NEW YORK | One Vanderbilt | 1,401 FT | 58 FLOORS

[NYguy]

Originally Posted by TechTalkGuy

I read that too.
When does this thread get promoted from Proposals to Construction?

The standard at SSP is when something goes into the ground, as opposed to just coming out. Sure, it's just a matter of time until something goes in here, but that's the standard.

Originally Posted by Design-mind

What the heck! Is that Gale brewer at the ground breaking ceremony? I would have thought she would have been vehemently opposed to this project given its height.

Every politician loves a good photo-op. When all is said and done, everyone wants to be seen as "being for it" from the start, especially when it's an obvious good thing. Same applies to that Dan Garodnick. He was the main reason this thing got hung up in the Bloomberg administration.



http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/10/is-one-vanderbilt-the-1-400-foot-building-we-need.html

Is One Vanderbilt the 1,400-Foot-Tall Building We Need?




By Justin Davidson

Sometime in the next few years, a new landmark will muscle onto the skyline, hulking over the Chrysler Building and waving to the Empire State Building half a mile away. At 1,401 feet — more than a quarter-mile high —the skyscraper known as One Vanderbilt will have Grand Central Terminal as its ground-hugging neighbor; the vacant construction site has opened up a tantalizing but temporary view of the station’s western flank. When the new tower is completed, we’ll be able to pick it out from bridge crossings and airplanes and adjoining states, its four crystalline forms tapering off in turn like voices at the end of a round. We’ll note the lines of angled terra-cotta tiles banding the glass façade and giving the surface an expensively patterned texture. Depending on our dispositions, we’ll celebrate or bemoan Manhattan’s continuing vertical march.

But despite this ostentatious new presence in the heavens — a new scepter just waiting to be shattered in the next alien-invasion movie — its most significant segment will be the lowest. The building gets its meaning at street level, where the people are and the architecture reaches its apex of complexity. Those first 100 feet show what the public can demand from a big corporate office tower: not just a machine for making money, but a juncture in the city’s life. One Vanderbilt, designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox, is that rarity, a civic-minded Goliath. A ceiling clad with concave terra-cotta tiles tilts up from west to east, like a mouth opening to swallow Grand Central. Those who step inside can slip down the building’s gullet and into the transit system. The street outside, for years a dark forgotten alley, will become a pedestrian-only thoroughfare, adding to the area’s scarce stock of genuinely public space.

.....One Vanderbilt needed a public buy-in from the start: a change in height and bulk restrictions to allow one of the city’s tallest buildings. Michael Bloomberg’s administration was happy to oblige. In the waning months of his tenure, Bloomberg tried to force through a sweeping rezoning plan that would not only have made this tower possible but also turned a vast swath of eastern midtown into fertile ground for new development. When that overreach failed, it looked for a while like the project was dead and the area around Grand Central would indefinitely remain a thronged but aging business district of low-ceilinged office buildings. Then the de Blasio administration revived a miniaturized version of the rezoning plan, tailored to let One Vanderbilt proceed. The cumulative result of all this stop-and-start negotiating was a sophisticated design and $220 million in street and transit improvements, to be paid for by the developer, SL Green.

The neighborhood badly needs those ministrations, and the urgency will only increase. When the Long Island Rail Road arrives on the East Side (a blessed event not scheduled for another five years, at best), it will ship in as many as 75,000 new commuters per hour, doubling the station’s peak congestion. Those crowds would overwhelm Grand Central’s ramps and escalators, turning the flow of foot traffic between platform and sidewalk into a sclerotic sludge. Instead, many of those new arrivals will siphon off toward 43rd Street and wind up in the base of One Vanderbilt. This might seem like a function only a traffic engineer could love, but it roots the building in the city’s public life. It also makes the tower’s most important face the one that turns toward Grand Central.

http://nypost.com/2016/10/18/one-vanderbilt-signs-up-td-bank-as-tenant/

the space at the top of One Vanderbilt can’t be occupied by office tenants until the $220 million transit improvements and connections are completed.

Mayor de Blasio repeated this not once but twice during his speech at Tuesday’s groundbreaking.

While the remark prompted a TD Bank official to make a face, the bank’s 200,000-square-foot tenancy won’t be affected. It will have an impact, however, on the portion of the building that was allowed to be added through the public improvement deal with the city.

Roughly, this would be half the building as it went from a 15 FAR (floor area ratio) to a 30 FAR.

SL Green Chief Executive Marc Holliday told me the 250,000-square-foot tenants the company is seeking are barely looking now, and likely won’t make any commitments until later in the process when “they can see it.”

The hole in the ground bounded by East 42nd and East 43rd streets and Madison and Vanderbilt avenues is about 10 feet away from its bottom, Holliday said. The building should be completely finished by 2020.

http://www.archdaily.com/797636/new-york...ks-ground-one-vanderbilt-tower-kpf-image