It Looked Familiar: An Odd Angle

Just your everyday occurrence in Manhattan: Spiderman and Silver Sable fighting Hammerhead (wearing a robot suit) on the outside of a plane. The background, though…

The generic cross-hatch and grids to indicate windows could be anywhere, but those two truncated cones on the left are easily found if you spend a lot of time in lower Manhattan: they’re part of the Brookfield Place (nee World Financial Center) complex. Here’s a view looking north up West Street:

So far, so good. You can even see the irregular line of the facade, stepping out as you go toward the small pavilion with the cone, past the second cone. On the far left, you’ve got a cascading setback on a facade that looks a lot like the far right of the comic panel. But the comic has a blocky building with fewer windows between the two cones, which is obviously not there in the photo. Just west (to the left in the photo) of Brookfield is Gateway Plaza, a group of 1970s exposed-concrete apartments. The northeast building in that complex is just south of Liberty Street, which is the street that the small bridge seen above is spanning over. So if you line things up right, looking either east or west along the line of Liberty Street, you get the Gateway building right in between the two coned-roof pavilions. Here’s an example: at Structurae.

But the Gateway building is not actually between the cones, just in line with them, while the comic drawing makes it look like the building is in the middle of Liberty Street. I suspect this was (a) a misreading of a photo by the artist, and (b) not worth nearly the amount of time I’ve spent thinking about it.