Jones Lang LaSalle


NYC 01 23 06
CONVENTION CENTER MARSHALL PLAN
Peter Slatin

As New York Gov. George Pataki gears up to step down in 2007 and mount a likely presidential bid, he is also hoping to push through the start of development on an expanded Jacob K. Javits Convention Center on Manhattan's still-gritty West Side. If he succeeds in getting the $1.7 billion project underway before he leaves office, it could serve as a counterweight to the ongoing fumbling at Ground Zero. (Even there, it would not be surprising to see a ratcheting up of activity in the months before a new governor takes office; Larry Silverstein, still clinging fiercely to his post, has engaged Sir Norman Foster to begin design on an office building to rise contemporaneously on the site with Freedom Tower.)

A new colonnade supports a roof overhang that extends 80 feet from the Convention Center's exterior wall.

On Monday, Empire State Development Corp. Chairman Charles Gargano unveiled plans drawn up by another British architect, Sir Richard Rogers, teamed up with New York's FxFowle and Chicago's A. Epstein, for an expansion of the convention center that would virtually double its convention exhibiition space, to 1.1 million square feet, and reorient its truck marshalling and security area. The plan also calls for a new convention hotel on state-owned land and the sale of a full-block parcel south of the convention center to a private developer. While adding a convention hotel on state-owned land immediately across the street from the center.

The design, which Rogers stressed is "conceptual" in a public presentation to the Convention Center' Development Corp.'s board of directors, is aimed at addressing some of the Javits' major flaws: Rogers called it a "black box" sitting behind a "moat" of pavement, an apt metaphor for a British knight-architect.

Designers hope to create more appealing public spaces outside the Convention Center.

The convention center, which now stretches from 34th to 38th Street on the west side of 11th Avenue, will be expanded northward two full blocks to 40th Street, creating an unbroken 1,000-foot expanse along which the design team proposed a colonnade supporting an overhang that extends 80 feet out from the glass wall of the convention center; the columns supporting the overhang will be placed at the halfway point between the curb and the wall. The height and transparency of the shelf will allow light to penetrate into the main public space of the convention center, a soaring "room" that FxFowle senior design principal Dan Kaplan says will be 120 feet deep and 130 feet high. The new facade will also include exposed (but enclosed) stair towers and circulation, a Rogers specialty.

The basic scheme of the renovation and expansion: the existing convention center area, between 34th to 37th streets, will be renovated and refreshed internally. From 37th to 38th streets, the renovations will overlap with new construction of an interstitial and operating floor above the existing space. An entire new building containing three floors of convention and meeting space plus interstitial service areas will be melded into the center in the next block,. Finally, at the north end of the project, another building will be built between 39th and 40th streets that will be the marshalling and security hub through which all truck traffic must pass before being deployed to existing and new loading docks. This building, which Kaplan describes as the "workhorse" of the complex, will be set back 190from street 190 feet; a small park in front is intended to lead to cafes and retail within the colonnade.

A new interior room 130 feet high and 120 feet deep, will be the main lobby for the Convention Center.

The CCDC, aided by its owner's rep, Tishman Construction, is expected to come out with two Requests for Proposals critical to the project: the first, likely in the second quarter of the year, will be for the development of a 1,000 to 1,500-room convention hotel on a site across 11th Avenue between 35th and 36th streets. Kaplan says the hotel could also support two stacked 20,000-square-foot ballrooms; conventioneers will be able to travel between the hotel and the center through an existing below-grade tunnel. The state values the land at $150 million, and will turn it over to a developer at a nominal sum on a ground lease; the lessee will no doubt hope to win tax relief or other incentives from New York City.

The second RFP, expected by year's end, will be for the sale of the full-block site immediately to the south of the center, from 33rd to 34th streets between 11th and 12th avenues. The land is owned by the state-controlled Metropolitan Transportation Authority, and was part of the controversial, discarded plans for a football stadium and Olympic facility; it had been proposed tot serve as the "front porch" for that project; a tailgating center and ceremonial park. Now the state hopes that a private developer enticed by rising values in the area and Manhattan's continuing westward push will pay some $330 million for the site and develop as a mixed-use property.

The 1,000- foot-long colonnade will be activated at night from within.

That $330 million is a crucial piece of the $1.7 billion budget. According to ESDC, New York City and State will each contribute $350 million; another $645 million "has been raised through the sale of bonds backed by a dedicated $1.50 per key surcharge that the hotel industry has begun to collect." The state hopes to make up the difference with the sale of the southern parcel.

Will the community buy this plan? It has three important pluses: first, it's not a football stadium. Second, it moves the marshalling area away from its current central location along 11th Avenue. And third, it has relocated the hotel away from 42nd Street to a location more accessible to the convention center. On the down side, the community had pushed to keep 39th Street open, but the new plan doesn't allow for that. Still, sources say that locals are relatively pleased with the proposal. Alternative plans have been floated, including one from the Newman Institute, a real estate think tank attached to Baruch College of the City University of New York, that called for demolishing the existing center and building a new one along 34th Street. But the convention center board had not even looked at that proposal by the time it met to consider its own plan.

The next step: the creation of a so-called General Project Plan that will lay out the procedural steps needed get the project really underway. That should take some 30 days, but in the meantime the architectural team is proceeding to schematic design and demolition contracts will be sought for the properties that now occupy the northern sites slated for new construction. The General Project Plan will need to be approved by the Public Authorities Control Board, the same body that stopped the football stadium in its tracks.

READER WRITES

Dear Slatin Report:

All well and good, but the real question is this:

once all the beautiful buildings and walkways and parks are there, will people come! how about some human behavorialists on the "committee" to consider how people actually behave rather than trying to build things assuming that people will flock to it. I think there's a huge logistical problem with the convention center location that relates to the distance and environs that one has to transverse to get there from where people really are in manhattan and elsewhere. Anyway, nice piece.

Steve Felix
Institutional Real Estate, Inc.