City Gives First Approval for the Lowline, Must Raise $10M Over the Next Year

The world’s first underground park just got one step closer to reality thanks to approvals from the NYC Economic Development Corporation. The Lowline, which will occupy a 40,000-square-foot abandoned trolley terminal below Delancey Street on the Lower East Side, received the thumbs up after an eight-monthbidding process during which no one else submitted a proposal.

City hall granted co-creators James Ramsey and Dan Barasch control of the space provided they can reach a $10 million fundraising goal over the next 12 months, complete a schematic design, and host five to 10 public design sessions and quarterly community engagement meetings.

The decision comes after the success of the Lowline Lab (it’s welcomed 70,000 visitors since opening), a miniature version of the subterranean park that tested its remote skylight system and horticulture, as well as conditional approvals from the local community board. It still needs to make its way through the city’s Uniform Land Use Review Process (ULURP), and as NY Mag points out, it may not be so easy to convince the public that the $60 million project that will require as much as $4 million annually in maintenance is feasible.

Though the city has committed no funds to the project, deputy mayor for housing and economic development Alicia Glen made it clear that public support hasn’t been ruled out. She also very exuberantly expressed her interest: “When they first presented it to me, I thought, That is some crazy, smoking-dope stuff — let’s check it out! We’re very excited about taking interesting technology, and the way the tech ecosystem is converging around cities, to solve civic problems and objectives.”

James Ramsey celebrated the victory: “Every designer dreams of doing civic work that contributes to society and to the profession. Over the last 8 years, we just stuck to what we thought was a great idea that could make our city and our community better. We’re thrilled to move ahead on designing and building a space that people will enjoy for generations to come.”

The Lowline Lab will be open through March, 2017; it’s free and open to the public.

Matt Lauer Unloading Southampton Beach Cottage for $4M

On Monday, 6sqft reported that “Today” anchor Matt Lauer had scooped upRichard Gere‘s Hamptons estate for an impressive $36 million. He’s wasted no time trying to unload his other properties on the island, as the Post reveals today that his Southampton beach cottage has hit the market for $4 million. Located at 67 Scotts Landing Road, the charming waterfront home sits on .75 acres within a community “where houses are generally passed on to the next generation,” according to the listing. This exclusive neighborhood offers tennis courts and access to a bay beach with a pavilion that puts on events.

The cottage is much simpler than Lauer’s new digs; it has three bedrooms and spans just 1,800 square feet. There’s beamed cathedral ceilings and a fireplace in the living room, which has an opening to the country kitchen. Off the kitchen is the dining room that features a lovely bay window.

The enclosed porch has glass doors that lead outside to a deck and down to the yard and 85 feet of bulkhead waterfront.

There also a charming detached garage that’s adjacent to the stone pathway that leads to the front door.

As 6sqft previously noted, “Lauer, who’s notorious for taking a private helicopter back and forth from the city to the Hamptons, also owns a 40-acre farm in Water Mill (where he recently had some beef with his neighbors).”

This Week’s 5 Most Expensive Listings

Here’s our look at the five most expensive residential listings to hit StreetEasy in the past seven days, otherwise known as the crème de la crème of the Manhattan market this week.

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30 Park Place #PH82

Address 30 Park Place #PH82
Price $30,000,000
Type/Size Condo: three bedrooms and four-and-a-half bathrooms
This full-floor penthouse in the Robert A.M. Stern designed 30 Park Place is this week’s most expensive listing. Situated on the 82nd floor of the tower, this spread comes with 360 degree views, four private terraces, a library and two walk-in closets.

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930 Fifth Avenue 18A–18C

Address 930 Fifth Avenue 18A–18C
Price $19,000,000
Type/Size Co-op
This listing isn’t just one apartment, it’s two. Snap up this combination opportunity and you’ll be the owner of 18A and 18C at 930 Fifth Avenue (where Woody Allen once owned a penthouse). Both units are available individually, but between them will total approximately 5,000 square feet with over 90 feet of frontage on Central Park.

