There was such a fuss about adding a fourth tower to I M Pei’s three existing, landmarked Silver Towers at NYU that the plan was abandoned.  They’re considered modern masterpieces now, but when they were built in 1966 they stirred up the same kind of resentment that glass condo buildings stir up now.

In the 1970 Brian De Palma movie “Hi, Mom!” Robert De Niro plays an aspiring pornographer who lives in a crumbling walk-up across the street from one of the towers who films what he sees going on through the windows.  Eventually he joins forces with a band of revolutionaries to blow up the building, which they all consider a bastion of middle-class propriety.  That’s a notion that would be inconceivable now.