ACT I - SITE SURVEY

BRIAN: We're here on the corner of ninth and 33rd street And we're standing out in front of One Manhattan west, which is a gorgeous glass office building.

BRIAN Narration: You can probably guess by the name Manhattan West that I’m in New York City. The development is one of the newest on the island, featuring office towers, a boutique hotel, a residential building, and a public plaza. But calling it a development doesn’t really describe the scale.

BRIAN: as far as you can see, if you stand here looking up, the towers are reflecting not only each other but also the sky. It's it's an amazing space.

BRIAN Narration: But just a decade ago, none of this was here.

BRIAN Narration: Walking around today, you wouldn’t know that about 600,000 riders are moving below your feet…

BRIAN Narration:  in and out of Penn Station every day.

BRIAN: We've got lots of retail space, lots of restaurants, it's a very inviting courtyard. Green space, patio space, places for, uh, people to relax and enjoy the city.

BRIAN Narration: I’m Brian Maughan, chief innovation and marketing officer with Fidelity National Financial, and this is Built – The podcast where you’ll meet creative leaders in the commercial real estate industry and hear how they do what they do. And for our next two episodes, how they created new living, working, and shopping space right above the busiest train tracks in the country.

KIM: I remember taking the train from DC on Amtrak and you go under the Hudson River and there was this little moment of lights that popped before you hit Penn Station. And it meant that you hit the island of Manhattan.

BRIAN Narration: This is Kim Van Holsbeke, Design Principal at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, the lead architectural firm for Manhattan West. 

KIM: When we started, basically it was very dominated by infrastructure. We had the train tunnel and the train tracks on the Hudson Yards.

KIM: The city changes, the uses changes, and people are always reinventing the economic situation, the urban fabric, what a building can be.

BRIAN Narration: And in the case of Manhattan West, what city blocks can be.

BRIAN Narration: Imagine you’re looking down on a map of Manhattan. About halfway up on the western side of the island, is the neighborhood called Hudson Yards. Two blocks in from the Hudson River is the north-south 10th avenue. A large building spans two whole city blocks -from 33rd St to 31st, also north to south. This is Five Manhattan West; opened in 1969, it’s a formerly brutalist mass that people jokingly called ‘the elephant’s foot’ – now with a new glass facade to go with its new neighbors. 

Walking east, a public space called Magnolia Court opens to the Manhattan West Plaza, which sits over the rails of the Long Island Railroad, Amtrak and Dyer Ave. Dyer Ave is a short road parallel to 10th Ave that leads to and from the Lincoln Tunnel Expressway. There’s also the 62-story Eugene – an apartment building and the first new Manhattan West building to break ground in 2014. 

Across from the Eugene on the plaza is the newly constructed Pendry, a five-star boutique hotel, and next to that is the redeveloped 13-story building known as the Lofts. Built in 1913, Brookfield kept its brick facade as a nod to the past. And finally, before you hit 9th avenue, are the new One and Two Manhattan West – the towers I saw reflecting each other and the sky – each about 60 stories tall.

TOM: If you went to that site in 1997 or 2010, you'd see some earth maybe one or two low rise industrial buildings, auto repair, etcera, et cetera, and then a big hole in the ground. And it was, way, way down. 

BRIAN Narration: This is Tom Glatthaar; he’s a Senior Underwriter and area counsel based in New York City for the Fidelity National Financial family of companies. Tom was a title lawyer for Brookfield as they planned Manhattan West.

BRIAN: So I imagine New York city has changed quite a bit since you arrived in 1984.

TOM: Oh, wow. Just unbelievable, you know, I grew up in the suburbs and when I first worked in New York city, everything was located on the east side, maybe to about sixth avenue was a brave new world going west, and now you have developments like Hudson Yards and Manhattan West that are all the way over on 10th avenue. They are booming in those areas.

