Sauronhenge is calling. Are you ready?
What if Brooklyn had its own uniquely evil solar phenomenon? Well good news, now we do!
If you live in or have visited Central Brooklyn, you’ve probably had the thought that the Brooklyn Tower — the 1,066 ft tall, relatively recent development and Brooklyn’s first super tall skyscraper — feels a bit uncanny. The discourse has decided that it looks foreboding, dour, even pure evil. And everyone agrees it most certainly looks like something out of Lord of the Rings.
That thing has a name: Barad-dûr. (I’ll admit, I had to look it up. I’ve just been calling it the Sauron tower like everyone else.)
The Brooklyn Tower, the neo-deco supertall by SHoP Architects is coated in a blackened stainless steel and bronze facade that gives it its imposing stature. It stands in pretty stark contrast to some of the generic glass boxes around it. I legitimately think it’s great architecture.
And if you’ve ever seen the tower around sunset like myself, you’ve maybe wondered: Will the sun ever set in a way so that it lines up perfectly with the top of the building, thus glowing like the Eye of Sauron atop the Tower and ready to send Nazgûl swooping over Prospect Park and blanket Kings County in a shadow as thick as the ash over Mount Doom?? No, just me?
Every time July rolls around, I’m bombarded with headlines about the return of Manhattanhenge and I won’t lie, as someone who could use a little more whimsy in his life, it makes me jealous. For the uninitiated, Manhattanhenge is a twice-a-year occurrence when the setting sun aligns perfectly with the Manhattan street grid, turning every major east-west roadway into a golden canyon of Instagram posts and a cacophony of horns. But I don’t live in Manhattan, let alone want to spend any time there. So I thought to myself—what if Brooklyn had its own uniquely evil solar phenomenon? After all, we’ve already produced both Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries—clearly we have a knack for dark towers and concentrated power.
Now, I don’t know much about astronomy, but I am an urban planner and I’ve spent a whole career working with maps, coordinate reference systems, and models of the Earth. I’ve worked with enough spatial geometry to understand the basic math we need to figure this out. I also do know that the world is ready for Sauronhenge and I’m determined to set out to figure out if, where, and when it’ll happen. It’ll be easiest if we start with the where and work backwards.
(Some due diligence revealed that the Eye of Sauron is not actually physically joined with Barad-dûr in the books. Apparently that was just creative license used in the Peter Jackson films, but we love show-biz, baby, so let’s run with it!)
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