At 57 Stories, 56 Leonard St. to Tower Over Tribeca

By Carl Glassman
POSTED SEPTEMBER 16, 2008

A tower of jagged and jutting glass-faced apartments, “stacked” nearly 800 feet high, will rise like a giant game of Jenga over Tribeca.

The Alexico Group, developers of the $650 million project at 56 Leonard Street, at the corner of Church Street, released renderings of the long-anticipated designs. It is the first residential tower by the celebrated architecture firm of Herzog & de Meuron, whose work includes the redesign of London’s Tate Modern museum and the Beijing National Stadium in China.

The building will be distinguished by its asymmetrical protrusion of glass boxes and terraces, what Alexico calls “residences opening to the atmosphere.” A massive, blob-like mirrored sculpture by British artist Anish Kapoor, seemingly squished beneath the building’s second floor, will be a prominent feature at the corner of Church and Leonard Streets.

Despite the building’s 57-stories, developer Izak Senbahar said he believes the tower—at street level, at least—suits the character of the mostly low-rise, historic neighborhood.

“I went through a long stretch of interviewing architects, trying to choose the one that would fit the bill in terms of the Tribeca fabric,” Senbahar told the Trib in a telephone interview. “I needed a sensitive firm to work with.”

“There’s no doubt they hired a well-respected architecture firm, but that doesn’t change the fact that the building is out of scale,” said Community Board 1 chairwoman Julie Menin. “It’s really unfortunate that when the Tribeca rezoning was done, that site was not in the overall rezoning. Now we have a situation that it’s as-of-right and it never had to be that way.”

The building’s lot, formerly the site the New York Law School library, was exempted from the 1995 rezoning of much of southern Tribeca, which has served to block high-rise development in the neighborhood. Earlier, when the city mapped Tribeca’s historic districts, it also excluded the law school site, leaving 56 Leonard Street beyond the scrutiny of the Landmarks Preservation Commission.

Alexico paid New York Law School $136.5 million for the library parcel, helping to fund the school’s expansion and renovation of its campus that includes a new library under construction next door at Leonard Street and West Broadway. The law school has been criticized by some for putting its endowment ahead of community interests. School officials responded that the assets were necessary to provide “comfort” to their lenders for the expansion.

Senbahar said only a building the size of his tower makes financial sense, given the price he paid for the lot.

“The reality of it is the law school needed a certain amount of money and we couldn’t have financed this if we didn’t have the square footage to sell. It was a fully priced deal and there was no room for us to move.”

The building’s 145 condominiums, due for completion in fall, 2010, will be priced from $3.5 million to $33 million. Senbahar claimed he is confident that they will sell, despite Wall Street woes and the downturn in the economy.

“It’s a big world,” he said, “and there’s a lot of money in the world, still.”

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