BRIAN Narration: How we got here has taken decades. For a long time, the Hudson Yards neighborhood of Manhattan could feel to outsiders like it was being held together by what bordered it – Hell’s Kitchen to the north and Chelsea to the south. Two decades ago, the area was zoned predominantly for low- and medium-density manufacturing and some commercial buildings .

But there were big dreams for the area…

BBC Olympic Decision: We are listening to the Olympic anthem as we see the five candidate cities and the logos portrayed  

BRIAN Narration: Olympic-sized ones, for a stadium to host the twenty-twelve Games. London, Madrid, Moscow and Paris were also in the running. The host city was announced in two-thousand-five; you’re listening to the BBC newscast.

BBC Olympic Decision: the International Olympic Committee has the honor of announcing that the games of the 30th Olympiad in 2012 are awarded to the city of London. We've done it, London have won it. 

BRIAN Narration: New York City had planned an Olympic stadium on the land just to the west of Manhattan West. The bid was lost, but the rezoning work the city had done in 2005 to prepare the area for a possible influx of athletes and Games spectators, meant the area had momentum for change.

Callie: The city said, what can we do with this large parcel of land? There’s clearly an opportunity here and there's very little room left in Manhattan as a whole for new development. So the city needed it and the office space needed it and the residential community needed it.

BRIAN Narration: This is Callie Haines, an executive at Brookfield Properties, the developer of Manhattan West. Callie has a background in civil engineering and architecture; but her love for this work started when she was just a kid.

Callie: When I was little I just loved building things and I'd just sit with my dad at night in his workroom while he was fixing things. And I would just build things out of whatever scraps I could find. 

BRIAN Narration: Now, Callie is the Executive Vice President of the Northeast region, overseeing all of Brookfield’s properties in New York and Boston. And even though they didn’t know what it would be someday, Brookfield had the foresight to start buying land around Hudson Yards early.

Callie: Manhattan West is four sites compiled together and started putting them together in the ‘80s.

TOM: When I first got introduced to the Manhattan West project was 1997. I had just opened an agency on my own and the sixth order I got was from Brookfield on Manhattan West and they told me at the time, this is gonna be a big project in about 20 years. We're working to get the area rezoned and all the stuff that's inherent. That'll give you a flavor for how long it takes really to make change in a place like New York City.

BRIAN Narration: Tom looked for any restrictions, like easements or other legal parameters, that could affect Brookfield’s plans to turn the four parcels of land into a living, working, and shopping destination. 

TOM: Boy, you better do your homework and you better make sure everything's all the i's are dotted and the t's are crossed, cuz that's a big change.

BRIAN Narration: By the 2000s Brookfield owned the land bordered by 31st and 33rd Streets, between Dyer and 9th Avenue, but couldn’t begin construction yet. 

TOM: Remember, you're talking about an entire change of use and that makes a difference. It changes things.

It is New York and things take a long time to get approved in yours. And then you add to that the economic situation that intervened in the middle of that you had the great recession that had to cause a pause on development. Even somebody who was seriously looking at developing a site like this, you gotta sit back a minute when you see the kind of economic dislocation that the years 2007, 8, 9, 10 had. Not only on New York, but on the entire country.

BUSH: over the past few weeks, many Americans have felt anxiety about their finances and their future, I understand their worry and their frustration.

BRIAN Narration: That's President George W. Bush addressing the Nation on the Financial Crisis on September 24, 2008

BUSH: We've seen triple digit swings in the stock market. Major financial institutions have teetered on the edge of collapse and some have failed. As uncertainty has grown many banks have restricted lending. Credit markets have frozen and families and businesses have found it harder to borrow money. We are in the midst of a serious financial crisis.

Callie: So it took years and years for it to come together and for all the right pieces to fall into place.

BRIAN Narration: All the way to 2015, when Brookfield acquired the last piece – 450 W 33rd St, that former ‘elephant’s foot building’. Also known as the Associated Press Building, today it is called Five Manhattan West. Planning to give an older property new life through redevelopment and a new facade showed that Brookfield was committed to the area.

