Projects would redefine retail scene

Real Estate Weekly, March 12, 1997 by Lois Weiss

Both Discovery Circle - proposed for the Coliseum site - and Atlantis New York proposed for Piers 92 and 94 - creatively take currently bland vanilla spaces and transform them into environments that will attract city dwellers and tourists alike, while focusing on educating children of all ages.

The city, state and Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) may have garnered world-wide interest in redeveloping the Coliseum site at Columbus Circle, but only nine proposals - all from locals and some with other American partners - were received.

The coveted site demands a landmark complex agree New Yorkers - something special for that corner of Central Park that is also, by the way, very sensitive to the surrounding and vocal West Side community.

The design architects, in fact, are almost all responsible for other famous projects, and were totally aware of the special nature and impact of what will end up on the site while creating their edifices.

As three community boards touch the site, its articulate leaders have demanded something that also blends in, and doesn't stick out or cast vast shadows. They already dissed the space-age Moshe Safdie design proposed for the site Mortimer Zuckerman and held anything at all up through years of renegotiations and years ago by Mortimer Zuckerman and held anything at all up through years of renegotiations and two other RFPs through law suits.

Today, while a prominent architectural critic may laud a newer, industrially influenced techno-pop design, a community activist decries its clear glass Lincoln Log effect.

And though most of the proposed designs are masonry-oriented to echo the residential nature of Central Park West and South, the bronze glass Trump International Tower and its huge chrome globe are already focal parts of the Circle.

The white marble Huntington Hartford Museum, expected initially to be demolished, is also the recipient of nine other city requested proposals, but only two call for it to be torn down and replaced. That decision is now in limbo, waiting for the cornerstone project of Columbus Circle to be decided.

What becomes the envelope for the new Coliseum will probably be debated long after a developer is designated, but what goes inside the resurrected structure and its economic impact is also supposed to be given great consideration.

Although the community has been most concerned with the took and bulk of the building, its insides too will become an integral part of the knobby fabric that makes up the Upper West Side.

One thing to remember is that he who gets the development nod will also get the tenants. So no one in the real estate community should be surprised to hear that a game of "musical tenants" is being quietly played as the name brand tenants solicit competing developers, and when the music stops, the one that wins the beauty contest will likely also walk away with whatever the community or the government wants most inside.

Indeed, the RFP is clear that in the end, the government can do whatever it wants on the site and too bad to everyone else. That includes taking a proposal that is not officially proposed, or combining elements or developments or developers.

So the choices for the choosers are really multitudinous. Eastdil has been hired by the MTA to provide economic feasibility impact supper and has interviewed the development teams.

Leaving aside the tower or towers, which are proposed variously and in combinations mostly to the full permitted height of 750 feet for residential, office and hotel use, the podium will here be the focus.

Should the space be used for the stuffy Sotheby's auction house that wants to be there so badly it has climbed on board with several developers and asked the others to consider it if they win?

Should there be a Sears department store, which in a brilliant lobbying stroke, recently proposed opening dozens of stores all over the state as a way to curry favor with the governor?

Should it be an elegant and expensive hotel, right next door to another elegant expensive hotel, albeit with more public restaurants, banquet space and lobby space?

Or house in part an expensive sports club, a few blocks away from another expensive sports club?

Should it hold cinemas, just down Broadway from other cinemas? Or entertainment venues and retail shops in various combinations? Indeed, the RFP demands street-level retail on nearly all sides and most developers have complied by providing shops and great glass galleries to suck in wandering pedestrians and subway scurrying New Yorkers.

Should it be a media and communications center?

Or should it be a site almost exclusively for television and film studios, that by their very nature, either allow studio audiences only at certain times, or else no one at all, ever, to watch, thus cutting off hundreds of thousands of square feet from public use?

Actually, the city is faced with a similar choice at Piers 92 and 94, where a six month conditional designation has recently been awarded to a nascent studio plan.