Starwood Capital's Baccarat Hotel & Residences won't even be the priciest new tower on 53rd Street.

The sales office for 20 West 53rd Street, Starwood Capital's Baccarat-branded hotel and condo tower isn't having its grand opening until next week, but the fancy glass maker turned hotelier has already settled on a price for its crown jewel. The dark crystal's penthouse unit is asking $60 million, according to BuzzBuzzHome, which got its hands on the asking price.

A call to the sales office didn't yield any additional details, but they did confirm the pricing of the top-floor penthouse, or "the pinnacle," as Baccarat puts it. For $60 million, the buyer will get a duplex with 7,381 square feet of interior floor space, plus a 417-square foot balcony, according to BuzzBuzzHome. The unit has five bedrooms and 5.5 baths (the master with a floating sculptural tub). No word on whether or not chandeliers will be included.

The sleek, black SOM-designed tower will rise to 46 stories and contain just 61 condominiums. The latest offering plan, filed on Thursday with the Attorney General's office, puts the building's total price—that is, the combined total asking price of all of its residential units, but not the hotel rooms (151 at latest count, up from 115 last year)—at a hair above $523 million. The cheapest condo listed so far with BuzzBuzzHome is a 932-square foot one-bedroom unit on the 23rd floor, asking just $2.26 million. Residences will begin at the 18th floor, according to the building's website, and will have ceilings of up to 14 feet.

The building's design details should be commensurate with its Baccarat Hotel and Resorts brand ("We're going to marry Louis XV with the modern era," Barry Sternlicht, Starwood Capital's CEO and chairman of Baccarat, told the Wall Street Journal), but prices will likely pale in comparison to those across the street at Hines' Tower Verre. The Jean Nouvel-designed spire will rise to 1,050 feet, shy of its initial height of 1,250 feet before it was clipped by the city's chief planner, Amanda Burden.

We'll wait for more renderings before deciding if the crystal company has succeeded in crafting a space that convinces residents that "life is for living" or sees to it that their "moments become sealed in memory."

It turns out that just three months ago, the agency's board approved a contract with architecture firm Skidmore Owings & Merrill to delve into a planning effort on the airport, creating conceptual designs for an entirely new main terminal—the Central Terminal Building—among other plans at the airport. A person familiar with the effort said the planning may also include renovation designs.

According to board materials, SOM, which designed Terminal 4 at JFK, has a $20.9 million three-contract for the project, much of it devoted to conceptual designs.

Just how much would it take to rebuild LaGuardia?

The Port Authority seemed to be exploring this in a fair amount of depth before the economy collapsed and it became clear how much more it would have to devote to the World Trade Center. According to a request for proposals the agency issued last year, the project would cost $3 billion to $4 billion, completed, at the earliest, by 2020.

From background in the RFP, which says that "Phase I" planning has occurred:

Phase I planning for the Project has been completed and a peer review of the planning concepts was held in November 2008. The recommended concepts all involve the demolition and replacement of the existing CTB along with the construction of new garages, roadways and other ancillary facilities. In addition, the new terminal will be designed to accommodate 17.5 million annual air passengers representing an increase in passenger capacity of 6.5 million annual air passengers. The construction cost of the overall program will be between $3 billion and $4 billion and is scheduled for completion by the end of 2020.

Prior to the economic collapse, the Port Authority had $1 billion in its 10-year capital plan for the "modernization" of LaGuardia. But with agency revenues (tolls, airport fees, etc.) down and expenses at the World Trade Center up, Port Authority officials said that money has been removed. 

ebrown@observer.com

The state's development agency on Thursday announced that it had awarded SOM design work for the first phase of its Moynihan Station project, the long-planned expansion of Penn Station into the Farley Post Office.

In the past decade, SOM has been a near constant in a project that is constantly going through gyrations. The firm's David Childs designed an earlier version of the train hall in the Farley building a decade ago—with a signature giant glass ceiling that shoots out of the Corinthian column-lined post office—and SOM has mostly been retained ever since (HOK took over for a while).

Thus the news that the firm has been retained is hardly earth-shattering, but it does signify some forward movement. 

The work—construction documents for platforms and entrances—is a bit grittier than the design the high-end firm is generally known and retained for (including the conceptual design for the train hall), although that's all that's really going on in the project right now.

For the first time ever, it looks like Moynihan Station will get a shovel in the ground, spurred in large part by an $83 million federal stimulus grant secured earlier this year with pressure from Senator Schumer. The state and the Port Authority have broken up the project into phases, focusing on extending a small concourse under Eighth Avenue used currently by Long Island Rail Road, and by creating a few new entrances along Eighth Avenue. Amtrak also signed an MOU last month, tentatively agreeing to move to the Farley building, should it ever get the money to get built.

ebrown@observer.com

More from Eliot Brown:

Bar Association: Reform Community-Developer Dealmaking

The Business of Ground Zero

Atlantic Yards and the Great Recession Groundbreaking

The Times’ Charles Bagli had a piece today on Brookfield’s development, and while the print edition had a small rendering, the online version went without it. Accordingly, I called over to the folks at Brookfield, and they gave us the pretty picture to the right.

Brookfield announced plans earlier this month to start construction on a $600 million platform over the rail tracks around June, with completion expected in 2010. The first of the office/mixed-use towers could see completion by 2013; though, as CEO Ric Clark told us a few months back, they probably won't build without a tenant

Update: 2:30 p.m.

If the renderings don't show it, these towers will be really, really tall. The one on the left is supposed to be 66 stories at 1,216 feet, while the one on the right is supposed to be 60 at 935 feet, according to a Brookfield spokeswoman.

For comparison, the Empire State Building is 1,250 feet.