Goldman Sachs Tower

Rank #5
Cost: $460 million

Goldman Sachs may be the powerhouse of Wall Street, but now the financial services giant also has the biggest presence of the companies across the Hudson River.

The firm's $650 million new campus - 30 Hudson St. - which is designed to complement Goldman's Manhattan offices, will replace a former Colgate factory on the Hudson River waterfront.

Not all the vestiges of the now-razed industrial property have disappeared. The signature 30-ft.-high octagonal clock, formerly atop the factory, earned an honorary place on an 85-ft. crown on top of the 42-story steel office tower.

The building was designed by Cesar Pelli & Associates, of New Haven, Conn., and Skidmore Owings & Merrill, of New York, N.Y., and will take up two contiguous parcels of land in Jersey City. The beautification of the site includes the 1.6-million-sq.-ft. steel structure and a 15-story, 500,000-sq.-ft. mixed-use building. An existing walkway, pier, ferry landing and public parks also have been revamped.

The new Goldman campus will be easily accessible to commuters via the new Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and Hudson-Bergen light-rail stations through an esplanade bordering the Hudson River, which will connect the PATH subway station north of the site to the building.

The campus features a 25,000-sq.-ft. glass structure called the Terraces, a climate-controlled glass atrium with a view of the Manhattan skyline; a global learning center; 16-room lodging area; health club; and 1,400 parking spaces in a four-level underground structure.

The development team was led by Hines Limited Interest Partnership. The team had the task of building an eight-story full-block podium for the office tower to ensure that the building was both horizontally and vertically integrated along the river's shoreline.

The tower is also a green building, not just internally but also in its relationship with the surrounding Jersey City neighborhood. For example, Goldman Sachs partnered with the Jersey City government, the Paulus Hook Park Neighborhood Association, Turner Construction and other local groups to restore a historic park in nearby Paulus Hook.

With Goldman's intent to move 6,000 employees onto its new campus, it was critical that the project team deliver the project on time. The company had an aggressive occupancy schedule due to its lease expiration, and it also had to negotiate the seven-month-long lead times of steel fabricators while facing competition from other large-scale steel developments in the area.

As a result, it had to contract the steel fabricator in advance of the actual design documentation, securing the providers in November 2000 and immediately putting in place a tiered schedule of phased construction tailored toward a tight fabrication and engineering timeline.

In the end, 30 Hudson St. required nearly 30,000 tons of steel, and the schedule was so unforgiving that structural steel had to be erected at night, but the project came in on time and within budget.

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