Has a familiar ring to it...
https://www.theruin.org/blog/2016/9/...osevelt-island
https://www.gettyimages.fr/search/2/...1311&sort=best
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/...son-yards.html
The Only Man Who Could Build Oz
How Stephen Ross outmaneuvered, outspent, out-leveraged, and out-sweet-talked his way into the Hudson Yards deal.
By Carl Swanson
February 18, 2019
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"How ow do you get people to move to this wasteland?” asks Stephen Ross, speaking rhetorically in what I would come to think of as his PowerPoint mode. We’re on the 24th-floor sales office of 10 Hudson Yards, and I’m trying to not be too distractedly beguiled by the floor-to-ceiling view of this soon-to-open pop-up metropolis he’s building all around us in what was, not so long ago, a blustery infrastructural trainscape, a place you’d probably go only if you needed to catch a Bolt Bus to Boston.
Ross, the 78-year-old founder and chairman of the real-estate-development firm the Related Companies, is the man behind the curtain in this Oz. Hudson Yards is the largest and most expensive real-estate project in America — 28 acres, at almost a billion dollars an acre. A strenuously engineered and resourcefully financed marvel, it was set in motion by the Bloomberg administration, which saw the northern terminus of the High Line as a good place for residential high-rises and office towers. But it was Ross who built it into what my colleague Justin Davidson refers to as a veritable nation-state, making Ross, just possibly and for this moment, the most powerful man in New York, a Robert Moses for our age of concierge mega-urbanism.
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He got here in part by building things that other developers found unglamorous, like affordable housing and big-box retailers. He has also, by many accounts, created a development machine unlike any the city has ever seen: highly competitive, vertically integrated, and international. He modeled his corporate culture on Wall Street, where he worked for two years without much success. (He was quickly fired, twice.) “They were able to introduce investment-banking-level human capital into the real-estate business,” says Jed Walentas, CEO of Two Trees, which is developing its own not-quite-as-mega megaproject on Williamsburg’s waterfront at the Domino Sugar site. “They recognized the talent. Before that it was a couple people in an office. They give a shit about what they are doing, and they’re in it for the long term.” Ross incentivizes his top people with partnerships.
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Ross will soon reside in 35 Hudson Yards, designed by David Childs, who also designed Time Warner (and got a Porsche from Ross as a reward when the condos sold out). The new building will house, in addition to condos and offices, the world’s first Equinox Hotel (Related owns the high-end fitness-club chain), the website of which promises frictionless exaltation: “This is the complete manifestation of high-performance living. This is a destination where how you move, eat, sleep and live is entirely reimagined. This is your life. Live it exceptionally.”
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http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/...tasy-city.html
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The Precipice: Urban adventurers will be able to strap on a harness and climb this lattice atop 30 Hudson Yards out in the freezing wind. The 101st floor also has a party room. If you have to ask what it costs, etc. The observatory, the fourth one in Manhattan, looks the Empire State Building square in the forehead. Ticket sales are expected to bring in tens of millions of dollars per year.
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Walk down most Manhattan avenues and your eyes rarely drift up beyond the first couple of stories; it is entirely possible to stride right past the Empire State Building and hardly notice it’s there. Hudson Yards confronts you with its ostentatious verticality. That’s because the plaza allows you the room to step back and look up toward the O of sky outlined by the towers’ tips. To temper that repetitive upward thrust, Ross demanded that the architects he hired forge a cogent composition out of disparate designs.
The problem is that each project has a separate set of ironclad givens and follows its own internal logic. William Pedersen, the co-founder of KPF, and Marianne Kwok, one of the firm’s directors, sit me down at a conference table with a scale model of Hudson Yards and make it clear that the glass façades, the massive floor plates, the distance from window to elevator core, and the resulting form all flow directly from the tenants’ needs.
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Still, there’s a community to build. “Tall buildings look like a bunch of people standing around a cocktail party. Everything we do is about creating gestures of connection,” Pedersen says. And so his firm nudged two of those isolated hulks, Nos. 10 and 30, into a relationship of sorts. They angle in opposite directions, as if facing off at arms’ length in a stately tango.
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NEW YORK is Back!
“Office buildings are our factories – whether for tech, creative or traditional industries we must continue to grow our modern factories to create new jobs,” said United States Senator Chuck Schumer.
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