Harry Grant Update

I got an email today in response to a post in this blog from August 20, 2008.

My dad is well and alive. Thanks for the amazing comments. Savy Grant

I replied:

I'm very glad to hear it. Too bad he didn't build that great building in Newark. I wonder if the people now planning a new HQ building for the Prudential know of your father's vision, and if they have anything like his ambition. Pls convey my best wishes to him, and thank you for writing.

Now, if you have no idea what I'm talking about, you can check the 2008 post, linked to above. In brief, Harry Grant was a man who wanted to build the world's tallest building in Downtown Newark in the mid-1980s. To be called "Grant USA Tower", it was to be 121 stories and over 1,750 feet tall at the top floor and 1,871 feet to the tip of a spire on top — nearly 100 feet taller than the planned height of 1 World Trade Center, which is now taller than the Empire State Building and still under construction in Downtown Manhattan. At the time I wrote that post, the Emporis buildings website had an architectural rendering of the proposed structure, but it no longer does. That site has been radically redesigned, much for the worse.
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Fortunately, there are still images of the proposal online, one at a discussion of "supertalls" moving out of Manhattan on the website Skyscraper City (search for "Grant"), and the other at SkyscraperPage.com. Curiously, the two images are very different.

The first (above) seems more like the model I saw in the waiting room of Newark Penn Station in the mid-1980s. That image is the one that appears at the Skyscraper City webpage, credited to Emporis, where it appeared in 2008. Since the German website Emporis no longer uses that artist's conception, and it is for a project that was never built, perhaps Emporis won't mind my showing it here. (Of course, if Emporis does want me to remove this image, I will.)