By Matt Chaban 7/10/12 5:46pm

Starchitects

Updating Park Avenue: an early conceptual rendering by L&L of the potential for 425 Park. Might these designers do them one better? (ll-holding.com)

Everybody But Frank Gehry: Four Top Starchitects Finalists for 425 Park Redesign

It is one of the stranger developments in the city, but it could also prove to be one of the most spectacular. David Levinson is poised to tear down most, but not all, of 425 Park Avenue—were he to totally demolish the tower, what he could replace it with could be quite a bit smaller, given a quirk in the 1961 zoning that reduced the density of the site, where a rather unremarkable and outdated 1958 tower now stands.

To fix this problem, L&L Holdings, Mr. Levinson’s development firm, tapped 11 of the planets top architects to sort out this challenge. He has now winnowed the designers for 425 Park down to four, according to The Times, with an unveiling expected shortly. All of them are Pritzker Prize winners with a mixed history in the city. Read More

By Matt Chaban 6/27/12 11:00am

Best Laid Plans

Picture 8

Faulty Towers: Midtown Needs a Makeover, with Twice as Tall Towers, But Can Mayor Bloomberg Get It Right?

It was but one line in Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s State of the City address in January, but it could prove to be one of the biggest of his dozen years in office.

“In the area around Grand Central, we’ll work with the City Council on a package of regulatory changes and incentives that will attract new investment, new companies and new jobs,” the mayor said from the stage inside Morris High School in the Bronx.

Hizzoner spent more time talking about Cornell’s Roosevelt Island tech campus, keeping the Hunt’s Point Produce Market from moving across the Hudson to Jersey and efforts to further expand the blue-collar workforce on the waterfront. Even the redevelopment of nearby East Fordham Road and Webster Avenue got equal billing with these vague pronouncements about “the area around Grand Central.”

Despite the scant mention, it turns out that for an administration that has never shied away from big plans, this may be one of the biggest projects yet. Read More

By Matt Chaban 6/21/12 11:20am

Skyscraper Living

9 Photos

One57 Tops Out

That’s It? A Look at the Tallest Apartment Building In New York that Doesn’t Look That Tall, One57

It was announced yesterday that One57 had topped out, making it (upon completion) the tallest residential building in the city, and thus the Western Hemisphere. Upon hearing the news, The Observer decided to take a rather sweaty stroll up Eight Avenue from NYO HQ to Columbus Circle to see what this record-setting 1,005-foot tower looked like.

The answer? Not much! Read More

By Matt Chaban 6/08/12 4:43pm

Best Laid Plans

Might Midtown, 1935. (Ephemeral New York)

Never Mind Midtown, We’ve Been Arguing About Skyscrapers for As Long As We’ve Been Building Them

What perfect timing our good friend Christopher Gray has. No sooner has the city begun debating in earnest the merits of whether or not Midtown East should be upzoned to allow for ever bigger skyscrapers than The Times’ Streetscapist reminds us that such debates, always fervent, are as old as the skyscrapers themselves, stretching back a century and a half. Read More

By Matt Chaban 6/07/12 9:00pm

Best Laid Plans

Needs work. (Globe Images)

Is Midtown Too Small? City Planning Outlines Ideas for Adding (Much) Taller Towers

How many New Yorkers, after a long day of work, are headed home, a little beaten down, look up and think to themselves, “You know what Midtown needs? Bigger buildings.”

Probably not very many. But this is a question the Department of City Planning and the Bloomberg administration are very seriously considering as they work on rezoning a huge swath of Midtown East, the vaguest details of which were revealed to the land use committees of Community Boards 5 and 6 last night.

The goals of the plan, first revealed, also vaguely, in the mayor’s State of the City address, are quite reasonable. Like it has with so much of the city, from the Far West Side to the Brooklyn waterfront to downtown Jamaica, Queens, the administration wants to revise a set of zoning principals first laid out in 1961, and changed little since.

Meanwhile the world has, as has the city, and in order to stay competitive with places like London, Shanghai and Abu Dhabi, Midtown, where 80 percent of buildings are 50 years old or older, must modernize. “We need to think of the global context,” said Edith Hsu-Chen, director of the department’s Manhattan office. Read More

By Matt Chaban 6/05/12 11:53am

Dizzying Designs

Hello Midtown.

