Mr. Beninati’s intention was to build an 80-story, 900-foot-tall tower, the latest addition to Billionaires’ Row, a stretch of Midtown where developers have erected skyscrapers with apartments selling in the $5,000-a-square-foot range, affordable only to those whose assets exceed mere millions. But he alienated local residents and was unable to secure financing.

Gamma took control of the site early this year and brought in the architect Thomas Juul-Hansen to design a sleek but somewhat smaller tower, though still more than 800 feet tall. The renderings available from the developer show only the front doors and the eight lowest floors.

Rather than marketing the apartments to wealthy foreigners who could afford Mr. Beninati’s planned $43.5 million penthouse, Mr. Kalikow said the tower would attract wealthy New Yorkers. “This is very much New York,” he said.

But Mr. Kalikow said he had been hampered by local opponents, many of whom live in the Sovereign, a 47-story apartment building directly across the street from Gamma’s site. They do not want to lose their view, Mr. Kalikow said.

In an irony not lost on anyone, the Sovereign was the overly tall luxury tower that residents complained about when it opened its doors in 1975. The architecture critic Paul Goldberger, writing for The New York Times, described it at the time as “brutally destructive of the scale of 58th Street and Sutton Place.”

Alan Kersh, a resident of the Sovereign and the founding president of the East River Fifties Alliance, which opposes the new tower, said there was a great deal of opposition in his building. But with an apartment on the 26th floor, his views would be blocked regardless of whether Gamma’s proposed tower or a smaller building was built.

The rezoning, he said, would protect residential side streets in the area from tall towers. Developers would be able to increase the size of their buildings by a couple of floors if they included units reserved for poor and moderate-income tenants who live in the area.