A kid-friendly way to explore the tallest towers in New York City, Chicago, Miami, Los Angeles, Hong Kong and Shanghai. Every tower sits on a real map, with a photo, its height, and a few things worth knowing about it.
Explore — Tap any pin or photo to fly to a tower and read its story.
Compare — Every tower in the city, ranked tallest to shortest with height bars.
Map Hunt — Find a described tower on the map. Wrong guesses unlock hints and cost stars.
Rank It — Drag four or five towers into order by height, age or floor count.
Quiz — Ten photo questions: which is taller, which came first, which has more floors.
Every tower belongs to one of four eras, shared across all the cities so the colours mean the same thing everywhere. How full each era is says something about the city — Chicago is strongest in the Modernist years, nearly all of Miami's towers are modern, and Los Angeles has only three older than 1950, because for fifty years the city banned anything taller than 150 feet.
Heights, floor counts and dates come from Wikipedia, checked building by building against each tower's infobox. Heights follow the CTBUH convention and are given in feet: spires count, antennas don't. That is why the Empire State Building is listed at 1,250 ft to the top of its spire rather than 1,454 ft to the tip of its broadcast antenna, and why Willis Tower is 1,451 ft rather than 1,707 ft.
Photographs come from Wikimedia Commons and belong to their photographers, each of whom is named on the tower's card alongside the licence the photograph was published under — click either one to reach the original. Map tiles are Esri World Topo Map. Buildings still under construction are left out, so the tallest tower in each city is one you can actually go and look at.
One entry bends the rules on purpose. Shanghai's Oriental Pearl Tower is a television tower rather than a building — nobody lives or works in it, so height lists usually leave it out. It is here because it is the first thing anyone looks for in Shanghai, and because you can ride a lift to the top of it.
How you may reuse what's here, who owns the photographs, and what the site collects about you (nothing).