Just How Crazy Will New York’s Tallest New Building Be? The 432 Park Avenue Pics You’ve Been Waiting For

Last week, The Journal got its hands on a 67-page marketing packet for Harry Macklowe and CIM’s soaring tower at 432 Park Avenue, the former Drake Hotel site where the developers are working on the tallest tower in the entire city, apartment or otherwise.

In their write-up, Journal journalist Eliot Brown and Craig Karmin mentioned that inside the packet “are a collection of striking images of what would be the tallest residential tower in the U.S. at 1,395 feet as well as a number of other interesting factoids about the tower, called 432 Park.”

Those factoids are below, but what obviously whet The Observer‘s appetite most was the promise of “striking images” (we have a thing for those) that were sadly absent from The Journal‘s report. But no more. Read More

By Matt Chaban 5/30/12 10:48pm

barnettiquette

7 Photos

The Great White Whale

Check Out a Bonkers Proposal for Gary Barnett’s 1,250-Foot Broadway Tower

Blind item: Which architecture firm displayed a mind-boggling model for a skyscraper that may well never be built, at least in this lovely form, on the corner of Broadway and 57th Street for Gary Barnett? The model was on display last night inside one of the firm’s downtown projects, which is all The Observer can say lest we give the devilish designers away. Read More

By Matt Chaban 5/22/12 3:55pm

Stratospheric Sales

Jagged! (Atelier Jean Nouvel)

You Can Soon Buy a Piece of MoMA! Or At Least a Piece of Its 1,050-Foot Condo Tower

Last year, The Observer discovered that Jean Nouvel’s soaring MoMA Tower—called “the most exhilarating addition to the skyline in a generation” by The Times‘ architecture critic—would not be a jagged victim of boom time hubris but in fact a real part of the skyline after all. Hines, the project’s developer, filed amended plans for the tower last July, showing that even at its Burden’d height of 1,050 feet, the Pritzker prize would still rise.

Now, more encouraging news that this project will actually become a reality: Hines has tapped Corcoran Sunshine to market the MoMA Tower, officially known as the Torre Verre, according to Crain’s, which means sales can’t be too far away Read More

By Matt Chaban 5/18/12 4:38pm

Stratospheric Sales

Are these $90 million views? (Extell)

Billionaires, Act Fast! Turns Out One57 Is 50 Percent Sold Out

If only Gary “The Best” Barnett were editing The Times, the Gray Lady wouldn’t have buried the lede.

“I think the story got a little carried away,” Mr. Barnett told The Observer by phone this afternoon. He was referring to a report in today’s Times that Extell, Mr. Barnett’s development company, had sold the penthouse at his 1,005-foot One57 luxury tower for somewhere in the neighborhood of $90 million to $100 million.

We asked how—and why—the sale had been kept under wraps for a few of months now, even as the price was raised from $98 million to $115 million in the face of the sale of Sandy Weill’s $88 million spread at 15 Central Park West. “We wanted to tie the two together,” he said, “the penthouse announcement and the fact that we’re 50 percent sold. We thought 50 percent would be the big news, but shows what we know.”

As though he doesn’t know exactly what he is doing.

Still, Mr. Barnett has a point: The Times totally ignored (downplayed) the 50-percent-sold news, not mentioning it only once. (See Correction below.) Read More

By Matt Chaban 5/14/12 5:20pm

Road Rage

Coming to a Midtown intersection near you. (NYC DOT)

6½th Avenue Gets Greenlight: Pedestrian Passageway Approved by Community Board, Installation in June

“I think this is a very important opportunity for this community to back this avenue, which was given to the developers decades ago,” Nancy Goshow said last Thursday night, during a meeting of Community Board 5. “The developers have gotten all the benefits for too long, and it is time we as a community take back these spaces and really push them to be improved and made as nice as possible.”

Ms. Goshow was one of a majority of board members who declared her support for what has come to be known as 6½th Avenue, a Department of Transportation proposal to link a series of arcades and public plazas running from 51st to 57th streets between Sixth and Seventh avenues. The spaces were created through a special zoning district in the 1980s and early ’90s, and are made up of Zuccotti-like privately owned public space, or POPS. In exchange for building the spaces, developers got the opportunity to build bigger buildings.

Last year, the community board, at the suggestion of Friends of POPS, a pro-POPS civic group, asked the Department of Transportation to study ways it might connect these spaces. They are already a popular pedestrian thoroughfare, especially during lunch time and at rush hour, providing a less hectic alternative to the avenues on either side. The board wanted to make the spaces even more inviting. Read More