Famed Architect’s Tower To Soar in TriBeCa
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Some units have already been sold in a new Manhattan building designed by architectural firm Herzog & de Meuron, which won the Pritzker Prize and is behind Ian Schrager’s 40 Bond St. condominium and the Tate Modern Museum of Art in London.
The building at 56 Leonard St., at the corner of Church Street in TriBeCa, will be one of the tallest residential towers in New York City.
Construction on the 57-story luxury condominium is quietly under way in TriBeCa, one project that does not appear to have been delayed by the slowing economy.
The Corcoran Sunshine Marketing Group is representing the building, and there have already been a “handful” of sales, a spokeswoman for the building’s developer, the Alexico Group, Andrea Schwan, said.
Plans for the 800-foot-tall building have not been made public, but community board members who were briefed on the design by representatives of the developer described it as a stacked, cube structure that will house several penthouses. It will have 145 apartments and a large public sculpture at ground level by the artist Anish Kapoor. The building is expected to be complete by 2010, and the construction costs alone are said to run about $350 million.
The Alexico Group acquired the site for the tower from New York Law School for a reported $140 million in 2006. The school sold the land, which was the site of the former Mendik Library, and is building a new nine-story library on an adjacent lot.
The block where the Alexico Group is building the luxury condo is designated “as of right,” so there was no need for city approvals, and the site is not subject to the 120-foot zoning height caps that affect much of the district.
While 56 Leonard St. will be one of the tallest 15 buildings in the city when it is built, it will eventually be dwarfed by neighboring development projects in Lower Manhattan as builders reach higher and higher to maximize their return on the scarce resource of Manhattan land.
Topping out at 1,776 feet, the Freedom Tower at ground zero will more than double the height of 56 Leonard St. Also at the World Trade Center site, Tower 2 will soar 1,270 feet, topped off by an 80-foot antenna, while Tower 3 and Tower 4 will rise 1,140 feet and 975 feet, respectively.
There is also a wave of residential buildings coming to the area, including Larry Silverstein’s new tower at 99 Church St., which will rise 912 feet to 80 stories, and Forest City Ratner’s Beekman Tower at 8 Spruce St., designed by Frank Gehry and reaching 867 feet to 76 stories.
“In 20 years, this is going to look like a brownstone,” a professor of urban policy and planning at New York University, Mitchell Moss, said of 56 Leonard St. “This is really quite modest in relation to what is going on further south.”
The median sales price of a condominium downtown is $1.3 million, according to the second quarter market report from Prudential Douglas Elliman.
“Lower Manhattan is one of the hottest neighborhoods in the city,” Mr. Moss said, adding that TriBeCa “is in the epicenter.”
The proposed height of the building had troubled at least one neighborhood official. “We are very frustrated by it and wouldn’t permit anything like it to be built in northern TriBeCa,” the president of the local community board 1, Julie Menin, said.