Here’s the first look at designs for a spectacular new boulevard and park planned for Manhattan’s far West Side, where Mayor Bloomberg wants to build a new business district more than twice the size of the World Trade Center complex.
Photo Gallery: West Side Boulevard Proposals
From fanciful images of hills, trails and plantings to a park filled with enormous evergreen trees and rock outcrops, the proposals from five teams of architects vying to design the park and boulevard will go before the public beginning today.
The project, part of the Hudson Yards redevelopment, will create four acres of park space down the middle of a boulevard stretching from 33rd to 42nd Streets, between 10th and 11th Avenues, and linking up with a massive new office and residential project planned for the West Side rail yard just to the south of the new avenue.
“We are thrilled by the quality of the designs,” said Ann Weisbrod, president of the Hudson Yards Development Corp., which is overseeing construction of the project and the financing of an extension of the No. 7 subway line to a new station at 11th Avenue and 34th Street.
The winning design will be selected in early October, Weisbrod said. Construction of the first phase of the project, from 33rd to 36th streets, is expected be completed at the same time as the subway extension in 2013.
The now low-rise neighborhood was rezoned by the City Council several years ago to allow for up to 24 million square feet of office space and 13,500 new units of housing, along with hotels and retail development.
The entire project – construction of the subway, boulevard, plaza and other infrastructure work – is being paid for with $3 billion in bonds.
“This is the extension of Midtown, the preeminent business district in the world,” said Weisbrod.
The designs will be on public display at the Center for Architecture, at 536 La Guardia Place, from Sept. 25 through the end of October.