Pelli Tower Proposed for Greenpoint Waterfront
Something about this seems so 2006! A first-time developer (but former lawyer for The Donald) is proposing building two tall residential towers, annexing streets and building piers as part of a 890,000-square-foot, Cesar Pelli-designed project on India Street near the East River in Greenpoint; the waterfront portion would also include sand dunes and wetlands. Countless…

Something about this seems so 2006! A first-time developer (but former lawyer for The Donald) is proposing building two tall residential towers, annexing streets and building piers as part of a 890,000-square-foot, Cesar Pelli-designed project on India Street near the East River in Greenpoint; the waterfront portion would also include sand dunes and wetlands. Countless approvals would be needed at the city and community level for this thing to happen, but the concept did get a warm reception from one not easily taken in by developers’ visions of grandeur: It’s a beautiful project with a hard sell, said Ward Dennis, chair of local Community Board 1’s land-use committee. What the community needs to decide is where that balance is between density and open space and affordable housing. And really, that’s what all of these projects come down to. Waddya think? Crazy or just so crazy it might work?
Greenpoint Rising [Architect’s Newspaper]
Introducing the Latest Crazy Greenpoint Waterfront Plan [Curbed]
If we can’t have it in AY, why not have it here.
I’m all for it as long as it’s clad in some combination of stucco, vinyl siding or shingles.
Preferably all three.
are people even living in the Viridian yet?
From the looks of it, luxury housing (as a typology) isn’t doing either! Of course none of that luxury is on the waterfront, where people might actually pay a lot of money to live. But people aren’t paying a lot of money to come to the Viridian, and the locals can’t afford the Viridian’s prices.
Oh – thanks WBer – I was always curious about that dynamic. Opens up questions about housing typology – I think the point of the large scale development isn’t to take advantage of existing demand in the neighborhood, but to entice people to come, for whatever reason (waterfront amenities, skyline views, etc.)
Yea, it was a great deal, either you get hi density everywhere or you shutup and we’ll put hi density on the waterfront and make your streets R6B. It was contract of adhesion.
arch66 – As BBB notes, it’s not like there is the demand in Greenpoint to fill those R6A developments (Viridian), let alone density at this scale. And the R6B inland was not a tradeoff – it was an afterthought (enacted four years after the waterfront rezoning).
Funny how nobody actually cares about the architecture – it’s all in the entourage. My personal fave is the suburban style lawn in the middle of the street. If you erased those funny blue things sticking up in the middle, it could be a nice development.
Anyhow, I guess this is what happens when you squash down the zoning further away from the waterfront. In Greenpoint, you do have the contextual zoning inland. I understand (though I am not local to the area) that there was a kind of compromise struck – the “community” wanted to preserve low scale (40 foot high streetwall) development in the areas that were already built up, so they got their R6B, and in return, more density was permitted along the waterfront. Fun times.
quote:
So ‘take that shyte back to denver’ doesn’t even make sense.
uh, it’s the denver mindset, genius. :-/ not the actual physical geography.
*rob*