Wednesday, February 15, 2012

51 Astor Place Death Star more Death Starry than previously thought

Hoo boy.


Curbed has the news this morning that a 51 Astor Place website is up and running... featuring new, more imposing, renderings....

Curbed notes several of the building features: a private green roof on the fifth floor, a tenant-accessible green roof on the 13th floor, and an urban plaza on the corner of Astor Place and Third Avenue.

And Curbed also hears that IBM and Microsoft are looking at office space here.


We'll be back with more after running over to the Continental for five shots of anything for $10.

Previously on EV Grieve:
51 Astor Place demolition begins July 1; 17 months to build new black-glass tower

East Village — the new Midtown?

Workers chopping down the trees at 51 Astor Place

23 comments:

cw! said...

This is going to make me reread Tom Wolf's "From Bauhaus to Our House" and get really angry about modern architecture again.

The saddest is seing how nice Astor Place is all open now and imagining a lovely park there. I guess being enveloped by the shadow this massive urban tombstone is the second best possibility.

esquared™ said...

Grieve, I find your lack of faith disturbing.

Anonymous said...

They should call it "Darth Vadar Hall"

BBnet3000 said...

damn, that thing is straight out of Midtown circa 1961.

Anonymous said...

Can we just leave the lot vacant like it is now?

The Hound said...

Makes you wish Spacely's face was still staring out over the intersection....

Satan said...

I thought we all realized modernism is the worst decades ago.

What the fuck?

Richard said...

It dwarfs its surroundings and is actually less appealing than the building it replaces -- something many previously thought impossible.

On the upside, now the herbivorous primates of the East Village will finally learn how to use the femur of an antelope to crack open the skulls of tapirs and become omnivores, ensuring their future evolution into humanity. Later, their remote descendants will discover an exact duplicate of 51 Astor Place buried on the Moon.

EV Grieve said...

@Richard

Ha!

Ate too many paint chips said...

Richard, please write the forward to my book... whenever I write one.. and on whatever topic you wish!!!

Dying On Bar Time said...

I'm sorry. I'm distracted by the vomit in my mouth...

Uncle Waltie said...

The Hound @ 1:52PM :

Haha...eye patch and all.

Mark said...

I'm just waiting for it to fire its death ray and turn everything between second and third ave into Pret's, Hale and Hearty's, and perhaps an Equinox or two.

Anonymous said...

This is terribly upsetting and strange. A midtown building just throw in there. SO awkward and sad. What the fuck. It's so weird that this is my home but things keep feeling out of place. This is just so incredibly out of scale and strange.

Jeremiah Moss said...

a midtown building filled with midtown people.

here come the tech corporations, advertising firms, etc., and the people who go to work in that building will have an impact on the neighborhood. they will drive demand for new businesses, a new landscape, that suits their needs.

so, when you think the social impact, it's even worse than it looks.

EV Grieve said...

@ Mark & Jeremiah

Exactly.

I expect some of those little shops and kiosks that are left on St. Mark's Place to become a Pret A Manger, Bread Factory, Ranch 1, etc., for office workers

Anonymous said...

It's actually much smaller than the office building to the west and will have a similar tenant mix, which seems to fit in with the downtown crowd. How many midtown buildings are 12 stories? Change happens.

Anonymous said...

WIN!!! Can't wait until this building is completed. Then, I look forward to even more dirty NIMBY crying. Eat it!

Ken from Ken's Kitchen said...

cw! describes it perfectly. It is a "massive urban tombstone."

glamma said...

oh my god. i feel sick to my stomach. this is outrageously wrong and will surely continue to only destroy the character of the east village with the corporate kiss of death

Anonymous said...

To Anonymous that says"It's actually much smaller than the office building to the west and will have a similar tenant mix, which seems to fit in with the downtown crowd. How many midtown buildings are 12 stories? Change happens."
Really? What are you the developer or a relation of some sort to it? Downtown Crowd? What the Downtown Wallstreet crowd? Be real, this sucks and anyone that knows what NYC should be knows it does. Change is great but this is a sorry excuse for it. If you want and support this kind of change you should petition for this crap to go up in your own little whitebread suburban hometown and stay out of NYC.

Anonymous said...

A stunning achievement: This design is even uglier than the prior design, originally considered the ugliest possible building in the world.

- East Villager

Anonymous said...

Makes me think more of the monolith in Kubrick's 2001. I wonder if it will have a similarly violent effect on the natives.

- East Villager