The Amsterdam at Harborside

Cost: $282 million

The Amsterdam at Harborside illustrates how the notion of retirement—and retirement communities—isn’t what it used to be.

Under construction since October 2007 in the hamlet of Port Washington, the six-story, 550,000-sq-ft community will be Nassau County’s first life-care community. Residents will be offered a number of amenities and lifestyle options, the charm and beauty of Long Island’s north shore and predictably priced health services as they transition from independent living to more intense levels of care.

Clad with an EIFS exterior and energy-efficient vinyl windows, the multiwinged structural steel building will contain 226 independent-living apartments ranging from 717 to 2,519 sq ft on its upper floors. On the lower floors will be 26 enriched-housing units ranging from 491-810 sq ft; 56 skilled-nursing units 275-350 sq ft in size; and 18 units 311-350 sq ft in size for Alzheimer’s patients.

The Amsterdam’s residents will have a choice of gourmet, casual and bistro dining options; game rooms; a theater, library and media room; studios for woodworking and creative arts; and a 51,000-sq-ft underground valet parking garage. There will even be space set aside near the common areas for residents to park their scooters.

“We’re providing our residents with everything they need to have an active, healthy and fulfilling retirement,” says James Davis, president & CEO of Amsterdam House Continuing Care Retirement Community Inc.

It took innovative engineering to make The Amsterdam a reality. The building site was once used as dumping area for spoils from a sand and gravel quarry that has since been shut down and gradually restored for other uses.

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“We knew that the soil conditions would be bad,” says Michael Orifici of Capital Projects Consulting, which is serving as the owner’s representative. “But once we started digging, it proved more onerous than we expected.  There was a lot of organic material, clay and trapped moisture.”

Approximately 250,000 cu yds of soil that lacked the needed bearing capacity was removed and replaced with imported fill. The poor-quality soil isn’t going to waste, however, with approximately 100,000 cu yd used to construct ball fields on an adjacent recreation site.

As a concession to the difficult conditions, the design team elected to use 6- by 6-ft to 16- by 29-ft footings with a two-ton bearing capacity for the foundation. “These footings had to be larger than 3-ton footings, but it also meant that we wouldn’t have to dig as deep,” says Geoffrey Turner, project manager for architect Perkins Eastman.

The Amsterdam also made a concession to rising costs of cement and reinforcing materials, electing to use precast concrete floor planks instead of flat-plate concrete within the structural steel frame. Although the move saved $4 million, it compromised the strategy to minimize floor-to-floor distances by requiring additional ceiling space for ductwork, plumbing and other building systems.

“We’re still working with the trades to fit all the systems within the ceilings,” Turner says. “The first-floor common areas are 10 to 10.5 ft high, but others are a little lower than we originally planned.”

Construction crews have also had to contend with the challenges of a constrained site, which is closely bordered by an existing active adult community. “It’s a suburban location, but it builds like an urban site,” Orifici says. “With only 50 ft to the property line, we have only a limited amount of space for staging. It’s also made positioning cranes difficult.”

Also constraining the project team is the targeted August 2010 opening of the facility’s first phase. One of the first steps the project team took to minimize the potential of interruptions was to forge a project labor agreement with its union subcontractors, a move that enabled the project to be unaffected by the concrete haulers strike in summer 2008.

Plans call for The Amsterdam to be topped off in May, with the exterior walls to be closed up before winter. The community’s common areas, skilled nursing beds and first two floors of independent living apartments will open first, with the entire project set for completion in October 2010.

Team Box

Community Sponsor: Amsterdam House Continuing Care Retirement Community, Inc., Port Washington, N.Y.
Developer: Greystone Communities Inc.
Owner’s Representative: Capital Projects Consulting, Hawthorne, N.Y.
General Contractor: Pike Construction Co., New York
Special Inspections: Metric Consulting and Inspections; Watsky Associates; Cashin Associates
Architect: Perkins Eastman, New York
Civil Engineer: Lockwood Kessler & Bartlett, Syosset, N.Y.
MEP Engineer: AKF Engineers, New York
Structural Engineer: Goldstein Associates, New York
Landscape Architect: H.M. White Site Architects, New York