Hudson Yards Construction Ballet Begins

Last week saw the second major groundbreaking on the west side of midtown Manhattan in the last two months, as the $4.5 billion "Manhattan West" project’s first phase officially began.

January 23, 2013, 11am PST | Jonathan Nettler | @nettsj

Just last month, "the largest private real estate development in the history of New York" broke ground on the far west side of Manhattan. Now comes news that, just a few blocks east of Related's Hudson Yards "mini-city", "Brookfield Properties’ trio of new SOM-designed towers comprising the Manhattan West development" has started construction atop train tracks just west of Penn Station and the Farley Post Office building, reports Branden Klayko.

At the grounbreaking ceremony, Mayor Bloomberg remarked that, “From Battery Park to Riverside Park, it’s just amazing how much development there has been all along the west side; an area everybody thought did not have the potential to become a hot neighborhood. Manhattan West will be a prime location in which to live or work, a vital piece of the mixed-use community we’ve envisioned for the Hudson Yards area, which is beginning to take shape.”

"Twin office towers with retail space will anchor the corners of the site, each with two million square feet of office space, and a third residential building will be built along West 31st Street for a total of 5.4 million square feet of space." notes Klayko. "In addition to the three towers, Manhattan West also calls for a 100-foot-wide swatch of new public space between the office towers built on the new platform. High Line designers James Corner Field Operations will design the new 1.5-acre landscape, which is imagined as a recreated 32nd Street forming a pedestrian link with Hudson Yards and park amenities farther west."

The complex choreography that will allow the platform and towers to be built atop the now-exposed tracks, while trains continue to operate is illustrated in the video below: