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Originally Posted by jmatero
For the umpteenth time, the roof and antenna were already engineered and ready to rock... If the radome wasn't going to work, the options were to either ditch the radome and keep the rest the same or halt the project and spend hundreds of millions redesigning the AC, roof, structural support and entire antenna. That is a massive, expensive, time consuming undertaking.
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Well, for the umpteenth plus 1 time, you are wrong, those weren't the only options. And it was spelled out whey the change was made. Durst was brought in to cut costs, and that is exactly what he did. Yes, it is a massive, expensive undertaking, and that's exactly why they should have taken the time - and spent the relatively minor cost - to get it right.
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Very few people in NYC in the 30's knew the GW Bridge was designed to be clad with stone. And today, NOBODY knows or cares.
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Comparing the skyscraper to the bridge is absoulutely ridiculous. You could have removed the stone from the Brooklyn Bridge back in the day, and no one would have known. Today? It is the absolute most distinctive and beloved of all New York City bridges. But it hardly matters, because in either case, the bridge is still a bridge. The destinction between spire and antenna mast is an important one. Further still, is the connection between the spire and the bulding it sits on. Now, if you want to say the tower would look better without being clad in its glass, and left open, that's your choice. But you'd need a better argument.
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Originally Posted by jd3189
The spire still looks good at night, so it ain't too much of a loss.
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Unfortunate, for the people who will only see it in the day.
As I've said before, when I look at the Chrysler Building, it is a masterpiece - as brilliant by day as by night. No one ever says "you know, at least it looks great at night". We're talking about the crown on the world's most famous skyline. Half acceptable is not acceptable.
http://www.capitalnewyork.com/articl...wn-goes-glossy
Downtown goes glossy
Joe Pompeo
Feb. 24, 2014
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.....Condé Nast chairman Si Newhouse first savored it one morning in August 2010, when Chris Ward, executive director of the Port Authority at the time, brought the elderly executive and his entourage up to a raw space on the 30th floor. Newhouse looked down pensively at the in-progress 9/11 Memorial Plaza, which was something of a bellwether for measuring how the World Trade Center rebuild was coming along. He remained quiet as his colleagues peppered Ward with questions. Newhouse was mainly concerned with what Condé Nast’s 3,500-person New York-based workforce would think of the place, said Ward. What would their experience of the building be? Were the transit options sufficient? Would they feel safe there?
Here’s one of the great opportunities in the real estate market that only comes along every 10 or 15 years,” Ward recalled when I asked him about that day. “Could it be realized? At that early stage, we were very apprehensive.”
But less than a year later, in May 2011, Condé Nast officially became the anchor tenant of 1 World Trade Center. The $2 billion deal placed a vaunted publishing institution at the center of a landmark reconstruction that symbolizes Lower Manhattan’s rebirth and the resilience of a post-9/11 New York. It was a coup for all the parties involved, as well as was evidence—yet again—that media companies and developers tend to make good bedfellows.
“Doug Durst is a genius,” said Mitchell Moss, a professor of urban policy and planning at New York University, speaking of The Durst Organization’s 69-year-old chairman. “He was smart to get Condé to come to Times Square, and now he’s guaranteeing their future by putting them down at the World Trade Center. It’s a win-win. He can raise the rent at 4 Times Square, and for Condé Nast, the World Trade Center is a natural location for the kinds of people who work in the media.”
Today, as the city’s most fraught construction project nears the finish line, the reality of Condé Nast’s rapidly approaching migration is starting to sink in. The company took possession of its floors on Jan. 1 and began building out its new nest. An outside project management firm has been hired to oversee the move, which will commence in November and conclude in the first quarter of 2015.
“This relocation represents a historic moment for our company and symbolizes the enormous transformation we have undergone in the past few years,” chief executive Chuck Townsend informed employees in a memo recently. “As the anchor tenant in one of the world’s most anticipated architectural sites, we have an unprecedented opportunity to take part in shaping the future of New York City.”
