80 South Street is a mixed-use supertall skyscraper proposal in Lower Manhattan, New York City. Below is some facts and information of the building.
Name: 80 South Street
This name comes from the building's location, as lots of other buildings in New York are directly named by the address. Since this building is still being developed, it is likely that the tower will be given an another name after the construction begins or after it's officially opened.
Location: The tower will be located at the combined sites of 80 South Street and 163 Front Street in the south of the South Street Seaport. There are many other tall buildings around the site.
The site on which the tower is planned to be built is occupied by a six-story red brick building and a white-facade building, the preparation work will begin after the existing buildings are demolished.
Design and Development:
80 South Street is a site in Lower Manhattan, a place filled with lots of skyscrapers due to the high land price, the site 80 South Street in South Street block is occupied by a building that has only 6 stories, for this the site has been eyed for redevelopment for over a decade since 2003, many developers have attempted to construct a supertall tower but all failed.
First proposal for the redevelopment of 80 South Street was proposed in 2003 by Frank Sciame, the starchitect Santiago Calatrava was chosen for the design, it was basically a 826 feet (252m) tower, a long spire atop the roof brings the total height to 1123 feet (342m).
The tower is composed of 12 four-story cubes stacked on top of one another, cantilevered off a slender central concrete core which rising above a 8-story base. the first two cubes from the base were intended to hold offices, while each of the upper 10 cubes would be a single multi-floor residential unit that features around 10336 square feet (960 square meters)of area and an outdoor garden.
Such a unit costs at least 29 million dollars, higher units are more expensive. The residents would access to their private spaces through the elevators or stairs that set inside the concrete core. The 8-story base structure was planned to serve as cultural spaces. The design is cool, but multi-story condominiums is not a good idea, very few buyer can afford them, as a result the developer didn't sell out any of these units. Nowadays in New York City the condominiums with that price are only existing at the uppermost floors of the new supertalls on 57th street as penthouses and none of them occupies more than one floor.
In February 2005, Santiago Calatrava's version of 80 South Street received approval for construction from the Department of Buildings of City of New York.
However after the approval the developer was unable to secure the enough funds to start the construction work since the real estate market in America had been declining and nobody bought the condos. In the later the financial crisis broke out, Frank Sciame sold the site on April 16, 2008, which means the project was officially cancelled. Although it revived again after many years, the version designed by Santiago Calatrava was terminated.
In 2012 Cord Meyer Development acquired the site and intended to revive the supertall project. In 2013 Morali Architects was chosen to design the tower, the design was released to the public in the same year, showing an eco-friendly tower rises to 1081 feet without spire.
As an Eco-friendly building, the tower would have a sky garden every ten floors and a green roof.
However as the economy hadn't fully recovered, this proposal also failed to materialize, the developer Cord Meyer sold the site to Seaport developer Howard Hughes in 2014.
In March 2016 Chinese investment company China Oceanwide Holdings purchased the site of 80 South Street at a price of $390 million through a America subsidiary from Howard Hughes Corporation, with the intention to build a 113-story tower.
In May 2017, demolition permits at existing buildings on the site has been officially filed.
As the proposal is still awaiting for the approval by Department of Buildings, the developer hasn’t released any information of the construction plans, the only thing announced is that the tower is expected to have a total of roughly 820000 square feet of floor area that occupies 113 stories, and will rise to 1,436 feet by roof height, this is even higher than the 1368 feet of the One World Trade Center's roof, also taller than 432 Park Ave's 1,396 feet.