[NYguy]

^ You could very well see hotel and residential space at the top. As mentioned earlier, they are studying the exact mix they want to build on site.

Originally Posted by Roadcruiser1

Not enough air rights.

Even as it is now, there are enough air rights (its how you distribute the space), and all of the air and development rights for the site aren't in order yet.



http://observer.com/2012/06/is-midto...taller-towers/

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




By Matt Chaban 6/07/12

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.

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.

Details were scant, but the area the department is looking at was outlined, an 85-block swath running from 40th Street to 57th Street, between Fifth Avenue and Third Avenue, except for a section of Second Avenue in the East 40s. This brackets a section of the neighborhood the department is especially interested in, roughly 20 blocks surrounding Grand Central Terminal. The one other detail to emerge was an interest in improving Park Avenue, ensuring its place as the city’s premier business address.

To put things in perspective, this roughly 250 acre rezoning would be almost 10 times as large as Hudson Yards, and according to one city planning source could increase development rights in the area by as much as 50 percent, depending on what set of recommendations the department embraces. As Real Estate Board president Steven Spinola explained a few weeks ago during a different discussion on the future of Midtown, “right now, our buildings top out around 50 stories. Why shouldn’t they top out around 80 stories? They do in a lot of other great cities.”

Including in Hudson Yards, and even exceed that height at the slowly redeveloping World Trade Center. And this was perhaps the greatest concern for community board members. “The public is spending buildings of dollars at Hudson Yards and ground zero, and for good reason,” said Raju Mann, a member of Community Board 5. “We haven’t even seen what these projects have produced yet, so how can we be sure what’s appropriate for Midtown East?”

Such ambitions also had community board members worried, as they felt the plan is moving too quickly given its size and scope. The department plans on releasing a more concrete vision in July, which it will study and modify throughout the fall before submitting it for public review in the first quarter of 2013. “For something so big, and so important, that seems awfully fast,” said Kate McDonough, chair of board 5′s Land Use Committee. The implication was that this was one last land grab by developers before the Bloomberg administration leaves office at the end of next year.