Callie: We actually chose to focus on Manhattan West because we think that the footprint of it allows us to really focus on what Brookfield's core placemaking strategy is.

BRIAN Narration: While Brookfield was reimaging the location as a mixed use   place with spots for exercise, relaxing, shopping, working and living, Tom Glatthaar had his job to do.

TOM: Anytime you have the railroad involved in something, it's a level of complexity that you don't get any place else.

BRIAN Narration: The train tracks going in and out of Penn Station, that had been there for about 100 years, were now running on land owned by Brookfield.

TOM: Here on Manhattan West, we owned from the center of the earth up, and we granted easements to the railroad companies to run their rail lines underneath the site. 

All of those we had to make sure that we didn't do anything to interfere with their vested contract rights, cuz nobody's gonna be benefited if the railroad and its operations are materially impaired by anything we are doing.

ACT II – THE CHALLENGE

BRIAN Narration: Once the economic, zoning, and land-ownership pieces were all in place, Brookfield needed to figure out how to build that platform over the train tracks and Dyer Avenue – all while not shutting down Amtrak and commuter rail service. 

Callie: You can't do anything during the day. You have to do everything between basically 2:00 AM and 5:00 AM. That's when you know, the least amount of trains are coming through the site, and everything we came up with that just had too many points of contact with Amtrak.

Callie: One of our the guys on our construction and engineering team at the time was traveling was on vacation in Europe.

And he was driving with his family and he passed by, I think they were in, I wanna say Switzerland and they're building a bridge. And he saw this fascinating machine that was like dropping these panels onto supports to build the bridge.

….he came back and we designed and built our own system, called the launcher, very creative name, um,

BRIAN Narration: Picture the inner workings of your printer – the ink carriage that moves side to side. The bright yellow launcher worked in a similar way, but on a huge scale, by carrying 56-ton concrete panels over the width of 15 train tracks, and lining them up next to each other. These panels were threaded with hydraulically tensioned steel cable. The threaded panels were moved into position 65 feet above the train lines, creating what is essentially a bridge span covering the former open space. Over a dozen of those bridge spans placed side by side from west to east formed the platform. This was the foundation for the plaza and a safe space to work on the development.

Callie: It was such a great engineering solution to a really challenging problem. So not only did that save us money, because it cut down on the amount of time that we were over the rail yards, and then also created really interesting design challenges for the buildings themselves.

BRIAN Narration: The skyscrapers couldn’t sit directly on the new platform, because they needed to be securely supported by the bedrock.

PREETAM: You know, one of the things about Manhattan is its rock. The rock is so hard that actually that's one of the reasons why you had tall buildings in Manhattan.

If an elephant stood on top of a soup can. The soup can won't get crushed. That soup can is the Manhattan rock. It's just so tough and so hard.

BRIAN Narration: This is Preetam Biswas, Structural Engineering Principal at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill or SOM, the lead architectural, urban planning and engineering firm behind Manhattan West.

PREETAM: There were certain areas in this block that had hard rock, terra firma. So you could actually put foundations in those places, but if you restricted yourself to putting foundations in just those locations, you wouldn't get a building with a big enough footprint. And they would not be useful. Whatever we built, the two office towers were gonna be the anchor towers to the whole development.

And here it was a challenge provided to us, now that you have this land full of tracks, how do you do it?

BRIAN Narration: SOM was up to the challenge. The firm is behind iconic structures like the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the world’s tallest building, the Jin Mao Tower, home to the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Shanghai and One World Trade Center also in New York City. 

PREETAM: One Manhattan West and Two Manhattan West, the two towers that are there, though they look very similar. They look like kind of twins, structurally they're actually pretty dissimilar, and one of the things that is a difference between the two is what portion of the tower overlaps with railroad tracks? What portion of the footprint?

