http://www.nysun.com/article/71282
At Home Among the Clouds
By FRANCIS MORRONE
February 14, 2008
New York is again reaching for the sky, as the city has perhaps not done since the 1920s. Developer Larry Silverstein recently announced that his forthcoming apartment building and hotel at 99 Church Street would be 912 feet high. That will make the Robert A.M. Stern-designed structure the tallest residential building in New York.
Until recently, all of the city's super-tall buildings have been office buildings. New Yorkers have never really lived all that high up in the air. The fabled penthouses of Park Avenue or Central Park West were ever only 300 or 400 feet high. By the standards of history and of many other places, that's pretty high up. But by the standards of Manhattan skyscrapers, a handful of which rise more than 1,000 feet, it's not much.
Today, the city's tallest residential building, in whole or in part, is the Trump World Tower (on First Avenue between 47th and 48th streets). At 861 feet, it has had that title since 2001 — before which it was held for 14 years by CitySpire (on 56th Street between Sixth and Seventh avenues), which is mixed-use with apartments in its higher reaches. The Trump Tower (Fifth Avenue at 56th Street), also mixed-use, reigned between 1983 and 1987, taking the top spot from the Waldorf Towers part of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. But while the Waldorf had permanent apartments, it was primarily a transient hotel. The highest all-residential building between 1926 and 2001 — an amazing run for such a title in New York City — was the 541-foot Ritz Tower, on 57th Street at Park Avenue.
The Ritz Tower was an "apartment hotel." Though they were for permanent and not transient residents, units in apartment hotels did not — or were not supposed to — have kitchen facilities. That exempted the buildings from the tenement house laws and certain fire regulations that applied to all apartment buildings. In fact, many apartment hotel units were built with serving pantries equipped with refrigerators, running water, and outlets to which electrical stoves could be attached. In 1926, as the Ritz Tower was being readied for occupancy, the press implicated it in a sweeping move by the state's Tenement House Commission to declare illegal many of the apartment hotels going up in the city. Arthur Brisbane, the former Hearst journalist who was the developer of the Ritz Tower, protested that his building was falsely implicated — that it contained but two kitchens on its 42 floors. One kitchen served the building's tenants. The other was in Brisbane's own duplex apartment. There the matter rested.
Brisbane hired Emery Roth to design the building. Roth, more than any other architect, pioneered the "mansions in the clouds" style of Manhattan living. He designed Central Park West classics such as the San Remo, the Eldorado, and the Majestic. Roth and Brisbane, however, had some difficulties getting the design of the Ritz Tower just to their liking, and brought in Thomas Hastings to contribute to the design. Hastings had been the partner of the late John Carrère, and their credits included the New York Public Library. Late in his career, Hastings grew interested in the design of tall buildings. (In fact, the firm of Shreve, Lamb & Harmon, which designed the Empire State Building, grew out of Carrère & Hastings.) Classical devices enliven the Ritz Tower's sleekly telescoping stepped-back masses, and the obelisk finials are highly reminiscent of those on Hastings's contemporaneous Standard Oil Building at 26 Broadway. There's also a definite Jazz Age quality to the Ritz Tower, reminding us that the jazziest part of the Jazz Age wasn't marked by Art Deco, but by an easygoing classicism.
Contrast its design with that of the Trump World Tower. Donald Trump's building was designed by the Polish architect Marta Rudzka. Outraged neighbors opposed its construction; they were particularly concerned about its tremendous height. I myself have been known to consider certain buildings as too tall. In the end, though, it's the quality of design that matters. Trump World Tower is very successful on its own terms. It's the terms that are problematic. Basically, the building is an undifferentiated dark glass mass, a shiny object meant to register as such — and as nothing more. Sustained viewing is not only unrewarding, but also psychologically jarring.
Mr. Stern can handle tremendous scale because he understands that good buildings are made of varied and sensibly interrelated units. It's an old-fashioned notion to be sure — the same as that which informs the Ritz Tower's design. It's why his 550-foot apartment building, 15 Central Park West, works so well. Its rhythmical fenestration, moldings, and varied roofline are the sorts of devices New York skyscraper architects, all the way through the Art Deco era, knew humanized their tall buildings. Let's be clear: It's not so much that a style becomes passé in architecture as that the purposes a style serves become passé. In this case, humanizing the tall building is the purpose that has become, for the most part, hopelessly unchic.
Perhaps the best thing about 15 Central Park West is its beautiful limestone exterior, which creates a pocket of warm, shimmering light that benefits all the buildings around it. Mr. Stern plans to use limestone again at 99 Church St., which Mr. Silverstein says will be completed in 2010.
Just as some Turtle Bay residents were concerned that Trump World Tower would overwhelm the United Nations Secretariat Building, some have voiced concern that 99 Church Street will overpower the adjacent Woolworth Building. Given that three 1,000-foot-plus towers have been approved for the former World Trade Center site, I think the Woolworth Building will be overwhelmed anyway. And from the renderings,
99 Church Street — with its slender profile and subtle massing — could improve the ground zero towers by placing them in a sensible sequence with the Woolworth Building.