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432 Park Avenue #38A

Address 432 Park Avenue #38A
Price $18,350,000
Type/Size Condo: three bedrooms and four-and-a-half bathrooms
This 4,082 square foot spread in New York’s biggest trash can has only been on the market for three days and already it’s in contract. The potential buyers must have been swayed by the library, the private elevator landing and the huge windows with Central Park views.

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111 West 67th Street #22EFGH

Address 111 West 67th Street #22EFGH
Price $11,599,000
Type/Size Condo: five bedrooms and five-and-a-half bathrooms
Located at The Park Millennium, this corner apartment spans 3,300 square feet. While it may not be the biggest apartment on this week’s list, with 20 closets it might just have the most storage space. It’s being sold by the anonymous 111 West 67th LLC.

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60 Riverside Boulevard #PH4001

Address 60 Riverside Boulevard #PH4001
Price $9,999,000
Type/Size Condo: four bedrooms and four-and-a-half bathrooms
At $9.99 million, this Roman and Williams-designed penthouse is a little cheaper than the homes we usually highlight on this list – but not by much. It’s located on top floor of the Aldyn and has floor-to-ceiling windows and 12-foot-high ceilings. Meanwhile the building itself offers residents access to an athletic club and spa, a playground, a rock climbing wall and a bowling alley.

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How NYC’s Supertalls Compare in Height and Girth to Global Towers

As the Skyscraper Museum so aptly writes, “Tall and BIG are not the same thing.”

Echoing 6sqft’s recent post on global supertalls, the infographic above illustrates how when the height of New York’s tallest towers are stacked up against the sky-high constructions abroad (and 1 WTC), our city’s skyscrapers truly are “runts on the world’s stage.” The image also reveals that not only do these towers lack significantly in height, but also in girth. This means what really makes the design of all of New York’s new skyscrapers so unique is not how tall they are, but rather, how slender they are.

“The pencil-thin periscopes — all 50 to 90+ stories — use a development and design strategy of slenderness to pile their city-regulated maximum square feet of floor area (FAR) as high in the sky to as possible to create luxury apartments defined by spectacular views,” says the Skyscraper Museum of this new typology.

“‘Slenderness’” is an engineering definition,” they add. “Structural engineers generally consider skyscrapers with a minimum 1:10 or 1:12 ratio (of the width of the building’s base to its height) to be ‘slender.’ Slenderness is a proportion based on the width of the base to the height of the building.”

In this slender lot, they point out 18 towers in specific that redefine the width versus height ratio, emphasizing again that extreme verticality is not at all representative of total gross floor area: One57, 111 West 57th Street, 432 Park Avenue, 520 Park Avenue, Central Park Tower, 220 Central Park South, 53W53, 100 East 53rd Street, Sky House, 45 East 22nd Street, One Madison, 35 Hudson Yards, 56 Leonard, 30 Park Place,111 Murray Street, 125 Greenwich Street, 50 West Street and 9 DeKalb Avenue.

Average Condo Sale in Manhattan Reaches $2.9M, Setting New Record

For the second quarter in a row, average condo sales prices in Manhattan are breaking records. The first three months of 2016 saw $4.59 billion in aggregate sales, breaking the previous record of $4.57 billion that was set last quarter, according to data from CityRealty. The average sales price topped out at $2.9 million, also significantly higher than last quarter’s $2.5 million. These figures aren’t surprising considering 24 percent of all condo sales during the beginning of this year were at or above $10 million, with new luxury developments like 432 Park Avenue, The Greenwich Lane, and 150 Charles Street accounting for the uptick.

In 1927, NYC Almost Got a 16-Mile Highway Along Building Rooftops

In the early 20th century, engineers and architects were certainly thinking outside the box when it came to city planning here in New York. There was the proposal to fill in the Hudson River for traffic and housing, the idea to create a giant conveyor belt to carry people between Grand Central and Times Square, and the plan tostack the city like a layered cake. Though these ideas sound whacky, they were born from the rise of the automobile and suburbinization. With many Americans moving out of urban centers, planners sought new ways to reimagine the modern city and entice car-loving prospects.

