[
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