432 Park-tallest residential building in the Western Hemisphere.

View from the top of Empire skyscraper.

More than a year ago, in June 2013 in one of  my posts I wrote about  One57 - new  skyscraper  on West 57 in Midtown. A year ago One 57 was the tallest residential building in the western hemisphere.   Now   I have to update the  header of my post about One57 - a new building  has the title 'the tallest'.
Last week  few final feet were added to the building at 432 Park Ave.    The tower  that sits  between 56th and 57th streets, is now the tallest building in the city and the western hemisphere. Do you want to live on the 90th floor? ( I do not!)
The building is  28 feet taller than One World Trade Center– if you don’t count the   spire.  New York’s tallest buildings have always been its icons: the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building, the World Trade Center. I already wrote about two the most recent additions to the New York Sky line- One World Trade Center  (Freedom tower)  and One 57,that is just several blocks to the west from the new giant.
The 96-story on Park avenue condo offers 104 units, ranging in price from $16.95million to $95million. Windows  are  huge, at 10 x 10 feet,  each apartment has  12-foot ceilings and private elevators. You can buy a 6 bedroom condo on one of the top floors of the building for $82 million.

The developer of the building said:  “It’s almost like the Mona Lisa,  except instead of it looking at you, you’re looking at it wherever you are. You can’t escape it.”  On a clear day you can see the building from all five borough of the great New York. It changed the skyline of the city.
If you live on the lower floor you still have access to the view- there are huge windows  on the  resident-only observation deck.
There are  climate-controlled wine cellars, an outdoor terrace, a spa, a “massage therapy room,” and a pool in the building.
One of the most impressive things about 432 Park Avenue is its width to height ratio (slenderness ratio), 19:1, which makes it one of the thinnest skyscrapers in the world.  Slender towers require special measures, and sometimes considerable expense, to counteract the exaggerated forces of wind on the vertical cantilever. The most slender residential skyscraper in the world is Hong Kong's Highcliff, which rises 72 stories and 828 feet (252 meters) with an   slenderness ratio of 1:20.  The Skyscraper Museum at 39 Battery Place currently has an excellent exhibit in place called Sky-high & the Logic of Luxury that explains more details of super slender towers.

Real Estate site about the luxury buildings in NY published an intersecting picture some time ago. On this picture you can see  what the skyline will look like in 2020.   Of these five buildings, one  them - the 90-story One57 (second from the right) is complete. Four of the five buildings are  on the west side of Midtown Manhattan.
The market for  ultra-luxury apartments in New York City is booming.  The space is very limited and the buildings became slimmer and higher.  One57,  that was the tallest residential tower  before 432 park, sits on the 57th Street that earned  the nickname "Billionaires' Row."     57th Street is already known for its famous buildings, hotels, and restaurants.  


From left to right: 432 Park Ave., 111 West 57th St., 53 53rd St.,
One57, and Nordstrom Tower
http://www.llnyc.com
 

The   2-mile (3 km) street  is home to the Hearst Tower,   Carnegie Hall, and the Russian Tea Room.
 432Park is the tallest for now, but not for a long time- the plans for the   Nordstrom Tower on the Western end of 57 street are already approved. 

Before 432 Park there was  Drake hotel on this lot, the corner of  Park Avenue and 56 street. The hotel was built in 1926  and had  21 floors  with 495 rooms.
  Notable hotel  guests included Frank Sinatra and Muhammed Ali.  During their stay there in 1973, Led Zeppelin had $203,000 stolen from a safe deposit box at the hotel. The money was never recovered and the identity of the thief or thieves has never been discovered .

160 years of Steinway. Part 2

Steinway Hall, West 57 street

Steinway Piano, part 1 can be found here.

 Steinway & Sons company was founded in  1853 by German immigrant Henry Steinway. Steinway Hall, 88-year-old  historic and cultural landmark on 57th Street down the block and across the street from Carnegie Hall, was  sold in August 2013.

In 1866 Steinway & Sons opened the first Steinway Hall ( the building  housing concert halls, showrooms and sales departments )  on 14th Street near union Square.  

The concert hall was designed with 2,000 seats, and had a concert stage for a full 100-piece symphony orchestra. It became New York City's artistic and cultural center, housing the New York Philharmonic until Carnegie Hall opened in 1891. 

 In 1872, Steinway & Sons organized a concert tour of 215 performances in 239 days for the Russian virtuoso pianist Anton Rubinstein.  to promote his piano.  Rubinstein's legendary concert at the Steinway Hall was sold out with 3.000 guests, many of them standing.William Steinway, the son of the company founder,  said: "One concert on Saturday night, sells pianos on Monday morning ".

Theodore Roosevelt piano

In 1902 the 100,000th Steinway Piano was built  for President Theodore Roosevelt.  It was gilded with gold leaf, and American Eagles were  carved on the legs. Today the historic Gold Steinway stands in the First Ladies Hall of the National Museum of American History.

In 1925, Steinway Hall opened to its current location  in a newly constructed   16-story building  on West 57th Street near Carnegie Hall.  The building was built   by Warren and Wetmore - the same company that built Grand Central  in 1913. 

Steinway Hall, West 57 street

 A music themed sculpture of Apollo and the muse of music topped arched entrance. The top of the house  was designed to be part of a penthouse apartment for the president of Steinway, but was turned into a radio studio.  The two-story rotunda is the real centerpiece of Steinway Hall. The main rotunda seats up to 300 guests and a small symphony orchestra.

