220 Riverside Boulevard at Trump Place

Cost: $169 million

When Rockrose Development Corp. began buying up lots on 12th Avenue between 48th and 49th streets, it had in mind the construction of Manhattan's first ground-up telco hotel, with an overnight delivery service to function out of the lower floors.

David Kluge, senior architect with Vollmer Associates LLP, worked with a cadre of consultants to make sure the new facility would meet all the structural and technical requirements of a building hosting the servers and switches that make the Internet a reality.

Then the bottom fell out of the telco hotel market (nationally the vacancy rate in such facilities is currently hovering at about 40 percent) and changes had to be made.
The building that was completed last year at 660 12th Ave. is two stories high with a cellar. Federal Express Corp., which holds a 25-year lease, opened shop in March. The ground floor provides space for the off- and on-loading of Newark Airport-bound trucks and the distribution of their packages via conveyors to 140 van locations on the cellar and second-floor levels.

At the same time, the basement of the $80 million facility has the capacity to house a 140,000-gallon fuel tank farm that could supply 23 roof-top generators and 22 transformers, all required to provide the power redundancy needed by Internet tenants. The building can also provide 30 watts per sq. ft., the power necessary to cool racked computers and other Internet equipment.

None of that is needed - at least for now.

It also has a large lobby on 12th Avenue for future tenants and four empty elevator shafts for upper floors that don't yet exist.

"The hard thing about this project was designing a building, much of which was not going to be built immediately," Kluge said. "Structurally, it can take another six floors above what is built now."

Patricia Dunphy, a vice president with Rockrose, added: "It was a heartbreaker because we had designed such a beautiful building when the telco market collapsed under us. We had to go ahead (with construction) because we had already committed to Fed Ex."

Kluge and Dunphy are confident that the remaining six floors will be built when the market allows.

"I don't have a crystal ball; I don't know when or for what kind of tenant," Dunphy said. "Right now I doubt it will be telco. It may be something we can't even imagine yet."