A worrisome thing about the present boom is that at least twice before in New York did flurries of super-tall buildings run smack into colossal economic meltdowns — think of the crash of 1929 and the fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s. But the histories of cities are full of surprises. Who just a few years ago had not ceded the tall-building sweepstakes to Hong Kong, Dubai, or Kuala Lumpur? Who just a few years ago didn't think that New Yorkers just weren't interested anymore? Well, apparently we are.
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http://www.nysun.com/article/71293
Living the Highest Life
By BRADLEY HOPE
February 14, 2008
While New Yorkers who inhabit the penthouses atop the tallest residential buildings in Manhattan are members of an exclusive group, an even loftier rank exists: the owner of the top-floor penthouse in the city's tallest apartment building. The two men who now share this title are a managing director at the Blackstone Group, Chinh Chu, and a real estate investor, Dominick D'Alleva. Each owns a half-floor penthouse on the 90th floor of Trump World Tower.
But like so much in the world of real estate, this distinction can be fleeting.
Donald Trump's 860-foot high-rise, at 845 United Nations Plaza at 47th Street, is about to be "trumped" by Larry Silverstein's new condominium-hotel at 99 Church St. The new tower, which is to stand at 912 feet and whose units will go on sale in a year, will include a 4,800-square-foot top-floor penthouse with 15-foot ceilings and outdoor space.
"It will be the superlative apartment in a superlative building," a senior managing director at Corcoran Sunshine, Daniel Cordeiro, said. The brokerage firm, which is marketing the building, floated a special balloon with a camera 900 feet above ground to take 360-degree photographs mimicking the penthouse's view.
From that vantage point, a resident can look down about 100 feet at the filigreed cornices of the Woolworth Building, nearly every bridge on the East and Hudson rivers, City Hall, the Empire State Building, and the Statue of Liberty. Brooklyn, Queens, New Jersey, and parts of Long Island are also visible.
Despite being bested by about five floors, Mr. Trump said in an interview that he wasn't worried about the competition. Mr. Silverstein's building "can't compete with Trump World Tower," he said. "It doesn't have the location, the United Nations. You can't compete with that. ... You can see out to the Hamptons."
Mr. Silverstein's building, between Park Place and Barclay Street, will have 80 floors. While that is fewer than Trump World Tower, developers use different systems for numbering floors, and Mr. Trump's building will be 52 feet shorter.
The architect
Robert A.M. Stern is designing 99 Church St., including the terraces that will be featured in the 10 penthouses planned for the top eight floors of the building.
"This is not just some balcony," Mr. Stern said. "They are room-size spaces where you can dine and sit."
After reciting a few snippets of the 1937 hit "The Penthouse Serenade," Mr. Stern said the allure of living "at the top" is as old as New York's building boom.
"It's like standing on a great bow of a ship or the cabin of a plane," he said. "The city is at your feet. There is a whole romance to it." Membership to the clique of homeowners who look down on New York comes at a high price.
Last year, Blackstone's Mr. Chu top floor — and more than 10,000 square feet of the floor below it — of the bronze-tinted glass Trump World Tower, according to property records. Mr. D'Alleva paid about $13.5 million for a penthouse in 2006, the records show. If Mr. Silverstein's penthouses sell in the $7,000-a-square-foot range that similar properties in Mr. Trump's building fetch, the topmost penthouse could sell for nearly $37 million. Such a sum could be a stretch, however, as the average price a square foot in the financial district, where 99 Church St. is situated, was $1,106 in the fourth quarter of 2007, compared with $1,691 a square foot on the East Side, where the Trump tower stands, according to data from the real estate appraisal firm Miller Samuel.
Mr. Silverstein is building so high at 99 Church St. to make the project more economical. The developer is including a public park between his building and the Woolworth building as part of the project, which means the building's footprint can be just 20,000 square feet. To make it profitable, there must be more units to sell; the answer is to build tall.
"Since we're building a public space, the footprint is smaller," Mr. Silverstein said. "This necessitated a slender, very tall tower." The development will include 143 luxury apartments, including the penthouses, atop a 22-story, five-star Four Seasons Hotel, he said.
Mr. Silverstein bought the 11-story office building from Moody's in partnership with the California State Teachers' Retirement System for $170 million in 2006. Marketing will begin in about a year and residents will be able to move in sometime in 2011. The building will play a role in the network of buildings the developer is constructing at the World Trade Center, providing meeting space and accommodation for people doing business downtown.
"I expect some people who work at the World Trade Center to live in the building," he said. "It would also not surprise me if foreign buyers would come and see this as a superb opportunity to live one block away from some of the most significant architecture in the city."