Extell is looking to build a supertall on top of ABC’s old New York campus on the Upper West Side.
Photo: Google Maps
Extell is planning a tower the size of the Empire State Building somewhere between West 66th and West 67th, and Tony Danza is upset. The actor, who has lived in Lincoln Square for more than two decades, says he can see what will soon be a construction pit from his two-bedroom apartment and has been calling every city official he can to try and stop the tower from going up. “I don’t understand why the whole neighborhood isn’t out in the streets and furious about it,” he tells me. “It’s going to impact the neighborhood for probably the next four or five years, and then after that, it’ll shade the park and be this ugly glass tower.”
Danza is right that the proposed 1,200-foot tower is a good bit different than most of what’s around it. (For reference, the current tallest tower, which was also built by Extell, is 775 feet.) The site in question, a stretch from Columbus Avenue to Central Park West, is the former home of ABC’s New York campus, which you’ll likely remember for Eyewitness News studio at the corner of West 66th. In 2018, Disney was eyeing a move downtown and sold off its holdings along the block to Silverstein Properties, which in turn later sold 77 West 66th Street and 54 West 67th Street to Extell for $931 million. (Extell also owns the air rights from surrounding properties.) As for the matter of how very tall this new building is meant to be: Notably here, the land Extell bought doesn’t fall under the Lincoln Square Special District zoning regulations, owing to an amendment made by the the City Planning Commission back in 1993 to lure ABC to the neighborhood. It is, in the words of one community advocate I spoke with, “a block of the Upper West Side that has midtown zoning.” The current zoning also doesn’t require any kind of affordable housing. All of this likely made the lot incredibly appealing to Extell, which has been on a roll with supertalls including One57 on Billionaires’ Row and the planned Torch in Times Square.
Obviously, people other than beloved television actors got upset about Extell’s plan to build up, up, up. There are roughly two camps to the opposition: the no-way faction that doesn’t want any kind of supertall on the Upper West Side, period. Then there are the types like Seema Reddy, co-chair of Community Board 7’s Housing and Land Use committee, who while not exactly a fan of the incoming Extell tower, tells me she’d tolerate a shadow-casting behemoth if it means additional affordable housing for the neighborhood. “It’s desperately needed,” she says. In May, Extell’s Gary Barnett appeared at a community-board committee meeting in a black jacket and T-shirt to present his company’s plans for the incoming supertall. It wasn’t that long ago that construction finally topped out at Extell’s Snøhetta-designed 50 West 66th Street — which currently holds the crown for height in the neighborhood. With that project, he explained, Extell faced serious pusbhack. Construction ended up dragging on for years owing to legal challenges, which, per Barnett’s estimate, ended up costing tens of millions of dollars that “could have been better spent on something else.” This time, he said, “I’m not interested in a fight.” He wanted peace.
By summer, that peace offering officially arrived: Extell would voluntarily build affordable apartments in two mid-block buildings amounting to 20 percent of the total number of new condo units he was planning for the supertall. That effectively meant 121 affordable apartments, with the vast majority being studios for seniors. But Gale Brewer, the city councilmember representing District 6, wants 30 percent affordable — the equivalent of the city’s Mandatory Inclusionary Housing program. And at a meeting earlier this month, the community board more or less echoed the demand with a resolution that also called on Extell to make most of the affordable units family-size two bedrooms. In something of a Hail Mary, the community board even included a call for the city to upzone the parcel. Through a process called ULURP, the resolution is asking for the city to allow Extell to build an even-taller tower but also require the developer to build far more affordable housing than what he’s offered so far. (Extell hasn’t responded to a request for comment or, so far, the community board’s resolution, but Barnett has previously said he won’t entertain a 30 percent ask: “If that’s the starting point, I’m not sitting down.”)
So far, the city hasn’t intervened on any of the larger zoning questions and it’s clear that given what’s in place right now, Barnett has the power to do what he wants. (“I take Gary’s word that he’d walk away,” one person familiar with the negotiations tells me.) But Brewer thinks there are other reasons Extell might consider staying at the table. Barnett “has lots of other projects he wants to do, so he’s going to need the city for future development,” she tells me. (Plus, she adds, “I’m pretty good at winning.”) As for Tony Danza, he may have his own nuclear option if the tower moves forward as planned: move to Los Angeles. “My daughter just had a baby girl,” he says. “So maybe something’s calling me to come back to L.A.”