Citigroup’s revamp of its buildings on Greenwich Street—combining 388 and 390 into one headquarters, as first shown here in March—is due to start very soon. Reps from Citi and the project’s master architect, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, were at Wednesday’s meeting of the Community Board 1 Tribeca Committee to talk about how the neighborhood will be affected. Here’s what we learned—and the folks from Citi kindly sent over these renderings, giving us a better look than from what I posted before.

••• The work is projected to take five years. Here’s the timeline (all images get bigger if you click on them).

••• Sidewalk sheds have to go up around the entire block, all the way to the curb. Sidewalks will be accessible 99% of the time—the 1% is when they’re being replaced.

••• The Greenwich Street plaza, to be fenced off imminently, is expected to be closed for a year and a half. (Once it reopens, it won’t need to be closed again.) It’s being entirely redesigned, as you can see from the renderings. The trellises and walls will be removed in an effort to make it “more porous,” with more seating and greenery.

The main entrance:

The plaza as seen from Greenwich and N. Moore:

As seen from Greenwich and Beach:

••• The plaza at N. Moore and West is being used as the construction area. (If they decide they need a hoist, it’ll be there, so as to bother neighbors less.) I’m not sure whether this plaza will be accessible to the public once the headquarters is done.

••• To make the two buildings look more like one, the new glass curtain wall on 390 Greenwich will be extended to the east and west (but not south) sides of 388, where it will go up to the 14th floor. (There was an amusing moment when one of the reps said the glass was “to make it feel more like Tribeca.”) First, the façade that’s being kept will be restored, and then the rest will be replaced. On 390, the workers will be lifting the panels off whole, so as to be quieter.

••• Perhaps most interestingly, the new headquarters will have a retail space in the northeast corner (“maybe some kind of food service, with café seating on the street”) and a Citi bank branch (which certainly makes one assume the branch on Hudson is a goner). What’s more, as you can also see below, there will be an auditorium with seating for just over 400 people—and Citi “has a notion that it could be available for community use” because it can be accessed separately.

••• The building will be LEED Gold, and they’re “looking for opportunities to upgrade to LEED Platinum.”

••• Because Citi isn’t expanding, the company doesn’t need much in the way of city approval—most everything is as of right and they were presenting to CB1 as a courtesy. Nonetheless, committee members wondered what we could get for the trouble—in particular, couldn’t Citi help out with finishing Pier 26, right in its own backyard? “Citi is in preliminary discussions” with Hudson River Park about partnering somehow, was the answer—but that “there isn’t the appetite” for paying for the whole thing. Downtown Boathouse‘s Graeme Birchall said he supports any help Pier 26 can get—to which a Citi rep joked, “Can we get you to paint the boats blue?”

••• No one asked to what extent Citi’s in-house food services will be enlarged, which could obviously have an effect on local restaurants. As you can see in this rendering obtained in March, the shorter building at 390 will have a landscaped roof deck—pair it with a cafeteria and during the warmer months, there’s no reason to leave the building.