99 Church Street

Cost: $1 Billion

In a time when half of the country seems to want Wall Street's head on a platter, building a five-star hotel-condominium tower, to many, may seem bold – but that is exactly what developer Silverstein Properties is looking for with 99 Church Street in Lower Manhattan.

Work on the 70-story, 700,000-sq-ft tower started last June. The finished product will house the five-star Four Seasons Hotel on the lower 22 floors, consisting of 175 rooms, one-quarter of which will be suites, including a 3,7000-sq-ft "royal" suite, a restaurant, lounge, spa and health club with pool. The rest of the floors will be dedicated to 143 luxury residential condominiums, some as large as 6,500 sq ft, which the Four Seasons will manage, with amenities that include a 75-ft heated indoor pool, fitness center and lounge area.

According to Robert A.M. Stern, 99 Church Street's designer and dean of the Yale School of Architecture, the tower's "rhythm of windows" and light-colored masonry is meant to evoke the Woolworth's exterior. At 912 ft, however, 99 Church Street will tower over the 792-ft Woolworth, which was the tallest building in Manhattan when completed in 1913.

"The most challenging aspect has been designing a building that sits between one of New York’s most iconic buildings--the Woolworth Building--and the new 21st-century office towers that Silverstein Properties is developing at the World Trade Center site," Richard McKinley, development manager at Silverstein Properties wrote in an e-mail responding to questions about the project. "We met this challenge with the design of a slender, limestone building with a formidable structure that also satisfies the expansive hotel and condominium program. We have overcome this challenge by using high strength concrete and steel to minimize the structure’s footprint."

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The split between the hotel and residential properties resulted in a separate entrance for the hotel on Barclay Street, another entrance on Church Street for the restaurant, and a separate residential entrance at 30 Park Place. Because of the site limitations, the building's "slender ratio" is greater than 10 to 1. Tishman Construction, the contractor on the project that has also worked on Silverstein's 7 World Trade Center and is the general contractor on several other Silverstein projects downtown, used 14,000 psi concrete for shear walls and columns up to the 24th floor. In all, despite its slenderness, 99 Church required closer to 100,000 tons of concrete and 6,000 tons of rebar steel. To meet the scheduled completion in the first quarter 2012 (subject to construction loan financing, according to McKinley), the project is employing up to 400 workers on the site. With safety a major concern, the team is using a PERI RCS cocoon system during construction of the superstructure for fall protection.

The new hotel-condo tower, incidentally, has several links to the country’s financial history-in-the-making: it happens to sit on the site of the former headquarters of Moody's Corp., the company responsible for rating several corporations that have gone bust during the recession. And, according to Silverstein, the site was purchased by – and is being redeveloped – through Metro Fund, LLC, a joint venture of Silverstein Properties and the California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS), a pension fund. The partnership has previously purchased 575 Lexington Avenue, as well as 1177 Avenue of the Americas.

Team List

Owner/Developer: Silverstein Properties, New York
Design Architect: Robert A. M. Stern Architects, New York
Architect of Record: SLCE Architects, New York
Construction Manager: Tishman Construction, New York
Hotel Interior Designer: Yabu Pushelberg, Toronto