1000-foot Tower of Gardens Planned for Seaport

Plans are in the works to build a 1,018-foot-tall tower at 80 South Street across from the Seaport. The 300,000-square-foot building will include a 200-room luxury hotel, 150,000 sq ft of residential apartments and cultural space. Cord Meyer Development - builder of Forest Hills Gardens - is the owner of the property and currently working out air rights it has purchased over the years. Anthony Morali Architects, also of Forest Hills, designed the mixed-use tower, which looks similar to the original Santiago Calatrava proposal from 2004 for the same address. The project is scheduled for completion in 2016.

Santiago Calatrava’s 1,123-foot tower of cubes at 80 South Street has been dead for almost five years, but Cord Meyer has selected a local designer, Anthony Morali, to revive the site.

Morali Architects released drawings of his 1,018-foot, 300,000-square foot design, which will feature apartments rising from a hotel base with garden space integrated into the tower. The new design also features segmentation, in common with Calatrava’s tower, but with integrated sustainability and gardens.

Moreover, unlike the original Calatrava proposal, Morali's version of 80 South Street will actually be built.

The design features a high-tech garage on the first three levels to equal the height of the FDR drive; above that a museum highlighting the history of Wall Street and the South Street Seaport; and a restaurant and spa befitting a 200-room boutique hotel. Other eco-conscious elements of the building include cascading gardens throughout the segmented facade, a geothermal heat pump to be installed when caissons are sunk as part of the foundation, and a building skin made of green photovoltaic glass.

The tower will feature "vegetative roofs" cutout every ten stories, which will bloom into vertical gardens. "Instead of having a balcony,” Mr. Morali said, “residents would have a 3

Kreisler Borg Florman, the same contractor that built the 76-story New York by Gehry at 8 Spruce Street, but was, in fact, inspired by Herzog & de Meuron’s revived “Jenga” tower at 56 Leonard Street, will build 80 South Street. The project has a completion date for 2016, the same time as 56 Leonard.