On Monday, The Observer was atop the Standard for the launch party of ASAP. Dizzy with champagne, we did a double-take while waiting for the elevator on our way out. It was not the booze, but indeed the World Trade Center had been lit up for the holidays, just like last year. Now, with Read More
It’s the great white whale of Manhattan retail.
Aside from Walmart, Nordstrom is the store every retail broker in the city dreams of harpooning and reeling into a new home. One prominent broker familiar with the store, the amount of space it needs and the rents it would probably be willing to pay estimates that the commission for handling its lease would be around $10 million.
But like a leviathan lurking beneath the waves, the department store has offered only fleeting glimpses around the city, most notably at several development sites and a few existing assets with the capacity to accommodate its sprawling footprint.
The scuttlebutt nowadays: Nordstrom is contemplating one of two leases, one at the West Side rail yards with the Related Companies or another at the base of Extell Development’s soaring new residential tower now rising at 157 West 57th Street.
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In September, retail brokerage veteran Patrick Breslin joined Studley as executive vice president of East Coast Retail Services, a division that, until now, the international real estate firm never had reason to focus on. The former president of Grubb & Ellis’s U.S. retail division and a retail broker at CBRE, Mr. Breslin, 50, spoke about his strategy at the International Council of Shopping Centers this week, his goals for Studley’s new East Coast Retail division and father Jimmy Breslin’s views on commercial real estate.
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If the lingering after effects of the recession and Manhattan’s already arduous construction environment weren’t challenging enough to builders in the city, the Department of Transportation’s annual holiday construction embargo is about take effect.
Starting tomorrow and in effect through January 2, 2012, the rules prohibit construction projects from blocking streets and walkways in various areas of the city, including 30th to 60th Streets river to river in midtown.
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We always kind of knew this intuitively, but The Architect's Newspaper did a really nice job of putting World Trade Center retail into perspective. Read More
Attendance at the newly opened 9/11 memorial has been underwhelming, to say the least. Despite the millions of dollars that went into the project, over 30% of people who have reserved tickets to visit the site in recent months have failed to show, DNAinfo reports.
It's not all bad news, though. Despite the AWOL ticket holders, tens of thousands of people are still visiting the site each week. Read More
One of the enduring challenges at the World Trade Center—besides who will lease up the offices—has been what the base of Tower 1 would look like. Fears persisted that the 185-foot concrete shell demanded by the N.Y.P.D. would look like exactly that, a giant bunker. The solution, arrived at by a harried team of architects in less than a month back in 2005, was waves of crenelated glass that would turn the entire structure into a giant crystal.
The only problem was, that approach proved almost impossible to produce when the fabricators began creating mock-ups of the structure earlier this year. The glass would shatter too easily, a major issue for a high-traffic tower that could be susceptible to another attack. The architects at SOM returned to the drawing board and created a solution that is at once very similar to and totally different from their original proposal, a new plan that was approved yesterday by the board of the Port Authority.
The main goal was achieving an aesthetic solution to this ongoing challenge, though it turns out the biggest different between the two plans is economic—the new curtain wall will cost less than half the price of the original one, $37.2 million. Read More
In greater New York City, there is a total of 11.3 million square feet of office product under construction with another 33.1 million square feet proposed. That makes a grand total of 44.4 million square feet that will or could be delivered in the next few years.
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It was only a year ago that the St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church beside the World Trade Center looked doomed, at least to a side street if not all together. But Andrew Cuomo, in one of his first direct acts at the Port Authority, brokered a deal to put the church back in its pride-of-place spot across from the 9/11 Memorial, as George Pataki promised a decade ago.
The Architect's Newspaper looks into the new arrangement and turns up some new details about the plans for the church, as well as some new renderings that make a compelling case for the church. Read More
Much as we have been enjoying the work of Michael Kimmelman lately, no one stokes the critical fires like Ada Louise Huxtable. The grand dame of the business, Ms. Huxtable writes all too infrequently for The Journal—only six times a year, but not because that is all the paper will give here but instead it is all she will offer them.
Today Ada Louise offers an especially intriguing look at the Empire State Building and its resurrection, an assessment really only she could offer as few others have the same lens through which to view it, having seen both its grandeur and its decay. Read More
The din of construction is rising across New York City. Apart from long-term endeavors that predate the downturn, including the rebuilding of the World Trade Center and Brooklyn’s Atlantic Yards, a spate of new projects has entered the planning and proposal phases in recent quarters, portending an uptick in development over the next several years.
The World Trace Center site may be the most famous construction project since the Tower of Babel, if not the most contentious.
But most of the work has taken place behind some 13,000 feet of blue construction fencing, and so to the extent that we have watched the progress, we’ve mostly relied on the images sent out from behind the fence—many of them the work of Joe Woolhead. The official photographer for Larry Silverstein and the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, he has spent almost every day for the past seven years documenting the slow pace of construction at Ground Zero. If it was not one of his images gracing a magazine spread or appearing in a documentary still, then he almost certainly was helping to guide the lens of Annie Liebowitz, Robert Polidori, NOVA, or Korean news crews—whomever might be parachuting in for a shoot.
No one has spent more time at the World Trade Center site than Joe Woolhead. No one knows it better. To see it through Joe Woolhead’s eyes, or lens, is to witness the halting, hectic, heartfelt transformation of the 16-acre site from ground zero to the World Trade Center, from a warzone back into a workaday corner of the city. Read More
Even with grumbles about an overzealous response to Hurricane Irene—and some disappointment that it was not a more serious storm to justify said response—the new Quinnipiac poll out this morning finds that 54 percent of New Yorkers approve of the job Mayor Michael Bloomberg is doing. That is the highest percentage since the Read More
Amidst all the commemoration and solemn ceremony for the 10th anniversary of 9/11, Charles Bagli took time off from his book leave—for his Stuyvesant Town opus—to file his first story since June 15, "Downtown’s Rebirth, 10 Years and $24 Billion Later." Mr. Bagli, always the development skeptic, reminds us just how much rebuilding the World Trade Center has cost. Read More
The city’s ironworkers and carpenters have never much gotten along. Falling somewhere between rival sports teams and armies at war, the construction unions responsible for the city’s tall buildings rarely work together—office buildings are made from steel, apartments from concrete (which is poured by the carpenter’s union). “Is there ego? There is certainly pride amongst these unions, and not a little competition,” said Gary Higby director of industry development at the Steel Institute of New York, a trade group.
But 9/11 changed that, or at least the rebuilding of 7 World Trade Center did. It was not simply a matter of camaraderie but also necessity. “Obviously, what you had to do after 9/11 was address the fundamental question of how are we going to create buildings that are as safe as can be in a post-9/11 world,” said Janno Lieber, president of World Trade Center Properties at Silverstein Properties. “The concrete core was probably the single most important of hundreds of safety innovations at 7 World Trade Center that went beyond code. It was a huge step forward for safety and structural robustness.” Read More
