Harlem Park

Rank #8
Cost: $190 million

The 29-story building rising in Harlem will not just be one of the most striking contrasts - a tall, modern glass tower in a neighborhood of lower-height traditional masonry structures. It will also be the first new hotel in decades - a 208-room Marriott Courtyard - in a community that for years has drawn nearly a third of tourists to the city but seldom had them stay overnight.

The Harlem Park project will offer a host of other amenities to visitors and residents near its 1800 Park Avenue address. Rising 475 ft. into the sky, the 585,000-sq. ft. structure will include catering spaces, a jazz club, 250,000 sq. ft. of office space, and an artistic architectural design. When Harlem Park opens in December 2005, it will be a triumph for the 1800 Park Avenue LLC development team, led by Michael Caridi, chairman of Majic Development Group, along with other prominent investors like Jackie Autry, widow of Western entertainer Gene Autry, and Kevin Liles, president of the hip-hop music company, DefJam Recordings.

The project stands out in other ways as well, including the tight budget that kept construction costs at $214 per sq. ft. in costs, when similar ones could run up to $270 per sq. ft., according to China Construction America, the construction manager on the job. That's more impressive given the project team's effort to deal with limited site size and maneuvering room for the construction crane.

The job entails digging out nearly 50,000 cubic yards of dirt and stone from a 32,000-sq.-ft. site to build the foundation and three levels of underground parking. The team has weighed options like a secant wall system, with interlocking caissons placed in trenches, to shore up the excavated area and seal out groundwater from neighboring sites, like the elevated rail line above Park Avenue and the neighboring New York College of Podiatric Medicine. The benefit of that approach would be avoiding the need to pound piles into the ground and potentially disrupt the podiatric college.

On a design from TEN Arquitectos of New York, N.Y., Harlem Park will be a dual-structure building. The non-hotel portion will be an opaque, 4-story "podium" housing the retail and catering space at the base and a large "glass cube" with upper floors for offices. Those, in turn, will link to the taller, thinner glass tower for the hotel.

Linking the two elements spurred the choice of a concrete superstructure for the building rather than steel. The link will be a curtain-wall atrium with a roof spanned by concrete beams - allowing the wider floor area of the office building to support the thinner tower. That choice of structural system could save considerable time on the project schedule - up to eight weeks off the full 24-month construction timetable. That eight-week boost is a key benefit, since the project team is aiming for an opening in late 2005 that would allow the hotel to attract holiday visitors to New York.

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