Extell Development Co.

Long in the planning stages, Gary Barnett and his Extell Development Co. have finally let loose images of Riverside Center, their planned 3.3 million-square-foot mostly residential complex at the base of the West Side development once known as Trump City. The Department of City Planning put on its Web site today an environmental review document for the project, a draft scope, which outlined the specifics of what Extell wants to put on the site, currently a series of parking lots.

The plan calls for five buildings, designed by Pritzker-winning Christian de Portzamparc, each a skinny tower that would run east-west on the two-block superblock [more details from a prior community presentation  read more »

Marc Shaw, a former deputy mayor in the Bloomberg administration and now a vice president at Gary Barnett’s Extell Development, is headed to work for Governor Paterson. The Paterson administration announced this afternoon that Mr. Shaw had been appointed as an adviser to the governor for a six-month period.

We’re waiting to hear back from the state on why Mr. Shaw is signing on for such a short term of work, but given his history in government as a budget expert, it seems safe to assume that he’ll be working on fixing the state’s fiscal woes (the budget is due in March). In addition to overseeing the city’s fiscal issues as deputy mayor, he was a budget director under Giuliani, chaired the congestion mitigation committee set up to assuage concerns about congestion pricing, and was an executive director of the M.T.A. (which is dealing with its own fiscal issues right now).  read more »

Gary Barnett and his Extell Development Co. are plowing forward with their plans for five new glass towers at the base of the Riverside South mega-development on the Upper West Side, and the company now says it plans to kick off early public review in December.

The plan, presented at an Upper West Side community meeting last night by Mr. Barnett himself, calls for four residential towers and one mixed-use tower totaling 3.1 million square feet on an eight-acre site between 59th and 61st streets along the West Side Highway.

Already, if last night's meeting is any guide, there are many unpleased Upper West Side residents.  read more »

Gary Barnett's Extell Development Co. is seeking to build a 15-story apartment tower on West 20th Street, a planned project that will be heard by the city's Landmarks Preservation Commission tomorrow.

The site, 19-25 West 20th Street, is in the Ladies' Mile Historic District, and any new construction would need consent of the commission. The new building would include a three-story addition to an existing garage on the site, according to the commission's agenda, coupled with a new tower on an adjacent parking lot.

Extell Development has dropped its push to bring Costco to its planned "Riverside Center" site on the Upper West Side, part of the larger Riverside South development by the West Side Highway.

The developer told elected officials this morning that the planned store was off the table, dropping a controversial element of their plan, which calls for up to 2,500 apartments in a series of five towers between 59th and 61st streets.

From the West Side Spirit:

"Gary Barnett has heard the concerns of the community, the community board, and elected officials as well as City Planning Commission Chair Amanda Burden and her staff and has therefore eliminated Costco and 500 parking spaces from Riverside Center," said George Arzt, Extell's spokesman.

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Extell Development is in talks with discount bulk retailer Costco to occupy a large underground store as part of a new 3.3 million-square-foot development of mostly residential buildings on the Upper West Side.

Extell, led by Gary Barnett, is seeking to move forward on developing the last parcels of Riverside South, the 55-acre swath of Upper West Side land known as Trump City when Donald Trump first started planning the complex in the 1980s. The company's plans for the final parcels between 59th and 61st streets would need approval of the City Council and City Planning Commission, as the firm is seeking to change the initial restrictions to allow for more density and different uses (the original development planned for a commercial tower for NBC at the site).  read more »

Now it's really official: the M.T.A. board this afternoon voted to approve a deal with the Related Companies and Goldman Sachs to develop over the 26-acre West Side rail yards.

A few nuggets of rail yards info from the meeting: According to M.T.A. CFO Gary Dellaverson, who summarized negotiations to the board, the key to the Related Companies' victory was its willingness to literally pick up the $1.054 billion Tishman Speyer deal and sign it, only inserting one notable change.  read more »

With Tishman Speyer out of the picture at the West Side rail yards, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority is now headed back to the other three bidding teams (Extell Development, the Related Companies, and a joint venture of the Durst Organization and Vornado Realty Trust); that is, if they’re still interested.

The apparent frontrunner, given that it was the runner-up to Tishman in the original bidding, would be Durst/Vornado, the only remaining team in late March with an anchor tenant, S.I. Newhouse’s Condé Nast. If Condé Nast is no longer on board with a move—The Times has reported that Tishman failed to woo them in recent weeks—that could mean trouble for the Durst/Vornado bid, or certainly the value of it.  read more »

Extell Development’s architect, Steven Holl, came up with the idea of building a very low suspension bridge over the West Side Rail Yards instead of a deck that would be supported by piers scattered among the tracks. That way, workers would only have to tinker along the north and south edges of the site, leaving the rail yards to function normally underneath them.

“I think we are the only project that is really minimally invasive with the Long Island Rail Road, with the MTA operations, and I think we will have a much lower cost of construction as a result,” said Extell’s founder Gary Barnett. “You know you don’t have to put a billion dollars or more into a platform up front.”  read more »

Extell Development Co.’s proposal for the Western Rail Yards, which is the first of five that the public and press can get a look at, really revs up the amount of green space on the ground by building tall. Really tall. The tripled-legged tower pictured to the right would stretch 1,238 feet into the air, rivaling the Empire State Building’s 1,250-foot height, and outdoing that icon in total square footage and the size of its observation deck.

Other buildings in the Extell proposal are quite a bit smaller, but still considerable: at around 700 feet tall, the so-called “sun slice” buildings proposed for 30th Street orient their narrow sides to the south to cut down on shadows cast over the open space behind them.

According to the plans (PDF), the footprints of all buildings will take up just 25 percent of the property, compared to 52 percent in the plans proposed by the city and the MTA, leaving an extra 7 acres or so of open space. Also, the plan would eliminate any discharge of storm water by funneling it into a reservoir that would run through the center of the park, and the plan claims to reduce energy consumption by 50 percent thanks to a geothermal cooling system and cogeneration.

The development company, led by Gary Barnett, also proposes a Long Island Rail Road station along 33rd Street between 11th and 12th avenues. After all, you never know how long it will take them to build this No. 7 line.