Extell revises its Riverside Center plans

Extell Development showed its revised plans for its Riverside Center project last night to Community Board 7.

The large development is expected to be certified into the city's Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP) soon and the community board has already been reviewing the site and recently sent its own proposals to the developer and to the city.

Extell, which has in recent years already developed much of the southern section of Donald Trump's Riverside Boulevard sites after Mr. Trump had built the north section, is one of the city's largest developers. It employed Costas Kondylis to design several of the high-rise residential towers it has already erected along Riverside Boulevard, but recently it changed architects and has commissioned Christian de Portzamparc, a leading French architect, to design not only the southern section of this project, known now as Riverside Center, but also two major mixed-use projects on West 57th Street.

This lower west corner of the Upper West Side has began a hot bed for major development with many new projects including major expansion plans for Fordham University just south of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, which is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on cutting away the corner of Alice Tully Hall, erected a slanting lawn in behind Avery Fisher Hall and installing graphic electric signs on the vertical portions of the steps leading to the center's plaza. There are numerous other new residential towers in the area, presumably attracted by the Whole Foods store in the basement of the Time-Warner Center facing Columbus Center and the luxury apartment sales at 15 Central Park West.

Extell's Riverside Center development stretches from 59th to 61st Street and from West End Avenue to the West Side Highway.

Portzamparc's revised plans retains much of the unusual tower shapes of the earlier plans but has scaled down the towers nearest the river while heightening those inland. The towers' design differs markedly from the earlier Trump and Extell towers facing the Hudson River, and they have angled roofs, cantilevered sections and some of partially undulating walls.

According to an article in today's edition of westsideindependent.com, the Extell plans calls for about 2,500 apartments, 210,000 square feet of retail space, a hotel, a movie theater, an underground automobile service center, a new K-8 school on 61st Street that could potentially enroll up to 1,300 children, and water elements include a very long shallow (a quarter-inch) pool or scrim in the center of the project that would be similar to the fountain at the Millennium Park in Chicago and three acres of open space.

The Extell proposal would have12 percent of its 2,500 apartments "affordable," even though community boards on the West Side have been vociferous in wanting to get a minimum of 20, if not 30 percent.

The article indicated that some community members of City Councilwoman Gale Brewer are concerned that affordable housing and also felt that the automobile showroom and service center could spew a lot of exhaust and some wanted it cut from the proposal although a representative of Extell it was one of the few businesses that could make the project profitable.

On February 8, 2010, Community Board 7 sent Amanda Burden, chair of the City Planning Commission, a letter stating that it was its intention that the project "be an unparalleled example of urban design." The board has been working on its own analysis of the site for the past couple of years and it submitted to the commission its "Core Principles and Key Recommendations," endorsed by the full board by a vote of 38-4 February 2, 2010.

Its suggestions include a pedestrian bridge at 60th Street to Riverside Park and provision of open space views for the architecturally distinguished Con Ed Power Plant on 59th Street looking toward future adaptive re-use.