The clock is likewise ticking for The Durst Organization. It’s been nearly three years since Condé inked its 25-year, roughly $60-per-square-foot, tax-incentivized lease. As of press time, no other major corporations had followed suit, and 1.4 million square-feet worth of offices remained un-leased. (The other two existing office tenants are China Center New York and the U.S. General Services Administration.)
.....Durst told me in a phone interview that there are two potential takers among the dozens that have looked at 1 World Trade. Both have signed term sheets, and negotiations are ongoing. “We’re very active and hope to be making some announcements shortly,” said Durst. He declined to name names, but he did say these mystery suitors were interested specifically because of Condé Nast, which one of them counts as a client.
Such is the halo effect of blue chip brands moving into neighborhoods that could use a little rehab. In the late ‘90s, when a bargain of a lease lured Condé Nast from 350 Madison Avenue to Durst’s newly-erected 4 Times Square, the surrounding area was transformed from a grimy no man’s land into a power center for media and finance. A few years later, The Related Companies’ construction of the Time Warner Center had a similar impact on Columbus Circle, which went from shabby to chic in short order.
In 2018, when Time Warner sets sail once again, dropping anchor this time on the far West Side, it will be the pièce de résistance of Related’s Hudson Yards redevelopment. And just as Time Warner is expected to breathe new life into a 13-acre former railyard, so too has Condé Nast been heralded as a “game changer,” as Ward put it in a statement when the Port Authority lease was finalized, that “will be truly transformative for Downtown.”
Urban-planning wonks smell a sea change. “The two largest development sites in the city are both defined by having media companies,” said Moss. “Media is a bigger and bigger part of the real estate industry.”
Vishaan Chakrabarti, director of Columbia University’s Center for Urban Real Estate, agrees. “Media tenants are defining the character of these places as opposed to banks,” he said, “and that’s a real shift.”
.....When parts of the fences finally start to come down sometime later this year, the hallowed 16-acre site will begin its reintegration with the prosperous enclaves that surround it—Tribeca to the north, Greenwich South and Battery Park City to the rear, and the Financial District to the east. “I think that’s the challenge for the Trade Center now,” said Barowitz, the Durst Organization representative. “It’s sort of been a city within a city. When the neighborhood is reintegrated, it will stop being an eyesore. The edges will quickly tidy up and become much more compelling.”
Aiding the transition is the expected completion of the much-delayed Fulton Transit Center in July, and of the Santiago Calatrava-designed World Trade Center Transit Hub next year. Both stations will enable connections to 11 different subway lines (and, by 2016, to each other), thereby increasing the neighborhood’s appeal to commuters, including the hordes of Condé Nast employees shuttling in from Brooklyn.
For the Jersey set, the World Trade Center Hub will provide access to the PATH system and the Hudson River ferries, as well as to the World Trade Center Memorial, WTC Towers 1, 2, 3, and 4, Brookfield Place (formerly known as the World Financial Center) and the Winter Garden Atrium. And it’s of course worth noting that Condé’s new home will likewise make for a quicker, more pleasurable drive from the West Village townhouses of top editors like Anna Wintour (Vogue) and Graydon Carter (Vanity Fair).
The very presence of Condé’s denizens is enough to alter the tenor of the neighborhood. The company’s relatively young, stylish, largely female demographic will encourage a certain caliber of retail, experts say, particularly at the new Westfield World Trade Center, which is said to be courting smaller, boutique tenants in addition to big-name brands and upscale eateries. Nor is it hard to picture the arrival of gourmet food trucks, coffee-snob cafes and restaurants befitting power lunches with celebrities, sources, publicists and advertisers.
“If Graydon Carter and Anna Wintour are out having lunch at the local restaurants, that’s gonna have an impact,” said Chakrabarti. And maybe, just maybe, employees will start looking for apartments close to work (the more well-heeled among them might check out the Four Seasons Downtown, a condo-hotel combo that broke ground in December), or at least spend more time sampling the local food and drink before running home to Brooklyn or the suburbs.
