Move over, Manhattanhenge.
City residents are gushing over “Sauronhenge,’’ the newly coined phrase for an astronomical phenomenon involving the sun aligning with the top of the “evil”-looking Brooklyn Tower — looking akin to Sauron’s lair from the flick “Lord of the Rings.’’
Dozens of Brooklynites lined up at the intersection of Dekalb and Vanderbilt avenues in Clinton Hill last week for the perfect glimpse of the stunning sight.
“The rumors are true!” an enthralled commentator wrote in a “Lord of the Ring” sub Reddit, which touts more than a million members.
The “Manhattanhenge”-inspired viewing event gained attention when Park Slope-based urban planner Kevin Clyne decided to calculate when the sun would appear right above the meme-ified black Brooklyn skyscraper – a scene that fans say resembles Sauron’s glowing, fiery eye atop Barad-dûr.
“People talk about that building all the time and sort of how it looks like something out of ‘Lord of the Rings,’ ” Clyne told The Post of the quirky, online fascination with the SHoP Architects-designed tower.
“I’ve just always wondered if the sun would ever align perfectly with the top of the building.”
The phenomenon is reminiscent of Manhattanhenge, when New Yorkers watch in awe as the setting sun aligns perfectly with the city grid every once in awhile.
Clyne said the view near his Brooklyn home was always “too far south” to tell if “Sauronhenge” would ever happen.
He said it wasn’t until he moved to Park Slope and “boredom” hit that he figured out the alignment dates – Aug. 8 to 13 from 6:25 p.m. to 6:35 p.m., to be exact – using “back-of-napkin” math to calculate the perfect time and place, he said in a now-viral New York Groove blog post.
“I thought it’d be a nerdy, niche story that would just get some likes online” — hardly the response it got, he said.
A Reddit user wrote last Monday, “My lady and I both saw the article and then decided to walk over [t]his evening,
“There were like 30 people there, it was great.”
Clyne said he almost didn’t attend last Tuesday evening’s viewing, which drew even more people, out of fear his calculations were wrong.
“At the start of the week, I started getting Instagram DMs from just strangers tagging me in their photos,” he said. “I didn’t realize people were going to actually go check it out.
“I think it was pretty amazing, how many people turned out with such short notice,” Clyne said. “I saw online people commenting like, ‘When’s it going to be next year? I’m sad I missed it.’ So I think it might end up being a thing from now on.”
The sight has drawn both “Lord of the Rings” fans and “people just fascinated by ‘evil’-coded architecture,” according to New York Groove.
The mass fascination with the supertall Brooklyn Tower in Downtown Brooklyn — the borough’s first skyscraper when it was erected in 2023 — is undoubtedly owed to how omnipresent it is along the skyline, Clyne said.
“You can still sort of see it everywhere,” he said. “I take the train from Grand Army Plaza, and even there, it just sort of looms over the trees. … It makes itself known, like no matter where you are.”
A Reddit user wrote, “I see the tower directly from my window on Queens [sic]. “I feel like Gondor.”
The fact that the 1,066-foot-tall luxe residential tower at 9 Dekalb Ave. is a menacing onyx hue with battlement-like spires among gray and glass surrounding architecture doesn’t help it’s “evil” reputation, the urban planner said.
“It’s very divisive,” Clyne said. “The fact that it’s like, almost pitch black is rare for a skyscraper nowadays. “And it does look kind of evil.”
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