West Side Rail Yards

A day after the M.T.A.’s West Side rail yards deal with Tishman Speyer Properties was officially declared dead, Mayor Bloomberg today pointed to the gubernatorial roller coaster in Albany to explain the troubles for his economic development agenda.

“The chaos in Albany was not good for us,” he told reporters. “I’m not disparaging what they were trying to do, it’s just that when you change administrations, it does slow things down, and nobody expected when the administration changed a year and a third ago, that a year and a third later, they would go through the same process.”

This is a tune the mayor has been singing for a few days now—in London, he was more explicit, saying, “When Eliot Spitzer came in, he basically stopped every project that the Pataki administration negotiated, saying he wanted to look at it.”  read more »

With Tishman Speyer out of the picture at the West Side rail yards, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority is now headed back to the other three bidding teams (Extell Development, the Related Companies, and a joint venture of the Durst Organization and Vornado Realty Trust); that is, if they’re still interested.

The apparent frontrunner, given that it was the runner-up to Tishman in the original bidding, would be Durst/Vornado, the only remaining team in late March with an anchor tenant, S.I. Newhouse’s Condé Nast. If Condé Nast is no longer on board with a move—The Times has reported that Tishman failed to woo them in recent weeks—that could mean trouble for the Durst/Vornado bid, or certainly the value of it.  read more »

Big news from the M.T.A. via a statement. After Tishman Speyer tried over the weekend and in the past two days to revive talks, the state agency has officially stopped discussions and is opening up talks again with other developers.

From M.T.A. spokesman Jeremy Soffin:

The MTA met today with Tishman Speyer. Despite the best efforts of both sides, a final agreement could not be reached. The MTA has now re-entered discussions with other interested developers and remains committed to timely development of these unique and valuable parcels of land on Manhattan's Far West Side.

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At a press conference earlier today, Michael Bloomberg pushed back against Chuck Schumer’s suggestion that building Moynihan Station should take precedence over developing the West Side rail yards.
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Speaking from London earlier today, Michael Bloomberg said the deal for the West Side rail yards was still alive, and called on the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to work out its differences with Tishman Speyer and come to an agreement. The M.T.A. said it reached an impasse with Tishman Speyer yesterday.

“These projects are phenomenally complex—they have lots of different layers of government involved,” Mr. Bloomberg said, speaking to reporters. “My hope is that the state government, really the M.T.A. in this case, can get together and solve the problems that they have and that Tishman Speyer has so that they can come together. But I don’t think it’s the least bit fair or accurate to say that anything’s dead.”

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Did Jerry and Rob Speyer dive into a project too big for the real estate giants to handle?

When Tishman Speyer Properties was announced winner of the West Side rail yards development rights in late March, the scene was a cheery one, with the governor and mayor on hand at the yards to hail the Speyers as victors. Now, with the deal apparently dead, the mood has changed substantially [background on the deal collapse here].

In the weeks since the March announcement, Tishman Speyer appeared to grow unexpectedly wary. What was ultimately the sticking point in negotiations—the firm wanted to wait an extra year or so before closing on the eastern rail yard, until the western rail yard was rezoned—was a point that Tishman accepted a few weeks back when it was selected.  read more »

With the West Side rail yards development deal on very shaky ground, Assemblyman Richard Brodsky today announced a bill that would chart a new course for the 26-acre parcel west of Penn Station, bringing in a new authority to follow a Battery Park City model of piecemeal development.

“Instead of selling at the bottom of the market for a price that was never really what the property was worth in the long run,” Mr. Brodsky said, “we should do what we know works.”

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which owns the rail yards, has been trying to sell them to a private firm to develop, though yesterday talks broke down with selected developer Tishman Speyer, which had planned to pay the M.T.A. about $1 billion for the property.  read more »

The deal for billions of dollars worth of development over the West Side rail yards collapsed Thursday afternoon, with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and Tishman Speyer hitting an impasse in negotiations. The failure to reach a deal came more than five weeks after the M.T.A. announced Tishman Speyer as the winner of the development rights, after a months-long bidding contest between six of the city’s largest development firms.

According to a statement from the M.T.A., the failure to complete the deal came as Tishman Speyer refused to close on the agreement for the eastern half of the rail yards until the western half was rezoned, a process that could easily take until late 2009, if not 2010. The accord reached in late March held that Tishman would close on the eastern half; then, after the western half was rezoned, they would close the deal on that section, completing the deal. The total deal was estimated to bring the M.T.A. about $1 billion from Tishman.

The collapse in talks came one day after the M.T.A. passed a self-imposed seven-day deadline to finish negotiations and sign a conditional letter of designation, a document that was not signed when Tishman won the bidding. Officials said at the time of that announcement, in late March, that they were highly confident a final deal would be reached, characterizing the designation letter as something of a formality.  read more »

Five weeks after Tishman Speyer was announced the winner of the West Side rail yards, negotiations are still unfinished between Tishman, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the city, an M.T.A. spokesman confirmed.

The parties yesterday missed a seven-day deadline set by the M.T.A. at its board meeting last week, with the final details of a conditional letter of designation yet to be finalized.  read more »

A month after the state declared Tishman Speyer winner of the bid to develop the West Side rail yards, the  read more »

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority and Tishman Speyer have missed their first deadline in the project to develop the West Side rail yards, as the date for the MTA to officially designate Tishman Speyer as the developer has come and gone.  read more »

By almost any measure, Jerry and Rob Speyer’s planned development of the West Side rail yards is on a grand scale.

Its space (26 acres), price tag (perhaps $12 billion to $13 billion, based on the cost for two similar proposals at the site), and size (13 million square feet) all outstrip major development projects such as Bruce Ratner’s Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn, the World Trade Center, and Sheldon Solow’s seven-tower complex planned for the area just south of the United Nations.

But as the largest development project to grace New York City’s presence in generations, it carries with it great risk—risk that if it were to fail, it could bring down the emerging far West Side with it; risk that if the urban design is poorly planned, the area could be scarred with a large, barren public space for decades. Once eyed to hold an Olympic stadium, the rail yards are intended to be the anchor for the new Midtown West business district—the catalyst that would give the emerging area its critical mass and invite a set of apartment and commercial towers.  read more »

Above is a rendering of some of the 13 acres of public space in Tishman Speyer's winning West Side rail yards bid. Here's some more.

Conde Nast was one of the tangential losers in the West Side rail yards bidding. The magazine publishing giant was the anchor tenant for the Durst-Vornado bid, and that bid, of course, lost yesterday to Tishman Speyer's.

But! John Koblin, at our brother blog Media Mob, reports that Conde Nast C.O.O. John Bellando sent out an internal memo this morning telling employees that the company was still looking to build a new tower--somewhere--by 2016.

From the memo:  read more »

If there is anything to be learned from the moves and actions of the Speyer family over the past few years, it is that its members have a penchant for high-profile trophy properties; they have no qualms about aggressively engaging in mega-deals for the city’s largest sales; they can win out in tough contests; and they sell buildings for tremendous returns.

The Tishman Speyer kingdom, already extending to more than a dozen U.S. cities and three continents, will now raise a flag on the far West Side of Manhattan. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority yesterday declared the longtime New York real estate firm the developer and owner-to-be of its 26-acre rail yards, Manhattan’s largest chunk of undeveloped real estate, bounded by 11th and 12th avenues, and 30th and 33rd streets. [See our coverage from Wednesday here, here, here, and here.]

Now the fate of the West Side rests in large part in the Speyers' hands, as officials and real estate executives say the successful creation of a new business district a few avenues west of America’s largest central business district depends on the development of the rail yards, long eyed as the site for something other than open air.  read more »

A few statements from various politicians and organizations, including Friends of the High Line and State Senator Tom Duane, about the selection of Tishman Speyer as developer of the 26-acre West Side rail yards:  read more »

In the beginning, there were five teams that included the city's biggest developers vying for the West Side rail yards. Today, the board of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the yards' owner, voted to negotiate solely with Tishman Speyer over acquiring and developing the 26-acre site.

Gary Dellaverson, the MTA's CFO, talked at today's board meeting about the bidding that was closely watched for months even though few people beyond those directly involved knew what was really going on. According to Mr. Dellaverson and an MTA summary handed out to board members:  read more »

Maybe it’s best to keep the champagne on ice just for a few more days.

There’s a bit more work to be done on the deal between the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and Tishman Speyer over the West Side rail yards, as the MTA did not give, as it once planned to, a “conditional letter of designation” to Tishman today for the deal. With some final details yet to be ironed out, that designation comes in the next 14 days, to be followed by a contract within 120 days after that.  read more »

Our brother blog The Politicker reports that Governor Paterson and Mayor Bloomberg have scheduled a 3 p.m. press conference at the Hudson Yards.

It's quite a real estate empire the Speyers now have. When they get done building 10 million square feet of office space and 3 million square feet of residential on the West Side rail yards, they can add that to the following massive trophies:

Stuyvesant Town and Cooper Village, the Manhattan apartment complexes Tishman Speyer and junior partners acquired in late 2006 for the record price of $5.4 billion. The complexes have 110 buildings total with over 11,200 apartments, many of which are moving toward market-rate.  read more »

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As expected, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority has selected Tishman Speyer to develop the West Side rail yards. We'll have more on this later in the day.

My colleague Eliot Brown has a story in today's paper about the next steps for Tishman Speyer in developing the 26-acre site.

