Nearby was the Time Warner Center, where they saw a three-bedroom apartment in the south tower renting for $18,000.
In some of the most desirable Manhattan towers, rents can be stunningly high.
A one-bedroom at Herald Towers rents for $2,700 a month, a leasing agent there said.
In Trump Village I and Trump Village II, the development's two rental towers, rent-stabilized studios are commanding $1,100 a month.
On a recent afternoon, in a temporary Midtown office, Mr. Kocache is discussing the council's intent to relocate downtown, and to sponsor an uplifting exhibition of works by artists who made art in vast swaths of unused office space in the towers, rent-free.
If you were a narco-trafficker, and needed to launder several million dollars a month in illegal income, for instance, you could set up several dozen Panamanian businesses, all of them entirely fictitious, and then make arrangements with the owner of the new tower to "rent" as many offices as you needed.
Mr. Akre also owns shares of American Tower, which rents space on cellphone towers through contracts that call for annual price increases.
They are virtual because rather than put up their own cell towers, they rent space from the three largest nationwide networks.
A.T. & T. doesn't build transmission towers and rent them to smaller phone companies, the way Amazon Web Services provides server infrastructure for startups (not to mention the C.I.A .. Amazon's identity and goals are never clear and always fluid, which makes the company destabilizing and intimidating.
As a boy, his cinephilia was encouraged by two of his brothers and by a man known as Mentor who ran a private video club on the 13th floor of the family's tower block, renting out a bootleg collection of 500 titles.
