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By the standards of ultraluxury Manhattan real estate, the building proposed for West 66th Street was relatively modest. At 1,800 to 3,000 square feet, the apartments in it would approximate the size of dressing rooms or wine cellars in an oligarch’s Midtown crash pad.

This would not be a tower for foreign billionaires who spend three and a half days a year in New York as a stopover between trips to Davos and Bill Gates’s house and polo matches in Argentina — though they wouldn’t be turned away. It would, instead, be marketed to “regular” families, which is to say families with two or three privately schooled children, $7 million or $8 million to spend on an apartment and the inclination to shop at Citarella without the help of staff.

Though you could imagine a scenario in which this might have generated a modicum of local good will or at least shrugging acceptance, a neighborhood preservation group known as Landmark West in September formally opposed the building. Set to stand at 775 feet, its footprint had grown over the years with the developer’s acquisition of properties adjacent to the original site.

The results of the challenge to keep the building from going up have revealed absurd gaps in the city’s zoning regulations, showing us how residential towers like this one manage to grow so tall that they command obscene prices and cast shadows that are both literal and figurative.