The Howard Hughes Corporation, a spinoff of General Growth Properties, has begun speaking with city agencies and SHoP Architects about options for redoing the South Street Seaport, Corie Sharples, a principal at the architectural firm, said, according to an an article today by Julie Shapiro at DNAinfo.com.

Ms. Sharples said the firm has not done any "physical work" for Howard Hughes but has attended meetings with them, adding that "they're proceeding very, very cautiously," and "they're talking with the city before doing anything else."

SHoP Architects designed General Growth's original 2008 plan to raze the Pier 17 mall and build a hotel and retail complex anchored by a 495-foot tower with a terracotta exoskeleton.

Local residents were concerned about the height of the tower and worried that the upscale development would shut out the community. General Growth proposed several givebacks to assuage those concerns, including a community center and a school.

The plan had strong support from the city Economic Development Corp., which owns the Seaport property, but it hit a snag at the city Landmarks Preservation Commission.

In November 2008, Landmarks commissioners slammed the project, calling the design "inappropriate" for the South Street Seaport Historic District. Commissioners also raised concerns about General Growth's plan to move the historic Tin Building from the base of the pier to its tip.

The commissioners did not vote on the plan, but they suggested that General Growth revise it.

However, General Growth was struggling under $27 billion in debt and soon saw its stock price fall below 50 cents a share. In April 2009, before returning to the LPC with revised plans, General Growth declared bankruptcy and put all development on hold.

General Growth officially emerged from bankruptcy earlier this fall, after splitting into two companies. GGP retained more than 180 malls across the country, while the spinoff Howard Hughes Corp. - bolstered by investments from Pershing Square Capital, Brookfield Asset Management and others - took over the properties with development potential, including the Seaport.

Howard Hughes Corp. has not spoken publicly about plans for the Seaport, and the company's staff has not responded to Community Board 1's request that they attend a public meeting, the board's staff said.

In a November 18, 2008 article in The New York Times, David W. Dunlap wrote that the seaport plan "was largely rebuffed on Tuesday by the Landmarks Preservation Commission" and "without taking a vote, a majority of the commissioners made it clear at a hearing that they believed the massing, scale and height of the proposed new buildings would be out of character with the 19th-century riverfront historic district."

Under the proposal, a 1980s mall on Pier 17 would have been replaced with two-story retail buildings, a four- and six-story hotel, walkways, a plaza, and the refurbished and relocated Tin Building.

The new tower, which was called the "Lighthouse," was to house about 286 hotel rooms and 78 cooperative apartments and its exterior was to "be reminiscent of the fishing nets and the ropes of ships that once docked at the Seaport."

The plan more than doubled the existing open space on the pier and would have extended the downtown street grid onto the pier.

The plan included four new two-story retail buildings and two other structures that will be built above them and home to a boutique hotel, the first of which will be three stories tall and the second six stories. The two structures that contain the hotel will "hang" from steel rooftop girders and "appear as floating structures, suspended from steel cables hung from the girders" and the hotel buildings will be linked by two skybridges and have elements exposed "to evoke ship masts and utilitarian port equipment."