As The Observer noted in November, Tishman Speyer's West Side rail yards bid leans more heavily commercial than any of the others. Its original bid had 3,000 apartments and 10 million square feet of office space. That office space component may have dwindled as Tishman Speyer lost Morgan Stanley as an anchor tenant earlier this year.

Tishman Speyer appears to be in the pole position going into the final stretch of the West Side rail yards saga, as the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, as of this morning, was still negotiating with the firm to hammer out an agreement before Wednesday’s MTA board meeting, according to three people familiar with the talks.  read more »

A developer for the West Side rail yards could be selected as early as tonight, with Tishman Speyer and a venture between the Durst Organization and Vornado Realty Trust leading the field, according to two people familiar with discussions.  read more »

Revised bids for the West Side rail yards were due today, and Brookfield Properties did not submit a response, leaving four of the city’s biggest developers in a battle for control of the 26-acre site west of Pennsylvania Station.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which owns the site, put out a statement a few minutes ago saying that the agency had received four revised proposals, with no bid from Brookfield. The timeline, which puts selection of a developer in April, remains the same, the MTA said.  read more »

An addendum to my post yesterday on the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s decision process at the West Side rail yards: Almost four months after the five development teams first submitted proposals (and spent millions of dollars to do so), it seems the MTA is nearly ready to narrow the field.

The MTA, which owns the 26-acre rail yards, has asked the development teams to send in “supplemental proposals” that give a detailed financial payment plan for a 99-year lease on the property.  read more »

Rare in the world of government-administered mega-development projects, the West Side rail yards actually seem to be running on schedule (well, the schedule set late last year).

In documents sent late last month to the five teams vying to develop the yards, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s schedule indicated it wants a developer conditionally designated for each of the two yards (the eastern rail yards and the western rail yards, each 13 acres in size) by April 1, with the team (or teams) going into contract on the deal on Sept. 1, 2008.

A few other nuggets from the documents:  read more »

The New York Times' Charles Bagli reported over the weekend that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority has asked the five bidders for the West Side rail yards to submit a new round of bids. Apparently, the MTA would like to now lease for 99 years the 26 acres of rail yard rather than sell it. The MTA, the yards' landlord, would also like an "equity-type interest" in any project built on the site on the far West Side of Manhattan.

The new bids are due by Feb. 19.  read more »

Above is the former exhibit space for the five Hudson Yards development bids. The space, at Vanderbilt Avenue and 43rd Street near Grand Central Station, has been empty since December, and looked particularly cold today.

The board of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the Yards' owner, is supposed to start considering next month which of the five bids wins the development rights to the 26-acre site.

The Hudson Yards Community Advisory Committee, a community group that includes numerous elected officials, is pushing for a series of changes in the process of developing the West Side rail yards, critiquing the density, amount of affordable housing, and the design guidelines for the 26-acre site.

Anna Levin, chairwoman of the HYCAC, sent a letter yesterday to MTA executive director Elliot “Lee” Sander, outlining 13 points of criticism.  read more »

Wall Street Journal architect critic Ada Louise Huxtable likes the West Side rail yard bids of Brookfield Properties and Extell Development Corporation. In general, Ms. Huxtable doesn't like any of the five bids, but those of Brookfield and Extell at least, she writes, "are worth talking about."  read more »

More from The Observer's February interview at City Hall with outgoing deputy mayor for economic development Daniel Doctoroff.

Location: What about Hudson Yards? The city and the M.T.A. are preparing bids for the eastern and western yards at the same time. What sort of thing will be built there?  read more »

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We're dropping by the West Side rail yards exhibit at Vanderbilt Avenue and 43rd Street each week to see who's looking and how closely. Last week, Governor Spitzer dropped by. This week (Thursday to be precise) it was a sparse collection of people; but they looked interested. And isn't that what it's all about?

The West Side rail yards competition has pitted some of the biggest developers in the city against one another in an intense race to win the right to build 12 million square feet of office, residential and retail space. But it is also pitting former senior officials of the Bloomberg administration against one another.  read more »

Any good development firm worth its salt has got to have a former City Hall staffer or two on hand to navigate the bureaucracy. Last month, Brookfield Properties sent its latest government hire, Joshua Sirefman, into a meeting to help present the company’s multi-billion dollar plan for the West Side rail yards to a joint city-Metropolitan Transportation Authority selection committee.  read more »

We sat down with Gary Barnett, president of Extell Development, to talk about his firm's bid for the West Side rail yards. Mr. Barnett also talked about Extell's failed bid for Atlantic Yards and its plans for building a 57th Street hotel and condo.

The interview can be read here. It will also be in The Observer's print edition tomorrow.

It's the first full week since the five bids for the West Side rail yards debuted for public consumption at a midtown location off Vanderbilt Avenue. We've decided to drop by every week and check out who's checking out the bids.

