By STEPHANIE BERZON
City officials and big builders on Tuesday unveiled a massive multi-billion dollar plan to develop the Hudson Yards site on the far west side of Manhattan that would include a tower soaring higher than the Empire State Building and casting shadows over the surrounding neighborhood.
“Today we formally start the most ambitious construction project in the history of New York,” said Bloomberg at a groundbreaking ceremony.
This ends nearly a decade of deal making between developers and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which owns the rail yard and will start collecting monthly lease payments of $230,000 for 99 years.
Cranes were expected immediately to rise over the 26-acre site on 30th Street between 9th and 10th avenues to start building the south tower, slated as headquarters for Coach, the leather bag company.
The plan also would include a five-star hotel, cultural center, school, many buildings and a mix of offices and residential condos 75 stories over the river with a spire rising higher than the Empire State. The full project would be finished in 10 or 12 years, developers said.
The first building’s blueprint of 47 stories, designed by New York-based Kohn Pedersen Fox, are already 80 percent filled with committed tenants, said Stephen Ross, chairman of Related Companies and who along with Oxford Properties is the developer behind the sweeping project.
“This will shift the heart of the city to the Far West Side.” Ross predicted.
The new building would have a vertical atrium that juts out of the South Tower and over The Highline. It is expected to be complete by 2015.
The city planned an extension to the No. 7 subway to accommodate the project.
MTA Chairman Joseph Lhota recalled looking over the tax roll when he was Finance Commissioner of New York City in January of 1995. He noticed that the West side of Manhattan provided “absolutely no revenue to the City of New York.”
“Development will activate what is currently a little hole in the ground provide NYC with millions of square feet of premier office space, residential space while creating significant new revenues to the MTA,” said Manhattan President Scott Stringer.
“It will also have an economic impact lone before it is even completed.”
Bloomberg said the project would create 23,000 construction jobs and 1,000 more permanent jobs, which is “another major step in our city’s ongoing economic revival.”
Some urban critics deem the project too big and doubt that it would be completed in time or on budget, if at all.
PHOTO: Mayor Bloomberg and Speaker Quinn
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