Another such idea is this 1927 one for a 16-mile elevated highway that would have traveled across building rooftops from the Battery all the way to Yonkers. Conceived by engineer John K. Hencken, it required all buildings to be uniform at 12 stories. Within them would have been standard uses — residences, offices, schools, theaters, restaurants — and elevators to take cars from the street to the skyway.

Sure it’s crazy and was never built, but at the time, Hencken’s proposal was “approved by a number of eminent engineers and city planners. They say it is entirely feasible from an engineering standpoint,” according to a Popular Science article in which it was featured. The article continued: “Our artist pictures here an ingenious new plan for solving NYC’s traffic problems by a remarkable system of roof-top boulevards running more than sixteen miles in a straight line through the heart of the city. Bridging of cross streets for free movement of traffic; moving platforms for speedy and convenient service; healthful elevated playgrounds for children; underground railway freight service—these are some of its outstanding features.”

March’s 10 Most-Read Stories

March’s 10 Most-Read Stories

• Skyscraper Proposal Digs Out Central Park and Surrounds It With 1,000-Foot Glass Structure
• Apply for One of Stuyvesant Town’s Affordable Apartments, Starting at $1,200/Month
• Katie Couric Buys $12M Upper East Side Condo
• Apply for 83 Affordable Apartments in Astoria, Starting at $895/Month
• Queens’ New Skyline: A Rundown of the 30 Developments Coming to Long Island City
• Housing Lottery Launches for Greenpoint Landing’s 33 Eagle Street, Rents Start at $494
• My 1,000sqft: Tour a Newly Transplanted Couple’s Bushwick Apartment Filled With Craigslist Finds
• MAP: Where to Find NYC’s Current Affordable Housing Lotteries
• How Horse Poop Inspired the New York City Stoop
• New Views and Renderings of Eliot Spitzer’s ODA-Designed Williamsburg Mega-Development

The City's First LinkNYC Wi-Fi Kiosks Unveiled - 6sqft

As Crain’s first reported, the first of the city’s upcoming 7,500 LinkNYC Wi-Fi kiosks have officially rolled out today. Two new “links” (as they’ll be called), have sprouted up along Third Avenue in the East Village, one at the corner of East 15th Street and the other at East 17th Street. Each kiosk measures 9.5 feet tall and will be equipped with a gigabit-speed Wi-Fi connection with a 150-foot range, charging stations, a touch-screen that provides maps and info about city services, and a speaker phone that will let users make domestic calls—and all for free! The kiosks are meant to replace NYC’s 6,000 now-defunct pay phones.

The network of links will cost about $200 million to implement, but according to Crain’s, who attended today’s LinkNYC press unveiling, advertising generated by the kiosks are expected to bring in $500 million in revenue over the next 12 years. The designs themselves are the product of CityBridge, a technology consortium that teamed up with the city after winning a 12-year contract through the design competition Reinvent Payphones.

While the two kiosks debuting today won’t be fully functional just yet, they will give New Yorkers an idea of what’s to come. The gigabit-speed Wi-Fi connection is expected to kick in over the next two weeks, as eight other links planned for Third Avenue below 58th Street are installed. In February, the trial phase will bring a tablet component into the mix, this bit of tech giving users the ability to make phone calls and search the web. It’s expected by June that 500 more kiosks will be installed across the five boroughs. By 2024, the city will be covered with 7,500 links

Source: The City's First LinkNYC Wi-Fi Kiosks Unveiled Today! | 6sqft

New Renderings of One Vanderbilt, Midtown's Future Tallest Office Tower - 6sqft

 1 VANDERBILT AVENUE, NEW YORK, NY, UNITED STATES

The digital production studio Visualhouse has posted on their website our first motion video look at SL Green’s 63-story office tower known as One Vanderbilt. Hailed to forever change the face of Midtown East and reinvigorate the business district, the $1 billion-plus, 1.6-million-square-foot tower was unanimously approved by the City Council this past summer, thus granting SL Green the green light to begin construction of the supertower immediately.

