Quote:
Originally Posted by ArchGuy1
It does make me wish that New York City would have required an observation deck as a privately owned public space on the top floors as part of a building permit. These spaces are seen with a number of skyscraper lobbies in New York City. Furthermore, the city should have made it a requirement for such a deck to be open from 9 am to 11 pm daily and to not charge an admission fee of more than $10. The skyscrapers that have observation decks are expensive with tickets costing well over $30. By requiring a privately owned public space on the top floors of the JPMORGAN Chase Headquarters, there could have been a space with easy access for working and middle class New Yorkers that could not to afford to visit the existing observatories on a regular basis.
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It's just that the logistics of this would be very complicated and expensive. Public lobby space is complicated and expensive enough (and has deterred plenty of developers on its own), but doing it on top of the building would require:
- Losing the most valuable space in the building
- Adding elevators that otherwise aren't required, which must be accessible from the lobby and go all the way up the tower; in other words, using this space up on every single floor.
- Adding egress for an assembly use on the top floor; again, something that has a consequence on every floor.
- Finding a way to separate the public users from the office space, at all levels.
- Security in general in a bank headquarters is a nightmare - imagine it with the possibility that non-bank employees might end up on basically any floor.
- And then on top of that, subsidizing the price of every ticket.
Is all of this possible? Sure, many developers even choose to do it based on the sort of value they can create at the top of the building. But it's incredibly expensive and complicated, especially for an owner like JPMC.