NEW YORK | ABC Headquarters redevelopment | (1,250 - 420) FT | 86 & 25 FLOORS

[UrbanImpact]

Originally Posted by NYguy

Not only inspiration from the block, but the neighborhood...

OMG, I was going to post the exact same thing about 25 Central Park West yesterday.

[NYguy]

https://therealdeal.com/magazine/september-2026/extell-after-gary/

What’s Gary Barnett’s next big move?


Rich Bockmann
Setp 1, 2026

Gary Barnett walked into a meeting of the Upper West Side’s community board and — perhaps as a negotiating tactic picked up over many years — cracked a joke to set a friendly tone.

Then he got down to business.

“I asked to come here and to speak a little bit because I’ve kind of been hearing rumors and second-hand statements that some people have been spreading about me and saying that I’m anti-affordable, I don’t like poor people,” said the Extell Development chief, who a decade ago riled up his critics by installing a separate entrance — the “poor door” — for rent-stabilized tenants. “And it’s extremely upsetting to me to hear that kind of talk.”

Barnett was there to discuss his latest skyline-defining project: a 1,200-foot-tall condo tower on the site of the former Walt Disney-owned ABC campus at 80 West 67th Street that — at nearly the same height as the Empire State Building — will be the tallest thing on the Upper West Side.

Assemblages are a Barnett hallmark. He famously spent years stitching together his Billionaires Row sites, even outmaneuvering Steve Roth’s Vornado Realty Trust to shift the location of its 220 Central Park West out of the way of Extell’s Central Park Tower’s views of the park. Extell is currently working on an assemblage on Park Avenue, where Barnett is likely planning to build the boulevard’s next big office tower.

The building that will rise on the former ABC campus will stand 86 stories tall and cover some 1.2 million square feet. Demolition on the site is already well underway.

Seema Reddy, co-chair of the board’s land-use committee, said it’s clear Barnett’s gone out of the way to endear himself to the community this time around.

The last time Extell had a ULURP project in the district that required direct involvement with the community board was with Riverside South two decades ago. But on this project he’s much more hands-on than he’s been in the past, she said.

“But this is the first one that as of right he’s been involved, which is great to see,” she said.

[NYguy]

https://www.ilovetheupperwestside.com/cb...r-the-abc-site-one-key-player-isnt-sold/

CB7 Just Sent Extell a Take-It-or-Leave-It Number for the ABC Site. One Key Player Isn’t Sold.





Mike Mishkin
September 3, 2026

The Upper West Side’s biggest development in decades has spent two and a half years tangled in a question the zoning code never bothered to ask: how much affordable housing, if any, comes with a 1,200-foot tower? This week, Community Board 7 finally answered with a number of its own, voted to make it the last one it intends to offer, and then heard from the elected official who’s been at the table the whole time that she won’t be backing it.

The full board voted 41-1 with one abstention on Tuesday night to send Extell Development what the resolution calls CB7’s “best and final offer” for the former ABC campus on West 66th and 67th streets between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue, a day after the Housing and Land Use Committee approved it 11-0-1.

The ask has two pieces. On-site, CB7 wants roughly 35,000 square feet of affordable housing at 7 West 66th Street, the smaller of the two buildings Extell has proposed for the block, which committee members described as about 30 apartments with a mix of studios, one-bedrooms and two-bedrooms.

Off-site, the board wants a minimum of 140,000 square feet in one or more separate buildings that are 100 percent affordable, permanently affordable, and located within Community District 7. That’s about 175,000 square feet in all, which the co-chairs estimated works out to somewhere between 10 and 13 percent of the project.

It’s a fraction of where the board started. CB7’s earlier resolutions called for 30 percent of the project’s floor area, and with Extell never having supplied a total square footage, members have been working off an estimate of 1.1 to 1.6 million square feet, which would put 30 percent somewhere around 400,000 to 450,000 square feet. Housing co-chair Seema Reddy told the committee Extell’s response to that figure was that it was “insane.” From there, the offers crept up in stages: 90,000 square feet off-site, then 120,000 off-site or a 106,000 hybrid, then 140,000.

Something else quietly fell out of the deal. The nine-story building of senior studios that Extell and Robert A.M. Stern Architects presented to CB7 last fall at 30 West 67th Street is no longer part of the affordable ask. As one committee member put it, Extell can now “do whatever they want” with that site, and the committee acknowledged the developer never actually promised the units there would be income-restricted.

Board chair Alex Bell said the board had been meeting with Extell “like every week for the entire summer” and warned the committee that once the tower’s footings go in, “we lose all ability, and then we’re done with, and we get zero.”

Another member suggested asking for more than the target to leave room to come down, and was talked out of it on the grounds that Extell would be watching the meeting on YouTube the next morning.

Meanwhile, the stop work order issued on the site in July after asbestos turned up during demolition has been lifted, with about a week of remediation left. Borough President Brad Hoylman-Sigal told the board that Extell “has to do better at notifying the community.” Extell filed plans in April for the 86-story tower itself, with 430 apartments and no income-restricted component specified.

Then Council Member Gale Brewer took the microphone at the end of the meeting. After thanking the committee for its work, she said: “I cannot support something that does not include more on-site housing that is affordable. You put the rich people in one area and the poor people in another. It’s just not how I operate. So we’ll see.” Committee members had said Monday that Brewer was briefed throughout the negotiations and had told them to stay on the current path, while one predicted she wouldn’t block a deal but “may make a rumpus.”

[Zapatan]

To my knowledge Gale can't actually do anything to stop the project can she?

Who cares about affordable housing next to Central Park anyway? There's a place for everything and here is not the place for that.

If this one bites the dust like most other NY supertalls I'm not surprised.

[NYguy]

Originally Posted by Zapatan

To my knowledge Gale can't actually do anything to stop the project can she?

Who cares about affordable housing next to Central Park anyway? There's a place for everything and here is not the place for that.

If this one bites the dust like most other NY supertalls I'm not surprised.

No, Barnett doesn’t actually have to do anything. The fight is amongst themselves, with some recognizing the fact thst Gale Brewer is batshit crazy, and could potentially cause them to get nothing at all.

[ChiND]

It’s comical that it’s described as CB7’s “Take-It-or-Leave-It Number” to Extell. They should be grateful that Gary is building any “affordable housing.” Further, affordable housing should be built in the Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn. No one has a right to live in the most expensive real estate on earth. I’d like to live in Palm Beach, but I accept the fact that I don’t have $50m for a home.

The entitlement culture is revolting. What ever happened to hard work as a basis for advancement?