Posted Feb 3, 2012, 4:13 PM
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New Yorker for life
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Join Date: Jul 2001
Location: Borough of Jersey
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http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/20...d-at-its-feet/
The World at Its Feet
By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO
Feb 3, 2012
Quote:
New York real estate can bring out even the most dormant phobias of potential buyers. With so many options, apartment hunters can easily be paralyzed by decidophobia (yes, it’s a real term, and means the fear of making decisions). That doesn’t seem to be a problem for the wealthy investors who are wiring millions of dollars to New York to snatch up a piece of 157 West 57th Street — what will be New York City’s tallest residential building, with 90 floors overlooking Central Park. A bigger worry for these buyers may be acrophobia (fear of heights) or batophobia (fear of being near an object of great height, like a skyscraper).
The building (One57, as it brands itself) is not expected to open until the fall of 2013, but sales are already brisk, thanks in large part to interest from buyers from Russia and China, said Gary Barnett, the president of Extell Development Company, which is building the tower. Mr. Barnett said the willingness of foreign buyers to open their wallets for New York real estate “gave us the confidence to do layouts the way I would like them to be, with large, gracious spaces and volume, and not so many bedrooms.”
Buyers have appeared from all over the globe, including South America, and there have been multiple sales to people from China, Mr. Barnett said. Fact sheets for the building have been translated into Russian and Mandarin. Spanish, Portuguese and Italian translations are in the works. Americans, including New Yorkers, are buying as well, though they are a little late to the party. “Some want to buy, and we don’t have the exact product they want anymore,” Mr. Barnett said.
On Wednesday, the developers of One57 and Christian de Portzamparc, the French “starchitect” on the project, as the builders called him, explained their vision for the 1,004-foot-tall building at a mimosa-and-bellini-fueled event. Mr. Portzamparc said he tried to design the building’s exterior “like a staircase of curved roofs.”
The lighted and vented top will make the building a beacon at night. The architect said he designed the east-west facade in a pixelated pattern with three colors of glass.
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Quote:
I’ve seen this kind of movie before. I come from Chicago, a city of extra-tall buildings. I remember covering the announcement in 2005 of the “Spire” in Chicago, the stunning birthday candle-shaped residential structure designed by the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava. The project was supposed to be 2,000 feet tall, with 150 floors. It was abandoned in 2008 due to ongoing financial struggles and the global recession. The difference is New York, of course, where Wall Street’s collapse seemed to barely land a glancing blow to the cheek of high-end residential real estate. “People still see New York as a fantastic place to put their money,” Mr. Tubb said.
Sales managers said they received 1,000 inquiries for the building and responded to all of them. That led Jeannie Woodbrey, a senior sales executive at One57, to a 14-year-old boy from a town outside of Buffalo who called a few weeks ago to inquire about the six-bedroom penthouse. “Can you buy the apartment now?” she asked patiently. “No, but I will be able to in a couple of years,” he responded, sharing with her his plans to open a chain of hotels and “a bunch of Internet companies.”
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