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CB 1 Gets a First Look at New Goldman Sachs Tower

Goldman Sachs came to Community Board 1 on May 18 bearing gifts—$4.5 million in contributions to community projects. In return, the board gave its advisory approval to zoning changes that will allow the company to build an 800-foot-tall headquarters at the corner of West and Vesey Streets.

“It makes us happy to have Goldman Sachs as a neighbor,” Anthony Notaro, chair of the board’s Battery Park City committee, said of the contributions.

Three-and-a-half million dollars will be will be donated to build a Battery Park City library branch planned for a site at Murray and North End Avenue . The remaining $1 million will be used for a community center proposed to be located in a new residential development on a site bordered by West, Warren and Chambers Streets, known as site 5C.

Bob Townley, director of Manhattan Youth, which will run the community center, said, “The Goldman Sachs donation is a very generous gift. It means a lot. It’s great.” The total project, he said, is estimated to cost $4 million to $5 million.

The board was also shown what the building will look like, in a presentation by lead architect Henry Cobb, of the high-profile Downtown firm Pei Cobb Freed and Partners. The design, Cobb told the board, will follow the contours of the street grid formed by Broadway, West Street , Vesey and Murray Streets. The west side of the building will be curved to “echo the curve of the Battery Park City buildings facing the water.”

“It is shaped to express the quite radical difference in these two sides of the setting, in the city side on the east and the water side on the west,” Cobb explained.

The lower floors of the two-million-square-foot building will occupy the full lot and house the firm’s 75,000-square-foot trading floors, roomy enough for up to 1,000 traders on each one. One hundred and forty feet up, the building will be set back 70 feet to a more slender tower. That design, Cobb said, casts fewer shadows on

the nearby ball fields across the street than the generic building assessed in the required environmental impact statement.

On the West Street side, there will be a wide walkway lined with planters and a double row of trees, as well as the current bike path. On the west side, across from the movie theater, the plan is for a narrower sidewalk, sheltered by a glass canopy, and ground level retail stores. The board told Goldman Sachs that those stores should be geared to the needs of residents.

While there was little opposition, the board expressed concerns about limousines and increased traffic congestion. Timur Galen, a Goldman Sachs managing director, assured the committee that a parking area or “layby” carved into the West Street side of the site will provide enough space for black cars to line up and that they will be carefully controlled by Goldman Sachs to avoid spillover onto Vesey and Murray streets.

Galen also said that they will not have more than 15 parking spaces on the site, and that most of their expected 8,000 employees would use mass transportation.

The board resolution also called on Goldman Sachs to submit a construction plan detailing how materials and workers will be transported and staged, as well as how effects on air quality and noise will be mitigated near school and ball fields. It also requires the building to adhere to so-called “green guidelines” and to provide a safety plan for the storage of diesel fuel for emergency generation.

The lot, known as Site 26, is currently a parking lot, will likely be the site of the last non-residential development in Battery Park City. It had been

The proposed Goldman Sachs headquarters will occupy the lot bordered by Vesey, Murray, and West streets and North End Avenue. This rendering of the building is a northwest view from near West Street.

considered the probable location for an underground bus parking lot for tourists coming to the memorial and the rebuilt World Trade Center site. That parking will now likely be underground on Liberty Street where the soon to be deconstructed Deutsche Bank building now stands.

This computer rendering, commissioned by Goldman Sachs, shows the company's new headquarters in the context of surrounding buildings, including the Freedom Tower to the southeast. The building can be seen in the right center of the photo, just north of the Battery Park City ballfields.