Visualhouse’s newly released film and renderings provide us with a clearer picture of how the building’s full-block base will meet the street, and also remind us just how gargantuan the tower will be. According to the tower’s architects Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF), the tower will rise 1,501 feet to its spire, making it the third tallest building in the city upon completion. However, unlike the pencil-thin supertalls underway around Central Park, the project will throw up a substantial amount of bulk into the air.

The new nighttime depictions show the office floors will be topped by a sizable illuminated crown that is sure to join the Chrysler and Empire State Building as nighttime skyline fixtures.

Demolition of the pre-war buildings at the site is expected to last until the second quarter of 2016, and excavation/ foundation work is slated to end by 2017. TD Bank is already lined up to occupy 200,000 square feet of space in the building and will also provide a flagship retail branch at the base.

Source: New Renderings & Video of One Vanderbilt, Midtown's Future Tallest Office Tower | 6sqft

Mapping All 1.1 Billion NYC Taxi Trips Since 2009 - 6sqft

Mapping All 1.1 Billion NYC Taxi Trips Since 2009

POSTED ON THU, NOVEMBER 19, 2015BY DANA SCHULZIN CITYLIVING, MAPS, TRANSPORTATION

That’s 183,333,333 trips a year; 15,277,777 a month; and roughly 510,000 a day. And it likely took software developer Todd W. Schneider a long time to put all of that data into this stunning map of taxi pickups and drop offs over the past six years. Green boro taxis are represented in their signature color and traditional yellow cabs in white, with brighter areas representing more taxi activity. As Gothamist first noted, “Yellow cab pickups are concentrated south of Central Park in Manhattan, while drop offs spread north and east into Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx; drop off and pickup activity snakes like a glowworm from Manhattan to the airports: along the Van Wyck Expressway to JFK, and by 278 and 495 to La Guardia.”

Using the TLC’s public data, Schneider also created charts and maps that show taxi travel compared with uber rides; weekend destinations of bridge-and-tunnelers; a late-night taxi index; how weather affects taxi trips; weekday drop-offs at Goldman Sachs and Citigroup; airport traffic; cash versus credit card payments; and the dramatic increase in North Williamsburg taxi activity.

Above is a GIF showing the transformation of North Williamsburg taxi activity from 2011 (when the green cabs were introduced) to 2014, the area with the largest increase in taxi pickups. 72 percent of these pickups occurred late night, and we can see some of the specific spots where this is most prevalent, such as the Wythe Hotel, Output nightclub, and Verboten nightclub.

It’s also interesting to look at where those from neighboring locales go on the weekend. Though the first map above shows taxi pickups originating at Penn Station, most passengers are not going very far, ending up in the Meatpacking District, Chelsea, and Midtown. Not surprisingly, Murray Hill is the number one drop off spot, often known as the heart of the bridge and tunnel crowd.

“We’ve already covered the hipsters of Williamsburg and the B&Ts of Murray Hill, why not see what the taxi data can tell us about investment bankers, yet another of New York’s distinctive subcultures?” asks Schneider. As his graphs show, Goldman Sachs employees’ average drop off time is 7:59 a.m.; Citigroup is 7:51 a.m. Those taking taxis to these offices mostly get picked up in the West Village, Chelsea/Flatiron/Union Square, and Soho/Tribeca (in that order).

