In the News: South Street Skyscraper

••• Curbed says that the foxy building it thought was going to be 22 Thames won’t be there; New York YIMBY says it might actually be 111 Washington.

••• “Imperial Development Group, the team behind the renovation/conversion of 372 Broadway, will go before the Landmarks Preservation Commission on February 26.” —Curbed

••• The Wall Street Journal has an article about Hudson Square. The only part that struck me as news was “the Dahesh Museum of Art […] recently opened a shop and office space at 145 Sixth Ave. after five years without a physical location.” I’d never heard of the museum; its website says “The Dahesh Museum of Art is the only institution in the United States devoted to collecting, exhibiting, and interpreting works by Europe’s academically trained artists of the 19th and early 20th centuries.”

••• “The principal of PS/IS 276 [said] that she reluctantly favors freeing up two classrooms by ending pre-kindergarten at her school, at least until the 2017-2018 school year.” —Tribeca Trib

••• A big, striking building—”a 998-foot tall skyscraper bisected by skygardens that would have a boutique hotel on the bottom and apartments on the top,” says Curbed—is in the works for 80 South Street. —YIMBY (via Curbed)

morali

 

9 Comments

  1. This is such a relief; let’s hope it’s going to be 111 Washington, which is already an empty lot and was previously a hideous parking garage, and not 22 Thames, which is such a beautiful neo-Romanesque building.

  2. @Hudson River: Sorry, but 22 Thames is still scheduled to be demolished.

  3. That’s so sad. I may have to throw myself in front of the wrecking ball on this one.

    Do you know anything about the lot across the street (corner of Thames and Greenwich)? I think it was going to be a hotel way back when.

  4. @Hudson River: Do you know the address?

  5. So much to laugh about with those reports on 80 South Street: “Bi-sected”? Um, sorry, Curbed, there appear to be way more than two sections. And “80 South Street’s scale is impressive for the neighborhood, as the eastern side of the FiDi is lacking in height. If it’s actually built, 80 South Street will help balance out the presence of the new World Trade Center, which will thoroughly dominate the Downtown skyline.” Um, YIMBY, you gotta be kidding if you think it’s a lack to not having more monsters like that and the Gehry building erectioning. (I know you’re not, but still . . .)

  6. Sorry; don’t know the address and can’t extrapolate from others.

  7. It’s 133 Greenwich according to a work permit on the fence, so I found your previous article on it and its going to be a 300-room hotel by the end of 2015. Because we don’t have enough hotels, I guess.

  8. It’s in this morning’s Broadsheet. Sigh . . .

  9. What makes New York unique? Not our skyscrapers. Shanghai has more of them than we do. Great cities like Paris and Rome have great historic districts, be they officially designated or not. We need to stop this kind of mindless “Shanghaiification” of our city that these towers represent and the destruction they do to the historic cityscape. They make our city unliveable. I don’t want to live in a clone of Shanghai.

    The zoning system needs to be profoundly overhauled to protect NY from real estate developers. We need a vision of our city’s future that is anchored in the preservation and expansion of our historic districts. Now we are stuck in a useless cycle of begging developers for inadequate “amenities” within their towers, which even if we get, wound the city in the process. The school we get will be instantly overcrowded. The park we get will have no sunlight. The plaza bonus will serve nobody. The “affordable housing” that is given will do nothing to make a neighborhood diverse. That game of negotiation is a losing one because it plays on their terms. This is not anti-growth or anti-change rhetoric. It is about what kind of growth we have, what kind of change happens, and who is in charge of it. Right now, it is just real estate developers that are in charge.