NEW YORK | 15 Penn Plaza (Hotel Penn) | 1,034 FT / 315 M | 53 FLOORS

[DrNest]

I really am torn with this tower. I like the design, and think it will be a great addition to the skyline, but I'm saddened that it will require the demolition of the Hotel Penn. There's a lot of character to the building. It would be nice if they could keep the skin and incorporate it into the lower floors of the building. Realistically that won't happen, but in my mind it will be sad to lose the brickwork.

[NYguy]

Just to note, the special permits have been renewed for a large tower here. If and when something gets built depends, as usual, on a tenant.

Seems the rumors of a new plan may be true.

[Prezrezc]

Assuming they go the redesign route, it simply has to be done by someone who completely understands how important it is that a potential supertall that stands practically feet away from ESB "knows its role".

Coz the current design, for what it is...

...i.e. yet another expression of PCP's curtain-walled monolithic propensities, which can be be and usually is strikingly executed in the right context...

...doesn't meet that standard.

As a "what if" HY "satellite" tower, OTOH, it does.

[NYguy]

http://nypost.com/2017/05/09/finance...bo-skyscraper/

“Morgan Stanley is looking very hard at [15] Penn Plaza,” our Midtown spy reported.

According to another scout, Vornado is presenting new building designs and not just the original 1,216-foot- tall Pelli Clarke Pelli design that passed New York City muster a decade ago.

“Steve Roth understands space and architecture better than most developers and, if he was going to restart the project, any tenant that size would be part and party to that design,” explained another source, referring to Vornado’s chief executive.

Like the original 2 WTC, Roth probably feels the design has been dated.

I wish we could get our eyes on any new renders or drawings...

[Prezrezc]

I wonder if the use of the plural in designs indicates either

A. A choice of proposals

or

B. More than one structure'sgonna get built.



Most likely A.

[mrnyc]

i'm glad they are keeping their options open to keep the site in play.

the transit improvements remarks are certainly intriguing.

[chris08876]

Originally Posted by Crawford

No development site in NYC is ever really dead. Land values are so high, that if something isn't built, it just goes into holding pattern until the next opportunity.

I'll just bump this comment again, because its kinda the way one has to think of Manhattan parcels.

We've seen many examples of long stalled parcels or even projects in the pipeline come back to life. In some way, shape or form, they come back. Sometimes larger, sometimes smaller, but either way, barring the land marked parcels which require amendment, most as-of-right properties are golden in this market, and the future outlook looks promising all over the island.

[NYguy]

Originally Posted by Prezrezc

I wonder if the use of the plural in designs indicates either

A. A choice of proposals

or

B. More than one structure'sgonna get built.



Most likely A.

Yeah, they've always kept their options open with a couple of designs, even during the approvals process.

Originally Posted by mrnyc

the transit improvements remarks are certainly intriguing.

One of the reasons it's a shame this wasn't built already. Part of the transit improvements will be the reopening of the Gimbel's Passage that will reconnect the PATH and Herald Square subway stations with Penn Station and it's various commuter and subway lines. It's always annoying when you have to leave outside the station to catch one of those trains, just a block away.




What the reopened tunnel was supposed to look like...



http://secondavenuesagas.com/2010/08...15-penn-plaza/






https://nypost.com/2010/11/28/rememb...imbels-tunnel/

Remembering the Gimbels tunnel



By Steve Cuozzo
November 28, 2010

To revisit the long-closed Gimbels Corridor is to relive New York’s past-tense future. In the early 1970s, conditions in the pedestrian tunnel presaged the bleeding city of the 1980s and early ’90s. Filthy, fetid and unpoliced, it entertained rampant lawlessness, squalor and decay years before they fully possessed the streets.

Before it was walled up, the passageway — parallel to the basements of Gimbels department store and the Hotel Pennsylvania beneath West 32nd Street — linked the Herald Square subway station with the one at Seventh Avenue/Penn Station. Vornado Realty Trust plans to reopen it one day as part of a new office tower project.

Prior to a recent “tour,” I hadn’t set foot in it since 1974 or ’75.

Back then, the interminable, 800-foot stroll, as long as four city blocks, was too much even for my youthful spirit of adventure. Street weirdos and sex hawkers on Eighth Avenue were amusing; knife-wielding hustlers, legless beggars and the howling insane in a dimly lit corridor a mere nine feet wide for much of its length were not. The mad harmonica player who stalked me end to end was the last straw.

Once you were inside, there was no way out except to reach the other end. In the midst of teeming Midtown, bare-bulb fixtures like those in mines marked a path through a Calcutta-like sprawl of diseased, predatory humanity.

The corridor seemed to exist beyond the reach of any authority. Vornado says it’s owned by the MTA. The MTA says it’s owned by Amtrak, which told me it thinks it owns a portion of it. Who was in charge 35 years ago is an even deeper mystery.