The mezzanine has  soundproofed rehearsal rooms, named after members of the Steinway family. Each room has a Steinway piano that is equipped with a  connection to personal computers. The only room not named for a Steinway is the Rachmaninoff room, which contains a large portrait of the virtuoso.

The official opening night of the hall was on October 27, 1925 with a performance by Philharmonic Orchestra before 300 invited guests of New York society,  including four Steinway grandson,  Sergei Rachmaninoff,   Andrew Carnegie, Guggenheim and  DuPont.  The entire performance was broadcast over the radio.  

According to legend, it was in the Steinway basement that Vladimir Horowitz and Sergei Rachmaninoff met for the first time. There they played Rachmaninoff’s third Concerto. This piece became Horowitz’s trademark.

The building now bears the name of the current owner, the British publisher, The Economist.  Despite having its “name on the door”, The Economist is nowhere on the premises. Its offices are at 750 Third Avenue.

Below street level is the world famous Steinway Basement with  the Steinway “piano bank” where piano professionals come to select instruments they will use in concerts, in recordings, and on tour. 
In August 2013   Steinway agreed to be acquired by Paulson & Co., the hedge fund owned by billionaire John Paulson for $512 Million. Steinway said that under the terms of the deal, it could remain in the building on 57 street  for up to 18 months.

 Paulson became a billionaire by short-selling subprime mortgages in 2007 and made $3.7 billion that year.  In 2010, he beat a hedge-fund record by making nearly $5 billion. His fortune was made largely from the collapse of mortgage backed securities market. Paulson owns three Steinway pianos  and says he’s planning on buying a fourth. Within a day of the announcement, he sent a letter that said he was not going to change a thing in how Steinway builds pianos.... 

One57 - the new condo on the Billionaire’s Row

   The  tallest residential building in New York City and the Western Hemisphere One57 Tower is now under construction on 157 West 57th Street, not far from Carnegie Hall. Extell Development Co. is the developer of the 90-story building.

Gary Barnett is President and founder of Extell. He had his bachelors from Queens College and Masters from Hunter. Barnett started  as a diamond trader in Antwerp, Belgium.   Later he returned to  United States  and  purchased shopping malls and office buildings in the Midwest.
 The architect is Christian de Portzamparc, a French architect.

 

     Portzamparc graduated from the École Nationale des Beaux Arts in Paris in 1970. His recent works in New York include LVMH Tower (1995) and residential tower on Park avenue South ,400 that has to be finished later in 2013.   One57 has only 92 condo units and includes everything you need (or maybe just dream about): triple-height indoor swimming pool with Jacuzzi, a crafts atelier, and even a pet washing room.

     Sales at the tower reached $1 billion a year ago.  Extell had  already twice increased prices. About 70% of One57's 92 units are sold.

     Three days ago Extell open their model apartment to attract more buyers- the building is almost complete.The walls  in this unit are covered in raw silk ,there is a leather-upholstered headboard,  fox-fur bedspread and crystal chandelier, World Street Journal reported.

     Last October during hurricane Sandy hundreds of people had to leave their homes because the winds had damaged the boom of a crane on One57 that was 1,000 feet above the sidewalk. Donald Trump told CNBC that he could see the crane from his window and it was moving violently in the wind before it collapsed. “I know lots about cranes and lots about building, and I am looking at that crane right now,” Donald Trump said. “I have a window that’s just about even with that crane and I was watching it yesterday, and they didn’t tie it down.”

     Buyers of the apartments in One57 include 66 years old fashion designer  Silas Chou from Hong Kong  (unit on 82nd floor with the price about $50 million), and   the founder of Pershing Square Capital Management LP William Ackman with the group of investors (penthouse for more than $90 million).

      $90 million is a new record for Manhattan apartments. The old record was set in February 2012 for apartment purchased for the daughter of Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev.

     One of the One57's latest buyers is a two-year-old Chinese girl. Her mother, who took care of the paperwork and stuff, said that her daughter will be “….. planning on going to Columbia or NYU, maybe Harvard, so she needed to be in the center of the city”

     Michael Gross , the author of bestseller  “740 Park” ( the inside story of    New York’s richest  cooperative apartment building)  published in 2005, introduced the term  "Billionaire's Belt "  for  57 street and vicinity.

     He said that he had seen “an uptick in the number of billionaires flocking to luxury buildings in the 57th Street and 59th Street corridors to the southern corner of Central Park, along to the Bloomberg building and 432 Park Avenue.”

 

"This neighborhood never really defined itself before," Gross told Business Insider. "Now, it's becoming the new 'billionaire's belt.'"

     By the way, Michael Gross and his wife live in  Alwyn Court (180 West 58th ) -   apartment house that was evacuated twice during last 6 months-the first rime when the crane on One57 collapsed, and the second time just less than two months ago when  the crane had to be reinstalled.

 

     One57  with it 1,004 feet will not keep the record for a long - apartment building 432 Park Avenue (completed by 2015) will be even taller. And the planned building  on 227 West 57th has enough air rights to rise 1,550 feet.   Six-bedroom, seven-bath penthouse with a library in 432 Park avenue is already under agreement for $95 million. So sky is the limit!

Learn more:

Haute Living:One57 Penthouse: Most Expensive Manhattan Property Ever for $110 Mil 

The Real Deal: CNBC video Trump alleges negligence at One57 tower crane collapse