http://ny.curbed.com/archives/2015/0...to_reality.php
1,500-Foot One Vanderbilt Is One Step Closer To Reality
January 30, 2015
by Zoe Rosenberg
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Manhattan borough president Gale Brewer has come forth with her support for One Vanderbilt, the mega-tower proposed alongside a rezoning for a small pocket of Midtown East. Both proposals are currently in the midst of the city's labyrinthine thisapproval process and are naturally getting both shade and endorsements from just about everyone with a voice.
Brewer's support comes with the announcement that her office has negotiated with developer SL Green to extract a few more benefits to the community from the builders behind the proposed 1,500-foot-tall office tower.
Brewer's office negotiated reforming the building's plaza to improve its public appeal and access, rather to construct a place that serves One Vanderbilt's office workers. Improvements include doors to the building's ground-floor retail section that open onto the plaza.
SL Green has also agreed to pay for maintenance of the plaza, and to throw some money into a reserve fund to continue maintenance of the area over time. Brewer also asked SL Green to make the already-criticized transit hall a friendlier place to commuters by including benches and restrooms in the transit corridor. The entrance to the subway on the corner of Vanderbilt Avenue and 42nd Street will be enlarged.
For other proposed buildings that will eventually have to undergo the discretionary review process down the line, the office has also succeeded in tweaking the text of what it takes to get a special permit to build larger than as-of-right. Basically, Brewer wants floor area ratio bonuses given to builders to seriously hinge upon the transit improvements that the builders are proposing in exchange for the increased density. Brewer's statement also said the office has increased the emphasis on sustainability, and has required all applicants describe anticipated maintenance plans for public improvements early on in the review process.
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UPDATE: SL Green has issued a response to Gale Brewer's statement.
We are extremely pleased to have the support of Borough President Brewer for this transformative development, which is poised to deliver $210 million in public improvements in and around Grand Central Terminal. We've worked side by side with Borough President Brewer on refining important elements of this plan and we look forward to working with the City Planning Commission and Council Member Garodnick as the proposal proceeds through ULURP.
Thank you to Borough President Brewer, her staff and to our partner organizations at the Coalition for a Better Grand Central, all of whom support improving the commute for the hundreds of thousands of daily riders that use the terminal.
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http://archrecord.construction.com/n...-Manhattan.asp
City Chips Away at Beaux Arts Heart of Manhattan
Brouhaha over development near Grand Central Terminal could be an object lesson for other cities.
By Cara Greenberg
January 30, 2015
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Grand Central Terminal, now polished and celebrated, has suffered many indignities since its 1913 opening on 42nd Street and Park Avenue. The two most notorious: having the monolithic 59-story Pan Am (now MetLife) Building wedged between it and the distinctive 1929 New York Central (now Helmsley) Building just one block north, in the early 1960s; and Donald Trump’s late ‘70s transformation of the adjacent Commodore Hotel into the Grand Hyatt, a black glass edifice wildly unsympathetic to the stately monument to the east on 42nd Street.
t’s in that context that preservationists are dismayed about Grand Central’s future next-door neighbor to the west, which is almost certain to be Midtown’s tallest tower, Kohn Pedersen Fox’s (KPF) One Vanderbilt , a 1,450-foot glass skyscraper with an asymmetrical façade. Occupying the block bounded by 42nd Street, 43rd Street, Vanderbilt, and Madison Avenues, the new tower will replace several historic buildings, including the 1912, 200-foot masonry structure at 51 East 42nd Street by Warren & Wetmore, Grand Central’s architects, the last of the remaining original buildings designed to frame the station in a complementary Beaux Arts style.
...SL Green intends to demolish the Vanderbilt Avenue building, along with other venerable structures on the same block, including 317 Madison (Carrere & Hastings, 1922) and 331 Madison (Charles Berg, 1911, and Van Alen & Severance, 1924). The major retail tenant at 51 East 42nd, Modell’s sporting goods store, leaves next month, and there are plans to break ground for One Vanderbilt later this year, says Andrea Goldwyn, Director of Public Policy for the New York Landmarks Conservancy.
...If the Vanderbilt Corridor rezoning proposal goes through, as many expect, other historic structures in the Vanderbilt Corridor, including the 1,015-room Roosevelt Hotel (George B. Post, 1924) at Madison Avenue and 45th Street, last of the grande dame hotels that once surrounded the station, and the 22-story, limestone-faced Yale Club (James Gamble Rogers, 1915) could be next in line.
“The Vanderbilt Corridor rezoning plan is moving ahead and seems to have the support of the [de Blasio] administration,” Goldwyn says. “If the plan is approved, and potential for much larger development made available, that will become an option building owners have to consider.” Says Philip K. Howard, a lawyer who is Chair Emeritus of the Municipal Arts Society and author of several books on public policy (The Rule of Nobody, The Death of Common Sense): “My instinct is that the new zoning would be the end of the Roosevelt, and perhaps the Yale Club.”
At a January 20 panel discussion titled “Is the Vanderbilt Corridor the Future of East Midtown?,” held at the Museum of the City of New York (MCNY), moderator Charles V. Bagli, a New York Times real estate reporter, raised the specter of Dubai-like towers potentially looming not just over Grand Central Station but even obliterating the nearby Chrysler Building, designed by William Van Alen and completed in 1930.
James von Klemperer, president and design principal at KPF, defended the new tower’s design, assuring the audience that One Vanderbilt—43,000 square feet at the base, tapering to 15,000 square feet on the upper floors—“has visual porosity on the skyline. It slims down to something very delicate at the top.” In the architect’s view, “Next to Grand Central is a great place for a marker of great height. It’s a dancing partner for the Chrysler Building, appropriate for its place.
Edith Hsu-Chen, director of the Manhattan Office of the NYC Department of City Planning, voiced the city’s concern that without the new upzoning, the aging buildings of the Midtown East district, Vanderbilt Corridor included, will be even less competitive with new state-of-the-art office construction in Hudson Yards and the Financial District.
“The current zoning doesn’t respect the needs of the city,” said the Hon. Daniel R. Garodnick, a New York City Council member whose district includes all of Midtown East, a 73-block area surrounding Grand Central. He regards the Vanderbilt Corridor proposal, in which the city stands to gain infrastructure improvements in exchange for increased FAR, as a decent alternative to “unfettered as-of-right development” (that does not require review or approval by City Planning), “which would be the other extreme.”
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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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