Hudson Yards: More Far West Side News
Manhattan rental apartment seekers have been keenly watching the news that keeps coming from the Far West Side (aka Hudson Yards), that stretch of real estate including parts of Chelsea and Clinton / Hell’s Kitchen, to the west of 9th Avenue, that developers have had their eyes on of late.
For decades a desolate area of rail yards, parking lots, and warehouses, the neighborhood had few Manhattan rental apartments on the market, nor really many residential buildings of any kind. The High Line, of course, sparked a huge change in the way Manhattan rental apartment developers viewed this part of town, especially when the second phase of the hugely popular and welcoming park extended up as far as 30th Street and 10th Avenue.
Suddenly such massively ambitious projects like the 16-skyscraper Hudson Yards development seemed ever more likely to change the area forever… and, in fact, given recent news, it looks as if it will become a reality sooner rather than later.
Related, one of New York City’s largest developers, announced that the handbag and fashion-accessories giant Coach Inc. has signed on to be the primary occupant of a 51-story office building, designed to be LEED Gold by Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates and pictured above and at top, that would kickstart the entire dream-(come-true?) 26-acre, 13-million-square-feet project to turn the train yards into an office and residential building mega-complex.
Having Coach on board moved Hudson Yards from the “Wishful Thinking” squarely into the “Possibly Actually Happening” column, and Related’s Stephen Ross promised that construction of the tower, located in the southeast corner of Hudson Yards site right near the High Line, would begin in the summer of 2012.
And this on the heels of the Diller-von Furstenberg Family Foundation $20 million gift to the Friends of the High Line, which makes the completion of the park, to 34th Street and 12th Avenue, all but certain.
The Coach tower is only the first step in what could become an enormous boon for both the Manhattan rental apartment market as well as the the city as a whole: the grand plan for Hudson Yards includes some “5,000 residences in nine residential buildings, 6 million square feet of state-of-the-art commercial office space, a 1 million square foot of destination retail complex, a 150-room five star hotel, a totally unique cultural facility, and a new 750-seat public school, all carefully planned around 14 acres of public open space.” Sounds like a neighborhood-changer to me!
The start of construction in the Hudson Yards complex also gave life to another years-long dream that would benefit all Manhattan rental apartment residents: the transformation of this once industrial part of town into a Far West Side, on-the-waterfront Museum Mile, anchored in the south by the currently-under-construction, Renzo Piano-designed Whitney Museum on Gansevoort Street (pictured above and below) in the Meatpacking District (and, not incidentally, at the southern terminus of the High Line), and to the north by what the Hudson Yards developers are calling the Culture Shed.
The Culture Shed, now in the early stages of conception by High Line designers Diller Scofidio & Renfro, in partnership with the Rockwell Group, is being touted as a mixed-use, totally transformable performance space, which could simultaneously stage theater shows, traveling exhibitions and community events on different floors, or the entire five-story building space could be used for one big event, such as Fashion Week.
If the Culture Shed and the West Side Museum Mile concept comes to fruition, Far West Side rental apartment residents could walk from a world-class art exhibition at the new Whitney, up through the heart of the Chelsea Gallery district (which may include the new Dia Art space on 22nd Street), and end up at the Culture Shed for a show in the evening.
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