This afternoon who should stop in but the 54th Governor of New York.

Ric Clark, president and CEO of Brookfield Properties, sat down last week with The Observer to expound on topics such as Merrill Lynch possibly moving out of Brookfield's World Financial Center and the firm's plans to develop a superblock along Ninth Avenue.

We'll have the complete interview in Wednesday's paper, but here's Mr. Clark talking about Brookfield's bid for the West Side rail yards. His firm is up against five others for the biggest slice of undeveloped Manhattan in many years.

About the bids for the West Side yards—How did you approach designing the future of this 26-acre site?  read more »

Blog Curbed has the results of its poll last week on the five bids to develop the West Side rail yards. Brookfield Properties' bid (partly rendered above) won with over 40 percent of the nearly 4,000 votes.

The Observer's Matthew Schuerman reported last week that Brookfield's bid had emerged as a crowd favorite, including among those who visited the midtown exhibit showing all five.

...[J]udging from the early reaction among visitors to the exhibit space, Brookfield has also gained a lot of fans, both via online message boards and among visitors to the exhibit, for a plan that they say looks the most like the rest of New York.

Brookfield's early popularity with the masses is no guarantee it will get to build on the 26-acre site. The site's owner, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, has the final say within the next few months, along with input from the Bloomberg administration.

The Observer will have an interview with Brookfield's chief executive Ric Clark in Wednesday's paper.

Maverick developer Gary Barnett and his Extell Development Company have closed on a sliver of Port Authority-owned land at 31st Street and 10th Avenue for about $17 million, property records show.  read more »

The three teams that appear to have the strongest of the five bids to develop 26 acres in the West 30’s are the ones that recruited tenants for the site.  read more »

Five developers have bid on the Western Rail Yards. The bids came into the yards' owner, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, by 5 p.m. on Thursday, and they include the usual heavyweights of New York City building.

1. Extell Development Company
2. Brookfield Properties Developer LLC
3. The Related Companies
4. TS West Side Holding, LLC (A Joint Venture of Tishman Speyer and Morgan Stanley)
5. Hudson Center East LLC and Hudson Center West LLC (A Joint Venture of Vornado Realty Trust and The Durst Organization, Inc.)

For the MTA's statement on the selection process, which should drag on toward at least spring, click here.

For earlier Observer coverage of the architects who could get to shape the yards, click here.  

Part of the art of winning projects like the West Side Rail Yards is creating a well-rounded proposal that touches all the right notes. The Durst-Vornado team and Tishman Speyer are already promising they will bring some jobs out to the West 30s should they win the competition. Now, the Durst Organization is saying it would add some cultural panache as well: the International Center of Photography.

“The West Side Rail Yards will showcase how sustainable construction, innovative landscape design and breathtaking architecture can form a vibrant 24-hour mixed-use community of culture, business, housing and recreation,” Jordan Barowitz, a spokesman for the Durst Organization, said.

Now, the ICP rents, at below-market rates, about 25,000 square feet in a Durst-owned building at Sixth Avenue and 43rd Street for its museum and storage, and another 40,000 square feet across the street for its school, according to its director, Willis Hartshorn. Moving to the West Side would enable the organization to consolidate into one space as large as 125,000 square feet.

"We are anticipating growth and anticipating a future and the rail yards look to us like one of the great opportunities in New York," Mr. Hartshorn said.

Bids for the rail yards are due Thursday. Having a cultural organization in hand is not necessarily going to be a huge asset in this battle, since the city has said that it would help find one willing to move out there—but it couldn’t hurt.

“You can say that today is the beginning of a new West Side Story,” Governor Sptizer said at a news conference this morning on West 33rd Street. But, it turned out the allusion was not to Leonard Bernstein’s musical, but rather to a dry, existential black-and-white drama penned by, well, a whole cast and crew of politicians. “The old West Side story related to this particular site was one of gridlock, delay and continuing discussion.”

Just over a year ago, the city was trying to wrest the John D. Caemmerer Rail Yard from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. And a year before that, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver blocked Mayor Bloomberg’s dream of building a football stadium on the western portion of the rail yards. Somehow, the city and the M.T.A. have since agreed on a development scheme that was unveiled today in the form of a request for proposals, an invitation for developers to bid on rights to build 12 million square feet on the six blocks bounded by 10th and 12th avenues and 30th and 33rd streets.

The M.T.A. wanted specs that would maximize its profit, so as to plug a $1 billion hole in its capital plan. The city wanted amenities like five acres of parkland, a new public school and a yet-to-be-named “major new cultural facility.”

The plan stayed pretty close to that which was presented at a May 8 community meeting, Ann Weisbrod, the president of the Hudson Yards Development Corporation, told reporters after the press conference. And as such, it may still meet with resistance from community residents who were pushing for more affordable housing and the preservation of the High Line.  read more »