BRIAN Narration: In the case of ONE Manhattan West, edges of the tower extend over Amtrak and New Jersey Transit Lines.

PREETAM: If we were to come down with the structure and try to thread between tracks and get any construction time, to build a foundation for a tower that's going to be a thousand feet high in between those tracks, it would take us years. So that was something that was not possible. 

BRIAN Narration: But there was space between the tracks in the middle of the building’s footprint.

PREETAM:  What we did is we kicked the columns back to the center of the building to balance it.

And the resulting structure is like a wine bottle upside down. It's bigger at the top. It narrows down and comes to the ground. But the center portion is what sits on hard rock on Terrafirma.

BRIAN Narration: The architects highlighted this engineering solution by keeping the travertine-clad core of the building visible in the lobby of ONE Manhattan West. Travertine is a limestone that is a warm beige color, with horizontal lines that remind me of water lines on the side of a canyon. You can even see it from the outside, since the tower is finished in transparent glass.

PREETAM: Brookfield very deliberately as a client, wanted to ensure that the building architecture and the building design celebrates the fact that this building is where it is. 

BRIAN Narration: The sister tower, Two Manhattan West is the opposite – it has train tracks that run through the center of the building’s base; so its mega columns give the building support on the outside edges, like a giant stool with many legs. 

PREETAM: And the architecture celebrates that tower by making the core into soft wood and allowing the columns to be clad in metal.

PREETAM: So both the building structures, all of the gymnastics around railroad tracks, how to get there, how to thread your way through the railroad tracks or avoid it is all done within the first six floors, which is the lobby, the mechanical rooms and above level six it's a regular building.

KIM: From an urban perspective, obviously the two commercial buildings had, each about 2 million square feet, give and take, have the strongest presence in the city. 

BRIAN Narration: This is Kim Van Holsbeke again, design principal at SOM.

KIM: So we felt it very important that the two towers created a sense of gateway moving from Penn station westbound that marked the public spaces that were partially required by city planning for the urban commuter, the urban visitor.

KIM: The two towers have this poetic dance between them that uh mark the skyline, which is very key New York too. New York is defined by its ever changing skyline.

BRIAN Narration: Each tower has one curved side, which gives a sense of movement, like a boat’s sail. 

KIM: And ONE Manhattan which sits on 33rd street has that curved, looking back to Midtown and the empire state building, cuz it's the main, pedestrian artery, and TWO Manhattan West of sits slightly forward to the east and comes forward and makes itself visible for the traffic coming down 9th avenue.

How did they meet the ground is very simple and elegant, but really trying to connect the public realm with the commercial private development pieces and create a kind of singular, presence, without overwhelming the pedestrian. 

BRIAN Narration:  Next time on Built, be a pedestrian with us as we explore whether all of this work, decades in the making, is paying off. We’ll explore Manhattan West from the public plaza to the top of the towers. 

Heather: It's nice to have some outdoor space in Manhattan and, you know, you can actually see the sky. It's not all um covered by skyscrapers. And you can see the sky, and you know you can enjoy a nice day like today.

I’m Brian Maughan. To see photos from our visit to Manhattan West, visit builtpodcast.com 

Built is a co-production of Fidelity National Financial, PRX Productions, and Goat Rodeo. From FNF, our project is run by Annie Bardelas. This episode was produced by Sandra Lopez-Monsalve and Genevieve Sponsler. Additional production support from Megan Nodolski. Audio mastering by Rebecca Seidel. Location recording by Adam Raymonda.

The Executive Producer of PRX Productions is Jocelyn Gonzales.

Special thanks to our guests, and to Laura Montross at Brookfield Properties, Annety De Luna and Sacha Angira at SOM, and Yenny Real.

We’ll have more great interviews with colleagues in commercial real estate coming your way. And if you missed last season, please go listen - our guests have been behind every type of structure from wind farms to warehouses. You can find all our episodes wherever you get your podcasts.