57th St New Condo Construction Next to Art Students League Ny
The Appraisal
A Tower Volition Rise Next to, and Over, a Paint-Spattered Landmark
In a city built on unlikely juxtapositions, there may exist no odder neighbors than the Fine art Students League, which occupies an ornate French Renaissance-manner building at 215 W 57th Street, and the Nordstrom Tower, an ultramodern colonnade, at to the lowest degree 1,500 feet tall, that will rising abreast it.
Abreast it, and above it, to exist precise. Starting about 300 anxiety up, the eastern edge of the Nordstrom Tower will jut out 28 feet over the league's 1892 abode, which is a landmark, making this improbable piece of streetscape fifty-fifty more curious: the brash upstart reaching out to a fragile dowager for back up.
Is the relationship a beneficial i? The answer, equally they might say in ane of the Fine art Students League'south drawing classes, is a matter of perspective.
Planned to exist the tallest residential structure in the hemisphere, the tower belongs to a new class of buildings — most clustered in the area directly south of Central Park — so extravagantly vertical that a new term has been coined for them: non just tall but hypertall. Its top story will be college than the top floor of 1 World Merchandise Eye (but lower than its needle).
In 2005, the Extell Development Corporation paid the league $23.1 meg for 136,000 foursquare anxiety of air rights, part of the more than one 1000000 square feet information technology assembled from buildings in the area. Last twelvemonth, the idea emerged to push the tower slightly off the edge of its pedestal; the shift allowed for a better floor program for Nordstrom, the tower's main retail tenant, and better views of the park for the belfry's residential tenants, too every bit bigger and presumably more than expensive apartments for them to live in.
For six,000 additional square feet of air rights for the cantilever, Extell paid the league an boosted $31.8 million. "They kind of got me back for the practiced deal I got years ago," said Gary Barnett, Extell's founder and president.
For 139 years, the Art Students League has opened its doors to all comers, from empty-nesters looking for a new hobby to historic painters, sculptors, printmakers and the like. The list of its most famous alumni reads like the index of an art history textbook, including Louise Bourgeois, Jackson Pollock, Georgia O'Keeffe and Ai Weiwei, an honoree at its coming gala.
Nigh classes run into 5 times a week, for three and a half hours a day, and cost just $230 a month, which works out to about $iii an hour. More than 2,500 students are currently enrolled.
Designed by Henry Hardenburg, the architect of the Plaza and the Dakota, the league's edifice is a time capsule. Classrooms look as they might have l or 100 years ago, with pigment-spattered folding chairs that Lee Krasner might have sat on, bundled in a semicircle from which Norman Rockwell might accept sketched a nude model.
Epitome
Late-20th-century technology is not present, to say nothing of early 21st-century gadgets. As for phones, in that location are a couple of old wooden booths in the entrance hall, merely they are used for storing human skeletons, a prop for anatomy studies.
It is all undeniably mannerly, but charm has its limits. "We need everything," a teaching assistant told a company, unprompted. Not merely equipment and supplies, she said. "Space. Air!"
For those who take pursued the deal with Extell, the behemothic side by side door represents a one time-in-a-lifetime chance to multiply the league's funds, to enrich its programs, to expand its classrooms, to renovate its home and to welcome more students than always before.
"I desire people to come up in," said Ira Goldberg, the league's executive managing director, "and experience like information technology'south Jerusalem, walking into the past and feeling connected with history."
Only to a portion of the league's members, the bargain is a rip-off of skyscraping proportions. Last fall, a group that called themselves ASL Unite rallied opposition to the cantilever, arguing that the league's leadership had fallen for a weak offering and unverified promises about the safety of the construction procedure, much of which would take place correct over their heads.
"Do you really want to be under that?" asked Richard Caraballo, who has taken courses at the league since 2007. At One 57, another hypertall project past the same developer on another block of the same street, a crane came shut to toppling over during Hurricane Sandy, snarling traffic and displacing neighbors.
In a members' plebiscite concluding Feb, the majority of votes supported the sale, in part, Mr. Caraballo alleged, because the league had suppressed voter turnout. But the ensuing lawsuit went nowhere, and the deal went through.
Backside the discord is the implication that a powerful real manor player effortlessly outmaneuvered a dowdy erstwhile nonprofit. Mr. Barnett says the two organizations are non so different. "Nosotros share an ambition for peachy art and, in our case, dandy architecture, and we aspire to create cute buildings the same way their artists aspire to create beautiful objects," he said.
In search of that dazzler, the Extell construction workers have spent most of a year slamming heavy machinery into solid boulder for the belfry's foundation. The pigsty is now about 80 feet deep at its deepest, and the drilling continues.
As Hardenburg's edifice hides its elegant face behind scaffolds, art students have started to decorate the area in front of it. An Art Nouveau portrait, a bold geometric composition: "Yous want to get a sense of the league," Mr. Goldberg said, "only walk down the street and see all these very different approaches to art-making."
The building'south scaffolds will come up down when the belfry has gone up around it. "You know we're an art school," Mr. Goldberg said, enjoying the sight of the outdoor paintings. "Now, we're a caged fine art school."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/23/nyregion/tower-will-rise-over-and-above-a-paint-spattered-landmark.html
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