Are two towers better than one? That’s a question Silverstein Properties is asking with regard to its latest development on the Far West Side.
Larry Silverstein’s [TRDataCustom] firm may scrap plans for a single, 1,000-foot tower at 514 11th Avenue. Instead, the developer would develop the site in two stages — first, build a 600,000-square-foot condominium tower, and then construct a roughly 1 million-square-foot commercial office tower.
Although Silverstein hasn’t made a final decision, the firm tapped CetraRuddy to design the condo portion of the plan, Crain’s reported.
Silverstein paid $115 million for the site, a former Mercedes-Benz dealership, in 2015. That year, the developer made a deal with the city to rezone the site’s commercial portion and build a 1.8 million-square-foot residential project with 30 percent of the units reserved for affordable housing. Later, Silverstein put the site on the market briefly.
At the time, he said he was not looking to sell because of the city’s aggressive affordable housing requirements.
Under this newly-floated plan, a rezoning would not be required. After building a residential component, Silverstein could capitalize on the growing office market in Hudson Yards, where BlackRock, Time Warner and others are or will be headquartered.
The two-phase project is a similar approach to the one Silverstein took at Silver Towers, a two-tier, 1,300-unit rental complex at 620 West 42nd Street that was completed in 2009. [Crain’s] — E.B. Solomont