Astor Place Tower

445 Lafayette Street | also 26 Astor Place, 64 Cooper Square, 443 Lafayette Street | NoHo | built 2004

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Written with AI from the source each entry cites, then fact-checked.

  1. 2002

    A hotel planned for Cooper Union's Astor Place parking lot is never built

    Cooper Union owned the triangular parking lot at Astor Place and leased it to developers for 99 years. Ian Schrager and the Related Companies planned a hotel there, with either Rem Koolhaas or Frank Gehry as its designer, holding about 100 rooms and a movie theater, and expected it to open in 2002. The lease required the building to be an "original artistic invention". The hotel never went ahead, and a Gwathmey-designed residential tower took its place.

    Source: Wikipedia

  2. 2005

    April

    The new Astor Place tower is sold as "sculpture for living," with 39 apartments from $2 million

    Stephen Ross of Related Companies took over the stalled Cooper Union site and hired Charles Gwathmey to design a small luxury tower, aiming at the buyers who had flocked to Richard Meier's glass towers in the West Village. While it went up, scaffolding around the base carried the slogan "sculpture for living." Paul Goldberger wrote in The New Yorker in April 2005 that its thirty-nine apartments started at two million dollars.

    Source: The New Yorker

  3. 2005

    Gwathmey stacks curved green glass into a four-part tower inspired by Mies's unbuilt skyscraper

    Gwathmey's design layers a trapezoidal limestone base, a twenty-one-story curved glass section, a boxy mini-tower and a second curved crown. He told Goldberger that Mies van der Rohe's unbuilt curving glass skyscraper had inspired it. The highly reflective pale green glass sets the tower apart from the masonry around Astor Place, and Goldberger found the whole a catalogue of parts rather than a single form.

    Source: The New Yorker

  4. 2005

    Charles Gwathmey designs a condo tower for a former parking lot

    Cooper Union owned the triangular parking lot at Astor Place and leased it to developers for 99 years, with the lease requiring an "original artistic invention." A planned hotel developed by Ian Schrager and Related was never built. Instead, Charles Gwathmey designed a 21-story luxury residential tower with a retail base, built from 2003 to 2005 for about $50 million.

    Source: Wikipedia

  5. 2005

    Critics pan the new tower as a symbol of gentrification

    Architecture critics panned Astor Place Tower as a symbol of gentrification, and sales of its condominiums were slow. The New Yorker ran Paul Goldberger's piece "Green Monster" on the building in May 2005. The New York Times and New York magazine also covered the design.

    Source: Wikipedia

  6. 2006

    June

    Astor Place Tower sells slowly, partly because Cooper Union leased the land instead of selling it

    Within days of the tower's opening, eleven of its 39 apartments were close to contract, but New York magazine reported in June 2006 that sales had stalled. One reason was that Cooper Union leased the land for 99 years rather than selling it, so the building had to be a co-op with condo rules and its owners paid ground rent. A 1,449-square-foot two-bedroom listed at $2.495 million carried monthly fees above $2,800.

    Source: nymag.com

Further reading

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All 222 buildings with stories in NoHo