Development

One Manhattan Square 252 South Street

The 800-foot-tall modern glass condominium tower located on the edge of the New York Harbor on the Lower East Side, One Manhattan Square has all the luxuries, comfort and glam one could wish for. Currently,this beauty has active units starting at $1.22MM with tax abatement50% of 3% commission paid at contract signing.

Meyer Davis, the award-winning studio behind world-class hotels, elite private homes and Oscar de la Renta’s flagship retail boutiques, has designed residences that rival five-star resorts. The luxurious interiors are a joy to live in combining style, comfort and function. 

Each kitchen is equipped with custom cabinetry, Miele premium appliances and Dornbracht fittings – accented by a stainless-steel mosaic backsplash, back-channel with integrated storage and stone bartop with options available for dark and light scheme. In a nutshell, the designer has put in everything to make the property a grand project.

The amenities include unlimited luxury offers like sports club, entertainment and recreation for adults and children, 7 kinds of spa options, private motor court, a grand lobby, and 24-hour doorman and concierge. Schedule a tour to make this property your home.

CITY REALTY ARTICLE

The Lower East Side has been a vast and wide, low- and mid-rise, residential swath hugging the East River for decades until Extell Development decided to erect this 811-foot-high condominium apartment tower in 2015 just to the north of the lovely, 330-foot-high, Manhattan Bridge.  

The elegant tower, whose address is 252 South Street one block north of the bridge, is known as One Manhattan Square. 

Confucius Plaza, a curved, brown-brick, 44-story, apartment tower designed by Horowitz & Chan on the south side of the bridge several blocks inland, has been the tallest structure on the Lower East Side since it was erected in 1976. 

Extell’s new tower will be about twice as high with about 80 stories.  While it falls short of the arbitrary, 1,000-foot-plus minimum height for a “SuperTall,” its undeniable “stand-aloneness” when announced and very high visibility certainly make it “Super.”  

Extell is no stranger to “SuperTalls” as its 1,004-foot-tall mixed use tower, One57, designed by Christian de Portzamparc, at 157 West 57th Street, was the first of the very tall skyscrapers to sprout along 57th Street on what has become known as “Billionaire’s Row.” 

With 811 rental apartments, this tower is certainly not a minor player in the city’s residential sweepstakes and since its announcement it has been joined by several other, nearby very high-rise projects that promise to make this area one of the city’s most dramatic, and most isolated, very-high-rise clusters.  They are in the Two Bridges neighborhood between the Manhattan and Williamsburg bridges. 

One Manhattan Square is due for completion in the third quarter of 2018 and its “poor door” smaller “affordable,” 205-unit building at 229 Cherry Street is due for completion in 2018. 

The other new very tall towers include the very handsome, 1,000-foot-high, 639-unit, green-terracotta building at 247 Cherry Street planned by JDS Development Group and designed by SHoP Architects, the same team that is developing the 1,427-foot-high, very skinny tower at 111 West 57th Street.  JDS bought about 500,000 square feet of air rights for its project for more than $50 million from the Settlement Housing Fund and the Two Bridges Neighborhood Council.  The 77-story JDS rental tower, which will have three skydecks similar in massing to the indendations at 432 Park Avenue and the MetLife building straddling Park Avenue, will be one block north of One Manhattan Square.  The five-sided JDS tower will be partially cantilevered over the 10-story residential building at 80 Rutgers Slip. 

A block closer to the East River, L and M Development and the CIM Group plan two taller towers with a total of 1,350 apartments of which 25 percent will be “affordable” on a site at 260 South Street two blocks further north.  The taller of the two towers, both designed by Gary Handel, will be about 800 feet tall. 

In December, 2016, the Starrett Corporation plan another a 62-story tower at 259 Clinton Street on a two-story podium between Piers 42 and 35 with ground floor retail one foot above the flood plain in front on the FDR Drive.  This project, which will also have 25 percent of its apartments “affordable,” is being designed by Perkins-Eastman very tall tower at 272-283 South Street. 

The Chinatown Working Group plan proposed a 350-foot height limitation on new development along the East River but the city’s Department of City Planning rejected the plan in February, 2015 and a spokesman for the department was quoted at the gothamist.com as stating that it was “too vast an undertaking” and would interfere with the goals of Mayor de Blasio’s Housing New York program to erect 80,000 “below market-rate apartments in the next 10 years.” 

In June, City Council member Margaret Chin and others asked the city to create a master plan for the neighborhood in view of the radical increase in building heights of these proposals in comparison with the mid-rise towers of the area’s many housing projects. 

In August, 2016, the Department of City Planning, however, rejected a request to require JDS, L and M and the CIM Group and Starrett to have their towers go through the Uniform Land Use Review Process (ULURP) that would have required approval from the community board, the borough president and the City Council.  City Planning Commissioner Carl Weisbrod maintained in an August 11 letter that while the changes might be significant for the neighborhood, an astounding understatement, they did not require any new zoning actions or waivers. 

All of these towers are “as-of-right,” which means that they do not require public review. 

That fact is astounding.  These developers have, effectively, “outsmarted” the city and community groups.  In a city that has become famous in recent decades for the power of its NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) groups opposed to new development in their neighborhoods, such an oversight in such a political alert neighborhood.             

Indeed, although the Lower East Side had not flashed super-luxury credentials, One Manhattan Square tower does have some exclusivity despite its vast number of small units: it was initially only being marketed, reportedly, to buyers in Asia with exhibitions in Shanghai, Hong Kong, Beijing, Singapore and Kuala Lumpur.

Adamson Associates Architects (AAI) has designed the glass-clad tower.  

Interiors are designed by Meyer Davis.  West 8 is the landscape architect.

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