First renderings for Disney’s HQ at former City Winery block

Skidmore, Owings & Merrill has released the first images of Disney’s new headquarters coming to the full block at Varick (to Hudson) and Vandam (to Spring) on the old City Winery site. The address is actually called 4 Hudson Square (I don’t know how anyone can find anything with those addresses) and the building will be 22 stories tall with two towers and a total of 1.2 million square feet. The materials are a pale green terracotta with bronze finishes — intended to reflect the neighborhood’s color palette.

There was no way this block was going to escape development, still, it’s worth looking at what was lost when the church leased to the mouse.

They are breaking ground in 2022.

 

10 Comments

  1. Church didn’t sell. They just gave the mouse a 99 year lease. :-)

  2. The Trinity church did NOT sell. It is a 99-year lease. The King of England gave them the land and they are not allowed to sell, I believe. But I am pretty sure this is a lease.

    • Yes, was just meant to be ‘in effect’ sold, but now corrected.

    • “The history of Trinity’s property begins with Anneke (or Annetje) Jans, who first came to the colony of New Netherland in 1630, settling in Fort Orange (today’s Albany). In 1634, she and her husband, Roelof, moved to Manhattan, and in 1636, they acquired a 62-acre parcel of land north of the newly constructed wall that marked the city’s northern border.

      “Roelof died in 1637, and the next year, Jans married the pastor of the Dutch Reformed Church, Everardus Bogardus. The Jans/Bogardus land came to be known as the Dominie’s Bowery, or Reverend’s Farm. After Bogardus died in a shipwreck in 1647, Jans moved back to the Albany area, where she died in 1663, just prior to the English takeover of New Netherland. In accordance with her will, Jans’s surviving children were to sell the farm and split the proceeds, which they did in 1671, selling it to Gov. Francis Lovelace. Over the next 25 years, the land was merged with another tract—the combination was dubbed the King’s Farm—and this 215-acre parcel became crown land. It stretched all the way up to Greenwich Village, probably ending around today’s Christopher Street.

      “In 1697, Gov. Benjamin Fletcher, who had taken the step of establishing the Church of England as New York’s official religion, leased the King’s Farm to Trinity Church, the brand-new parish at the corner of Wall Street and Broadway that stood adjacent to the farm’s southern border.

      “Eight years later, Queen Anne granted the entire parcel—which had become the Queen’s Farm—to Trinity outright. It soon came to be known as the Church Farm, but many reverted back to calling it by the King’s Farm name. The queen’s grant made the church the second-largest landholder in New York (after the crown itself) and set the stage for the church to become the wealthiest in the North American colonies. […]

      “Trinity, meanwhile, has weathered its real estate storms and come out ahead. The 215-acre King’s Farm has been reduced through donations and sales to a mere 14 acres, so while Trinity can no longer claim to be the second-largest landholder in the city, the church remains the 14th wealthiest private landowner in New York. A 2013 lawsuit revealed that wealth to be at about $2 billion, a figure that only stands to increase as Hudson Square is developed further”

      https://ny.curbed.com/2018/8/22/17764064/trinity-church-real-estate-history-hudson-square

  3. We should get this land back. It didn’t belong to the Queen in the first place.

  4. These renderings look great. Much better than the glass monsters at Hudson Yards and WTC. Nice job!

  5. I would like this building complex if it didn’t look awful.

  6. I cannot understand why they can’t build something better that doesn’t look like a giant glass box – so sad all that money and nothing either passive house style/ green, future looking or go opposite way and do a throw back to contextual to the neighborhood…just primarily another glass and grey building.

  7. I’m just soooo tired of this. Wonderful businesses like City Winery and that lovely little architectural firm getting booted from prime locations because of landlords like Trinity and corporations like Disney. Yeah, yeah, CW is building a new space over on the Hudson. But I liked this space and location. Get off the 1 train on the way home from my job on the UWS to see the likes of Glen Tilbrook, then jump back on back to Bay Ridge. A perfect night.
    Not to mention the renovation of the upper level of CW to create another concert space The Loft. Trinity encouraged this, knowing they would evict CW and raze the entire block for Disney. What wankers. Yeah, I called the “church” wankers. They asked for it.

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