’s talking to. He makes you feel good about yourself. He’ll praise you.”

“How has he praised you?” I asked.

“One time I ran into him at the U.S. Open, and he was with a well-known name in New York real estate,” Estis said. “We shake hands, and he turns to the builder-developer and says, ‘Warren’s probably one of the best lawyers in New York City.’ ” Estis beamed. “As I said, it makes you feel good.”

Trump does like to say things that make people feel good, though the question of their veracity is often tricky. Trump World Tower’s public-relations agency repeatedly assured The Times that Estis’s apartment lay 810 feet above the ground. But then I called Marshall Gerometta, an expert in skyscraper heights at the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat.

“Only the top residential unit is above 800 feet,” he said. That’s the 90th-floor penthouse, four floors above Estis and Enkin. His figure, he told me, came from a 3-D image of the building on Google Earth. When I raised doubts about his methods, he said that he had “checked dozens of buildings this way against the actual blueprints, and it’s usually within a couple of feet of accuracy. I’m kind of the go-to guy on this.” (This is true: The Council on Tall Buildings is a respected source.)

“Is Trump known for exaggerating his buildings’ heights?” I asked.

Gerometta replied that he didn’t know about that, but he did know this: Trump was probably one of the first builders to skip floor numbers in order to inflate the total count. “What he markets as the 90th floor is often actually the 72nd floor, just to make it sound more impressive.”

“The Donald,” Gerometta said, laughing, “likes to exaggerate.” (Trump World Tower continues to dispute Gerometta’s figures but has not produced blueprints or other evidence to the contrary.)

For Estis and Enkin, the precise altitude of their apartment is ultimately immaterial. At sunset we sat at a west-facing window. The evening light filled the room, and Enkin had opened a bottle of Champagne. I suddenly remembered recent demonstrations at various Trump-owned skyscrapers across New York City.

“Was there an anti-Trump protest outside this building a couple of weeks ago?” I asked them.

Enkin smiled. Then she shrugged and said, “You only see the top of their heads.” ♦

Jon Ronson is the author, most recently, of “So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed.” He last wrote for the magazine about social-media public shaming.

Christopher Anderson is a Magnum photographer and a recipient of a Robert Capa Gold Medal Award.