Could today’s looming service cuts and upticking crime rate similarly preview much worse to come? We should pray not, but the prospect, however remote, might please certain factions of the intelligentsia wistful for the misery of the past.

A New York Times op-ed column last Tuesday, which celebrated with tongue in cheek the “miracle” of today’s miserable Penn Station, stated, “People love to say they miss the ragged, gritty, vivid aura of New York in the ’70s.” Since the Gimbels tunnel fed into Penn Station, we may presume it’s among the joys some yearn to recapture.

Others miss subway graffiti, which proclaimed the criminal underclass’s dominion over the trains. James Wolcott expressed in Vanity Fair last year a nuanced but no less unfathomable preference for the “rubble” of the bad old days. Jimmy Breslin said he preferred hooker-filled Times Square to today’s “Disneyfied” version.

“30 Rock” star Tracy Morgan told TimeOut NY last week that the city of the ’70s was “more relaxed.” While he allows it was “more dangerous in the ’80s,” he says the city’s “soul” has been lost, and it seems to him, since 9/11, “like a police state.”

Out of their minds, every one.

The “soul” of Morgan’s lamented lost city reposed in the Gimbels tunnel, which foresaw the dysfunction and pathologies that would rule the city to come. Soon after I last used it, the municipality went nearly broke; the Bronx burned; infrastructure and transit fell to ruin after a generation of “deferred maintenance;” and murders swelled from 800 annually to 2,262 by 1990. And the tunnel? A rape epidemic finally prompted somebody to seal the ends shut in the early 1980s.

Vornado hopes to modernize and widen the passage as part of improvements it pledged in exchange for city approvals to replace the hotel with an office tower. A fine and overdue project, it will finally banish the tunnel’s stubborn ghosts.

Or maybe not. It was skin-crawlingly creepy on my recent walk-through — not only because of grimy signs for “Gimbel Brothers” or spooky remnants of a couple of fast-food joints.

Picking through vermin traps and rubble, we reached the point near the Sixth Avenue end where the harmonica man rose out of the dark as if in a bad dream. Toothless, oozing blood and worse, he blew his mangled tune in my face. The faster I walked, the faster his pursuit. How far to Seventh Avenue?

Those who romanticize our dark age need a tour, too. The harmonica man’s song is still down there for those who care to listen. Heed the echo, and tremble.

http://www.erictb.info/33passage.html





http://www.railfanwindow.com/blog/tag/gimbels-corridor/







Maybe one day they'll reopen this one too....


http://forgotten-ny.com/2015/09/under-6th-avenue/

My initial feeling was that this was the so-called “Gimbels Passageway” that connected 6th and 7th Avenues under 33rd Street and so allowed people coming in from Penn Station to walk underground to the 6th Avenue trains, but it’s not.
It is a closed passageway but it ran lengthwise on 6th Avenue from the 34th Street station north to the 42nd Street station. It was one of a number of subway pedestrian connectors that sometimes offered free transfers, sometimes not. There are lengthy passenger tunnels under 14th Street connecting the 6th, 7th and 8th Avenue lines, but today only the section connecting 6th and 7th Avenues is open. Today, a well-traveled underground walkway lined with shops, plazas and restaurants remains under 6th Avenue between 42nd and 49th Streets.

• Video Link

[NYguy]

Originally Posted by NYguy

Like the original 2 WTC, Roth probably feels the design has been dated.

I wish we could get our eyes on any new renders or drawings...

Not that anything is getting built, but whatever the revised plan is was approved last month...

[gramsjdg]

The original design, while nice, was too bulky for the location. I'd rather they go taller and narrower as it would actually be less intrusive on ESB...

[NYguy]

Originally Posted by gramsjdg

The original design, while nice, was too bulky for the location. I'd rather they go taller and narrower as it would actually be less intrusive on ESB...

The problem is, as an office building, it won't get too much more narrow than it already was (at least from the older versions we saw) because it's an office building, and companies looking to anchor such a tower would want the larger floorplates.

I just hope we don't have the exact opposite, and the tower becomes more bulky than it was.

[gramsjdg]

True.

[Zerton]

What is with Cesar Pelli's obsession with this shape?

[chris08876]

Originally Posted by Zerton

What is with Cesar Pelli's obsession with this shape?

He seems to design skyscrapers that way. I'm not sure what the motivation or art subject would be. Maybe he likes the sculptured look. He always tends to have the latticed crowns on his towers.

Although The Solaire is somewhat different. His mid rises tend to look different, but skyscrapers all share a similar trait.

Salesforce, Costanera, and 30 Hudson (Jersey City) are very similar. 15 Penn looks like a shorter, and fatter version of the International Commerce Centre in Hong Kong which is by KPF.

I think Pelli copied KPF or at least draws influence from their ICC in Hong Kong.