“It’s always important to get an anchor tenant,” said Chakrabarti. “It’s something entirely different to get a hip, media-savvy anchor tenant that has a whole cultural milieu around it. [Condé Nast] is a place that has storied magazines and an obvious relationship to celebrity, and I think all of these things are going to give the Trade Center site a tremendous amount of cachet.” Durst’s assessment was more blunt: “It’s going to make it a lot more glamorous.”
.....In 2008, the company made a joint bid with Durst for the Hudson Yards, where Condé cooked up plans for a 1.5 million-square-foot building, but the Yards ended up going to Related. Then the ensuing financial crisis made leasing the more attractive option, which is what brought Newhouse and his advisers down to the World Financial Center on a bus tour one day in 2009. (“The only billionaire I know who gets on buses is SI Newhouse,” Tighe said during her 2011 talk, according to a transcript.)
Lower Manhattan was starting to look palatable. A number of editors and publishers were living below 14th Street. And rent-wise, you could find a much better deal there than in Midtown.
The Newhouse family’s parent company, Advance Publications, which also owns a stable of New Jersey newspapers including The Star-Ledger, was considering splitting up its operations between offices on opposite sides of the Hudson. But as Tighe, Newhouse and the chairman’s nephew Steven climbed the stairs to the Winter Garden, according to Tighe, they looked up at the rising monolith across the street, and inspiration struck.
More than four years later, that propitious first encounter is giving way to reality. Condé Nast declined to discuss the move. But some of the details have already leaked out, such as the demand for an exhaust duct for Condé’s kitchens that was seen as a compromise to architect David Childs’ original design. On the inside, a glut of walled offices will be replaced by open-floor seating with fewer private spaces, a change that may rankle certain staffers and please others. “The overall number of offices at 4 Times Square is viewed as a sort of failure,” one proponent of the new configuration told me. “It’s lots of dark warrens and hallways with dark offices. Wanting big, open, collaborative spaces was part of the move.”
Several months ago, renderings depicting various spaces within the new headquarters were distributed internally. The full document, which was provided by a source, includes images of a large multi-purpose auditorium with hundreds of seats and two large flat-screen TVs; a sleek, spiral-staircase-equipped reception area; an art gallery; a coffee bar; a servery; and a cafe. It will be hard to top Condé Nast’s famous, Frank Gehry-designed cafeteria at 4 Times Square, but the new one, located on the 35th floor, will have sweeping, 360-degree views of the skyscape. There will also be a conference center, a library and private dining.
To accommodate delivery drivers, a $10 million interim loading dock was completed in January and a full-truck scanner is being installed. (The permanent loading dock is still a couple years off.) Every package will be sent down to the basement for scanning. Some editors are concerned about flower deliveries. “Everybody’s really worried about getting stuff in and out of the building,” one editorial staffer said. A “trusted driver” protocol is being developed so that frequent drivers, such as the chauffeurs of Condé’s black town-car fleet, can zip through security.
The plans for which books will be on which floors were still being finalized as of press time. But some titles will be shacking up—The New Yorker and Details, for instance, on floor 39; Bon Appetit and Wired’s New York bureau on floor 36; Vogue on 25. Publishers have been briefed, and some editors have participated in reviews with the design team and architects. Floors 20 through 24 will be occupied by human resources, finance and other operational departments. The auditorium is on 34. Conde Nast will have its own entrance and lobby on the ground floor.
Not all Condé Nasters are moving to 1 World Trade—the technology group and some departments of Condé Nast Entertainment will be housed in an adjacent building at 222 Broadway. The company is doing what it can, however, to make sure all of its employees can find their way around their new neighborhood. There’s been talk of individual magazines producing special guidebooks for internal use: Where to eat; where to get your shoes shined; where to get your hair blown out, etc.
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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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