“I’m certainly not the first person to use the public taxi data to make maps, but I hadn’t previously seen a map that includes the entire dataset of pickups and drop offs since 2009 for both yellow and green taxis,” says Todd W. Schneider. To see the rest of his maps and charts, visit the project page HERE >>

[Via Gothamist]

Source: Mapping All 1.1 Billion NYC Taxi Trips Since 2009 | 6sqft

Robert A.M. Stern's 520 Park Avenue Finally Reaches Street Level, $130M Penthouse On Its Way - 6sqft

Two years since its groundbreaking, Zeckendorf Development’s tower o’ opulence at 520 Park Avenue has finally emerged from its cavernous trench. Set for completion in 2018, the Billionaires’ Row building will climb 54 floors and 780 feet into the Manhattan skyline, becoming the tallest and likely the most prestigious building on the Upper East Side. Envisioned by William Lie and Arthur Zeckendorf, 520 Park Avenue inherits the classically-inspired taste of the real estate dynasty’s prior projects. In the ’80s, their father William Zeckendorf Jr. erected some of the city’s largest post-modern apartment complexes such as Worldwide Plaza, Zeckendorf Towers, and the Park Belvedere. Here, the developers commissioned the esteemed architect/historian and dean of the Yale School of Architecture Robert A.M. Stern as the designer and SLCEas the architects of record. This team also collaborated together on 18 Gramercy Park South and 15 Central Park West, which shattered apartment records when opened in 2008. Intent on replicating its west side counterpart’s success, the Zeckendorfs again gathered the now-not-so-secret ingredients: a powerful address, palatial apartments, and most importantly, the coveted Central Park view, all of which will culminate in a jaw-dropping $130 million penthouse.

Aerial renderings via CityRealty

Diagram of the tallest current and upcoming slender skyscrapers in New York City. From left: 520 Park Avenue, 111 Murray Street, 56 Leonard,30 Park Place, 220 Central Park South, One57, 53W53, 432 Park Avenue, 111 West 57th Street, and Central Park Tower. Image courtesy of the Skyscraper Museum

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the slenderest of them all? The project site is only 60 feet wide, making 520 Park among the most slender skyscrapers in the city. Despite its Park Avenue address, the building is actually tucked midblock along 60th Street behind Christ Church, to which the project owes its address and air rights. To garner more floor area, the building will cantilever over much of the adjacent Grolier Club, capturing an additional 30 feet of width.

From Left: 520 Park Avenue, Sherry-Netherland, and the The Pierre

The tower will rise in relative isolation, roughly to the same height as the Woolworth Building downtown. Nearly all of the building’s 33 full-floor residences will posses views of Central Park since the site lies just outside of Midtown’s canyons and overlooks the protected Upper East Side Historic District. The tower’s cladding of warm Indiana Limestone is designed to soak up natural light and be evocative of the great New York apartment buildings of the 1920s and ’30s. At its pinnacle is a $130 million, three-level, 12,400-square-foot shrine of wealth. Its crown of four corner chimneys strung together by sets of pilasters, will join the fairytale tops of the Pierre and the Sherry-Netherland nearby.

Homes begin 170 feet up and cover a minimum of 4,600 square feet of. Amenities include a landscape courtyard, guest suites, private wine cellars, a bi-level health and fitness center, a swimming pool and spa, children’s playroom, and a screening area. Prices begin at $16 million and as 6sqft first reported last March, the developers are projecting a total sellout of $1.2 billion. The $130 million triplex penthouse was the most expensive apartment to hit the market. However, the three top floors of 220 Central Park South(another Billionaires’ Row tower designed by Robert A.M. Stern), is reported to be in contract for a whopping $200 million by billionaire hedge fund manager Kenneth Griffin.

The construction site as of this week, via CityRealty

In a recent CNBC interview regarding the development, William L, Zeckendorf told media outlet that they’ve seen more Chinese buyers in the last 60 days than ever before. He also notes, “Probably more likely now than ever. We are seeing more and more interest in New York City from across the world, we’re also seeing record-breaking prices being paid by New Yorkers.”

Source: Robert A.M. Stern's 520 Park Avenue Finally Reaches Street Level, $130M Penthouse On Its Way | 6sqft