[NYguy]

https://www.google.com/amp/s/thereal...ant-tower/amp/

Roth does seem, however, to envision a large-scale reboot of Penn Plaza, which he refers to in the letter as the “Promised Land.” He says the REIT’s “grand plan” is to construct three to five new buildings on the sites it owns in the district.

The company is eyeing the Hotel Pennsylvania for either a large-scale renovation or a total rebuild, something Roth has considered in the past.

[NYguy]

https://commercialobserver.com/2018/...-plaza-towers/

BY REBECCA BAIRD-REMBA
APRIL 6, 2018

Roth also mentioned that his firm was at “a tipping point” with redeveloping the Hotel Pennsylvania site at 401 Seventh Avenue, across the street from Two Penn Plaza. The real estate investment trust could create a “giant convention/entertainment hotel.” Alternatively, the firm could tear down the hotel to build a 2.8-million-square-foot, 68-story office tower called 15 Penn Plaza. It just renewed special permits with the City Planning Commission to develop the tower last month.

[chris08876]

^^^^^^^^^^^^^

With the ever growing NYC tourism numbers, a hotel would be ideal.

There were 62 million in 2017, compared to 60.5 in 2016. 2018 should be a good year. I read close to 65 million (estimate). Point being, hotels are hot!

Also, thanks to the new business at HY now and in the years to come, along with the increase in tenant activity all over Midtown.

[NYguy]

Here's the quote from Steven Roth...

[NYguy]

https://nypost.com/2018/10/03/vornad...-to-investors/

Vornado quietly presented 15 Penn Plaza renderings to investors

By Lois Weiss.
October 3, 2018

The prospect of transforming the matronly Hotel Pennsylvania — into an innovative office building with greenery draped over its numerous outdoor areas — just got rosier.

A new rendering of a future, 2.8-million-square-foot 15 Penn Plaza was quietly slipped into the tail end of an investor presentation by Vornado Realty Trust, the hotel’s owner.

Such a technologically advanced office tower could be developed on the east side of Seventh Avenue across from Madison Square Garden on the site of the current hotel that sits between West 32nd and 33rd streets.

If you follow real estate as a sport, you may recall that Vornado Chairman Steve Roth has been courting office anchor tenants to lease a replacement structure for almost a decade.

The original design for 15 Penn Plaza by Pelli Clarke Pelli was of a plump matron — showing deep cleavage but with no waistline to break up its 68 stories.

In 2010, the real estate giant persuaded the city that this proposed 1,216-foot-tall structure wasn’t going to interfere with the Empire State Building’s majestic singularity on the immediate skyline — just 900 feet away.

By 2013, Roth was days away from an inked agreement with Merrill Lynch when its chief resigned and took the deal with him.

Last year, we told you Vornado was presenting other design options to companies that included Morgan Stanley.

Now, what looks like a somewhat taller replacement seems to alternate sky parks overflowing with trees and plantings with blocks of office floors hoisted above them on giant pillars.

The fact that no leaves would survive the city’s legendary high-floor winds is immaterial — perhaps glass windbreaker partitions will aid in their growth.

Yet, both Silverstein Properties’ new version of Two World Trade Center, and Tishman Speyer’s Spiral in Hudson Yards, are also flush with outdoor spaces and greenery.

While both were designed by Bjarke Ingels Group, that architecture firm did not design this for Vornado.

A similar design was created for L&L Holding’s upcoming 425 Park Ave. by Simon Davis of Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, although it’s just one-fifth the size of the proposed 15 Penn.

The Rogers firm did not respond to questions about the newest 15 Penn design, while the Pelli firm declined to comment and Roth simply ignored my requests.

One naysayer doubted this new design with expansive — and thus expensive — gardens would be built in the “inland” area.

“Experiments such as these are more commonly seen at the edges of the island, and even in the Hudson Yards district, most of the original architectural experiments with new forms got market-tested and value-engineered into pretty conventional buildings,” said one architecture guru who asked not to be identified.

Yet this is clearly a fresh, airy and Instagram-worthy design targeted to pique a millennial CEO’s imagination and kick off future-world New York.

The only question left is which tenant will pay sky-high rents to make it economically viable to tear down the 1.2-million-square-foot hotel and rebuild an engineering marvel that could cost $4 billion or more — similar to what other large towers now require — and be ready in four or five years.

“Two Penn and 260 Eleventh are certainly [Vornado] projects that people have confidence in them completing and are realistic,” said REIT analyst Alexander Goldfarb of Sandler O’Neill + Partners of smaller Vornado redevelopments in the pipeline. “[15 Penn] is one of those that could happen at some point in the future, but no one is betting their year-end on Hotel Pennsylvania.”

Nevertheless, when the time comes, any visionaries that decide to inhabit this next-gen Penn Plaza fairy tale will float skyward and likely tower over the new neighboring forests of Manhattan West and Hudson Yards.

Stay tuned.

[NYguy]

That rendering...