[Photo from Saturday]
Workers are starting on the fourth floor of the incoming 12-story zig-zagging office complex on the southwest corner of Broadway at 11th Street.
The address was the former home of the recently demolished St. Denis building. Normandy Real Estate Partners bought the property for somewhere in the $100 million ballpark back in 2016.
According to a news release about the address: "799 Broadway will feature floor-to-ceiling glass, private terraces, and 15 foot high ceilings. This combination of highly desirable location and state-of-the-art design will appeal to New York’s most progressive and creative companies."
And (previously revealed) renderings of the new building via architects Perkins and Will ...
The official site for 799 Broadway is at this link.
This is the type of new development of concern to preservationists, who say this out-of-scale construction is a threat to the area south of Union Square, where other new development includes 809 Broadway.
This morning, the City Planning Commission holds a public hearing on the proposed hotel special permit requirement for Greenwich Village and the East Village south of Union Square.
Per the Village Preservation:
The Mayor’s campaign donors and supporters are real beneficiaries are of this plan, which does nothing to fulfill promises to protect these neighborhoods in the wake of increased development pressure from the City Council’s approval of the upzoning for the Mayor’s 14th Street Tech Hub [in August 2018].
As for the southwest corner of Broadway and 11th Street: The former St. Denis building, which was 165 years old, was noteworthy for many reasons. It opened in 1853 as the St. Denis Hotel, which is where Ulysses S. Grant wrote his post-Civil War memoirs and Alexander Graham Bell provided the first demonstration of the telephone to New Yorkers. (For more history, Jeremiah Moss, who once had an office in the St. Denis, wrote this feature titled "The Death and Life of a Great American Building" for The New York Review of Books in March 2018.)
However, the building was not landmarked... and it is not in a Historic District.
[Image via Wikipedia Commons]
Previously on EV Grieve:
• Report: Former St. Denis Hotel selling for $100 million
This Newbie is so phucken UGLY..
ReplyDeleteHorrible.
ReplyDeleteNo one helps this neighborhood.
Disgusting, and so absolutely out of context that it belongs in another city entirely. Preferably far, far away.
ReplyDeleteOh c'mon. Lots of beautiful buildings on that block but that squat bulky eyesore with useless retail won't be missed.
ReplyDeletePerhaps the stores were useless to you, but not to others. They were interesting additions to the block unlike the chains coming into the new buildings.
DeleteThe building also housed therapists’ offices and small businesses who can no longer find affordable work spaces. Do you want to meet your therapist at a coffee shop or WeWork location or travel out to Queens for a session?
Jeremiah's Vanishing New York wrote several posts about this building I highly recommend reading. The building housed much more than just a couple of stores.
Deleteplease use bird safe glass, preferred by the "progressive and creative" thanks
ReplyDeleteI'm wondering if they will have to comply with the new bird-safe legislation as this is new construction. I hope so.
DeleteGreat looking eye catching design with a lot of green spaces on each level. Nice departure from the standard steel and glass rectangles all over Manhattan.
ReplyDeleteEverything is a matter of opinion. The old village houses mostly are very basic.
ReplyDeleteThe problem with this building is that it's absurdly short for knocking down the previous building and will come nowhere close to satisfying demand for office space in the neighborhood. Our zoning encourages such waste
ReplyDelete"Jeremiah's Vanishing New York wrote several posts about this building I highly recommend reading. The building housed much more than just a couple of stores."
ReplyDeleteJM worked in that building, that's where is office was.
Is it just me or are most of the comments here a little too "developer friendly" than usual? How could anyone but a developer be in favor of this out of place glass terrarium? The comment about how we desperately need more office space in the neighborhood is not is so LOL.
ReplyDeleteOops! I read that as “Glass tantrum..” Seems fitting.
DeleteFTR, Noble, I am a local EV YIMBY, I care far more about housing dev
ReplyDelete@noble-
ReplyDelete@noble- So anyone who doesn't agree with your opinion, or the usual anti-development twaddle, is a little too "developer friendly"?........projecting much? So a new state of the art modern building is replacing an outdated, lead and asbestos contaminated structure that was nothing much to look at in the first place? ....in NYC of all places?.......shocking!
(btw not a *transplant*. My mother was born in Brooklyn many moons ago and my father's family settled in NY in 1712)
But to give an explanation––there's a huge demand for office space in the neighborhood because the area south of Flatiron is where most technology firms are based. Google, FB, IBM. If you're a tech company, you want to be near them, and would pay a premium to do so. But the zoning is very tight, so it essentially encourages tech companies to displace whatever is there to get space in existing buildings. We could see this in miniature with how FB slowly ate a whole floor of KMart in Astor Place. And where the zoning allows it, you might also see them demolish existing buildings for a small amount of brand new office space. I assume a tech firm will be moving into this space and the one on St. Marks. But as I see it, allowing new buildings, (esp around Union Square) to be taller would counterintuitively reduce demand for existing space and allow the rest of the East Village to host more than just technology businesses.
ReplyDeleteAs an aside, what really annoys me is situations like JPMorgan's 270 Park Avenue, where they demolished their entire previous skyscraper to build one ~20 stories taller. Ideally, they would build a new skyscraper somewhere else, and the old building could become cheaper office space for non-finance firms. But because you can't build skyscrapers outside of a few neighborhoods, they decided to demolish an absurd amount of space.