Posted Apr 13, 2010, 12:50 PM
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New Yorker for life
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Join Date: Jul 2001
Location: Borough of Jersey
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http://www.nypost.com/p/news/busines...YBFPKeFPgIt2bO
Vornado's Penn tower deal
By STEVE CUOZZO
April 13, 2010
Quote:
Vornado Realty Trust is offering a deal it hopes the city can't refuse.
The publicly traded real estate giant is promising an unprecedented slew of improvements to the Herald Square-Penn Station area's confusing, overcrowded mass-transit nexus. The plan includes new subway entrances and the reopening of a long-closed underground pedestrian tunnel.
Those upgrades would provide riders with easier access to an underground network that will eventually stretch from Sixth to Ninth Avenue, and include the new Moynihan Station.
Vornado would pay for and build the transit amenities in exchange for variances it wants for a proposed office-tower development on the site of the Hotel Pennsylvania. Vornado bought the hotel in 1997 as a linchpin of its strategy for the bustling area, where it also owns several office buildings.
The company can replace the gloomy hotel with an 1.15 million square-foot office tower without public approvals. But it would prefer to put up a tower with nearly twice as much floor area -- just under 2.053 million square feet.
It would increase the size through a zoning change, a 20 percent floor-area bonus for the transit upgrades, and a transfer of air rights from its adjacent Manhattan Mall.
The zoning change and transit bonus would increase the floor area ratio (FAR) -- total floor area in relation to the size of the ground lot -- from the current 12 to 18 for the combined, 160,000 square-foot hotel and mall footprint.
Vornado would not immediately raze the Pennsylvania even if it got approvals for the tower overnight. Rather, it would wait until it pre-signs at least one large office tenant -- which could take years.
But Vornado chief Steven Roth wants the project, called 15 Penn Plaza, to be "fully entitled" well in advance of finding an anchor tenant.
The New York Observer first reported that Vornado would pursue an approve-now, build-later strategy for a tower rising to 1,216 feet. But no details emerged on 15 Penn Plaza's bulk or on most of the transit upgrades until this week.
The proposal goes before Manhattan Community Board 5 on Thursday -- a step in the city's Uniform Land Use Review Procedure. The plan requires the blessings of the Planning Department, City Council and Mayor Bloomberg.
The tower would come in two configurations -- one for a single financial-industry tenant requiring trading floors, the other for a mix of tenants.
Vornado's environmental impact statement reveals that either scheme would be considerably larger than its nominal 2.053 million square feet -- 2.82 million "gross square feet" for the larger version. The difference results from the fact that the zoning count doesn't include mechanical space or below-ground floors.
To allow the tower to taper gradually as it rises and to be set back 15 feet at the base from the Seventh Avenue property line, Vornado needs waivers to city height-and-setback rules.
But, if Vornado is asking a lot, it's also promisingwhat's believed to be the most extensive transit-center upgrades ever offered by a private developer here at one location.
The improvements, a source said, were "a wish-list basically dictated" by the MTA, the Port Authority and Amtrak.
According to the environmental impact study, Vornado would build new subway entrances at Seventh Avenue between West 32nd and 33rd streets; widen the congested northbound No. 1 line platform by six feet; and widen stairs and build new escalators and elevators to serve the subway and PATH lines. It would also improve access to the Sixth Avenue subway and PATH entrances, which are both now hidden inside the Manhattan Mall.
In an oral presentation to CB5, Vornado officials indicated that the existing train entrance at Sixth near 33rd would be moved to the corner sidewalk.
But the most dramatic change in the proposal might be a plan to open a sanitized, 21st Century edition of the old Gimbels Passageway -- the creepy corridor that once connected the Herald Square and Penn Station/Seventh Avenue subway stations, until crime and squalor forced the MTA to close it in 1980.
The dimly-lit tunnel ran parallel to the basements of the department store and the hotel. Users endured an interminable slog past homeless cripples and harmonica-playing squatters who rose shrieking out of the dark.
The concourse would be widened to 16 feet from 9 feet and crafted like Rockefeller Center's, with stores, artwork and mid- block access points.
And where using the old tunnel re quired paying an additional fare to go from one station to the other, the new one would offer a free transfer -- at least one feature of Vornado's dream unlikely to start an argument.
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