By The New York Times | The New York Times
While 50 West may have opted out of the hospitality business, the soaring 926-foot blocklong tower that Silverstein Properties is putting up at the corner of Park Place and Church Street, at the edge of TriBeCa, is giving the hotel-condo hybrid a warm embrace.
The top floors of the 82-story building, or floors 39 to 82, will have 157 apartments, ranging from one to six bedrooms, all reached through a dedicated lobby at 30 Park Place. Below will be a 185-room Four Seasons Hotel, with its own lobby on Barclay Street.
Separating the two parts of the building on the 38th floor will be amenities available only to residents: a screening room, a yoga studio and a double-height-ceiling conservatory with a baby grand piano. Residents will brush elbows with hotel guests in a three-lane swimming pool on the third floor, which is also home to a spa and fitness center.
Residents who pay additional fees can have dinner from the hotel delivered to their apartments, their shoes shined or babysitters arranged for their children.
Larry A. Silverstein, the company’s chairman, said that while he considered restricting the building to condos, especially in light of the city’s hot housing market, he took a cue from his own experiences in life.
“My wife and myself, we are not young people anymore, and the advantage of having those services available to you on a 24-hour basis is enormously reassuring,” he said. “And we thought that they would also be worth a good deal to people who move into this tower.”
Prices at the $1 billion project will start at around $3,000 a square foot, Mr. Silverstein said, or about $2.6 million for the smallest one-bedroom. There will be 11 penthouses; the priciest, a duplex, will cost about $60 million. Sales, to be handled by the Corcoran Sunshine Marketing Group, kick off in a few weeks. The completion date is 2016.
Even though the lowest prices at 30 Park Place will exceed the neighborhood average, hanging the Four Seasons banner outside will draw buyers, said Mr. Nassimi, who formerly oversaw sales at the nearby hotel-condo W New York-Downtown.
“It’s like with jewelry,” he said. “The same diamond that you buy on 47th Street will cost more at Tiffany. There’s an added value in a name.”
Silverstein’s latest tower is progressing quickly since construction resumed in December. On a recent afternoon, all traffic was halted on Park Place while a massive crane went to work at the site. But getting to this point has taken time.
Silverstein, along with a California teachers’ retirement fund, bought the site for $170 million in 2006. At the time, the existing 11-story 1950s structure contained the headquarters of Moody’s, the credit-rating company, which relocated to Silverstein’s nearby 7 World Trade Center. Plans were drawn, a team assembled, the building razed and a foundation poured.
But after the economic collapse in 2008, Mr. Silverstein re-evaluated the situation. “We decided that the prudent thing to do would be to shut down the site,” he said.
Silverstein Properties is a large developer with a huge portfolio, so it can afford to delay. And an unintended benefit of waiting may have been the increasing prominence of the project’s designer, Robert A. M. Stern Architects. In recent years Mr. Stern has made a splash with two buildings for Zeckendorf Realty, including 15 Central Park West and 18 Gramercy Park.
At 30 Park Place, Stern’s firm designed the cast-concrete and limestone exterior, the condos and domed condo lobby, with its black-and-white mandala-patterned stone floor. It also created the condo’s custom cabinets, vanities and light fixtures, while collaborating on some of the hotel spaces.
“As a kid who grew up watching movies like ‘How to Marry a Millionaire,’ I would see all these fabulous apartments,” Mr. Stern said of his inspiration. “This is a glamorous city. There should be glamorous places to live.”
