Best of 2006 Awards
Gramercy Park Hotel and Annex
AWARD OF MERIT: Hospitality
 A complete overhaul of the Gramercy Park Hotel in Manhattan has resulted in an upscale, boutique venue and 21 new high-end condominium apartments – all while maintaining the hotel’s bohemian heritage.
“The renovation of the apartment side was nice, and the hotel looks incredible,” said one of the judges. “It was a great design.”
The hotel famous for catering to a trendy clientele closed in January 2005.
But Ian Schrager Co. of New York, which owns and operates boutique hotels worldwide, has now split the two-building complex into a new hotel with 135 guest rooms and 51 suites in one portion, and the apartments, which are known as the
Gramercy Park Annex, in the other. The building also has two bars and a gym.
The project team broke ground in winter 2005 on the $63.5 million, 241,841-sq.- ft. renovation. Crews demolished a seven-story annex that had stood between the two buildings to erect a 15-story, steel and concrete structure housing the apartments.
Some units have double-height spaces with a 14-ft.-high by 10-ft.-wide window-wall system.
With no design or shop drawings available for the prior center structure, the team discovered steel in unexpected places, which affected many aspects of the project, from staircases to M-E-P risers. The architects, engineers, construction manager, and steel subcontractor met daily to resolve issues as they arose.
“They dealt with a lot of logistics issues,” another judge said.
The effort involved selective demolition of other portions of the hotel. To save on construction costs, the design retained most of the hotel’s original plaster walls and ceilings, joining them to new drywall.
The design also required complicated adjustments. In order to create a double-height, symmetrical space in the lobby, crews had to install a new transfer girder. But first, they had to remove a column, a move that itself required displacing another column by 3/8 in. The team achieved this by using a hydraulic jack to stress an existing girder, allowing enough room to displace the column, which supports 17 stories of the main building.
The team also carefully worked around 12 single-room occupancy tenants who stayed in their units during construction. Part of the project involved building seven mock-up spaces of hotel rooms and condominiums onsite as well as a full-scale section of the lobby in the basement of Schrager’s Morgans Hudson Hotel on West 58th Street in Midtown.
The team scrutinized every detail of the models for appearance, quality, constructability, and cost before building and installing the components in the Gramercy.
Key Players
Owner: Ian Schrager Co.
Architect-Hotel: Beer Brennan Gorman Architects; Julian Schnabel; McKay Architects
Architect-Condominium: Ismael Leyva Architects; John Pawson
Construction Manager: Bovis Lend Lease
Steel Contractor: Burgess Steel
Concrete: Eurotech Construction
Electrical: James F. Volpe Electric
Design Consultant: Ambrosio DePinto & Schmieder; Clair Bros.; Eddington Associates; Goldstein Associates
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