Gov. Spitzer has two major headaches on his hands in the push to redevelop the far West Side of Manhattan – a plan to expand the Javits Convention Center is now $1 billion over budget, and he has to pick a developer willing to build above the MTA’s railyards.
The solution may very well be combining the two projects into one.
More than a year behind schedule, the long-awaited expansion of the convention center could be scrapped and replaced with a bolder, bigger project just a block to the south by building a new hall over the West Side railyards.
Hailed as one of the most important economic development projects in the city, the plan to expand Javits has run into a brick wall – literally. After a ceremonial ground-breaking last year, the project was put on hold after Spitzer took office in January.
Just to the convention center’s north sits a massive MTA bus garage named after fiery longtime Transit Workers chief Michael J. Quill. Perhaps befitting Quill’s legacy, the garage named in his honor makes expanding Javits expensive to the point of impossible. Not only would it cost a minimum of $500 million to build a new bus garage, there’s virtually no place in Manhattan to put it.
All this leaves the woefully undersized Javits locked in on a six-block long footprint that’s far too small to create a modern convention floor. Then-Gov. George Pataki tried to solve the problem by expanding Javits upward over six levels, squeezing in a truck-marshalling yard, a ballroom and new meeting rooms – but that left the center’s exhibitions space broken up into smaller segments.
And for all the architectural gymnastics involved, that plan boosted the center’s total space from an anemic 840,000 square feet to a slightly more robust 1.3 million square feet. Still a far cry from Chicago’s McCormick Center at 2.1 million square feet.
The price tag for the project a year ago was estimated at $1.8 billion. Now, state officials estimate it is closer to $3 billion.
But the answer sits just a block south of the Javits: two sections of MTA railyards covering 26 acres – an enormous parcel for property-starved Manhattan, yet a site that is tremendously difficult and expensive to develop because it will have to be built above a working railyard. Just the cost of building a platform over the tracks could top $1.5 billion.
The city and state are looking for office and apartment towers as well as 12 acres of park space and a cultural center that would go above the railyard; they’re now reviewing five bids from developers vying for the site. The proposals aren’t yet public, but doubts are surfacing over whether any of the plans would generate the $1 billion sale price the MTA is seeking for the development rights.
State officials don’t need to look far for proposals to build a new convention center abover the railyards. Architects, planners and real-estate analysts at Baruch College’s Newman Institute did the heavy lifting several years ago, when they came up with a proposal called “The Flip” that featured 2 million square feet of exhibition space on a single floor, plus commercial and residential towers as well as a park twice the size of Bryant Park.
The proposal’s biggest problem was timing. The Flip was unveiled just as the Jets football team and the Bloomberg administration were driving toward the endzone with a $2 billion stadium for football and the Olympics proposed for the railyards. The stadium at that time overshadowed any other proposals for the site.
Meanwhile, Pataki had settled on the expansion plan. “Once the stadium and the Olympics were dead, we had a busted play,” said Robert Geddes, an architect with the Newman Institute and a driving force behind “The Flip.” Geddes said the demise of the stadium creates a new opportunity to use the railyards for a convention center.
Geddes says the current Javits could operate until its replacement is finished; then the state-owned site along the Hudson River of the “old” convention center could be sold to help finance the new one. (Several years ago, the Newman Institute valued the Javits land at $3 billion.)
The Flip has its fans – including Sen. Charles Schumer, who has been pushing the state and city to consider a new convention center over the railyards. And sources say the Flip has been looked at closely by Spitzer’s team, which estimates the cost at $5 billion.
The city is at a crossroads over the future of Manhattan’s last frontier, a massive stretch of the woefully underdeveloped far West Side – a district that could very well help pave the way for the city’s economic future through the rest of the century.
Taking the time to step back and look at all options – including “The Flip” – will pay dividends for decades to come.
Tom Topousis covers public development for The Post