One Manhattan Square
One Manhattan Square will stand as a soaring 823-foot condominium tower at 252 South Street in the Two Bridges neighborhood of the Lower East Side. When finished, the skyscraper will be the tallest building between downtown and Midtown granting nearly all of its 815 condominium apartments postcard views of the city. Ushered forward by Gary Barnett's Extell Development Company, the busy developer reportedly paid $175 million for the site in 2013, including a $47 million buyback of Pathmark’s lease. Demolition and excavation work began in earnest shortly thereafter and the team eventually unveiled renderings of a copper and glass monolith designed by Adamson Associates Architects (AAI), visually shouldering the historic Manhattan Bridge.
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The projected sellout of the the project's 815 condos is pegged at $1.87 billion according to The Real Deal. Units will range from one to three bedrooms, and prices will start at $1.15 million and scale upwards to $13 million for its two penthouses. Meyer Davis Studios will design the interiors. Late last year, Extell released a batch of new renderings for the 937,000-square-foot development, showing off its nearly 100,000 square feet of amenity space which includes a movie theater, a bowling alley, a dog spa and a cigar room. More recently the team unveiled a new fly-through video with the tower superimposed within the Manhattan cityscape, and has also posted a few illustrations of its outdoor amenity areas designed by West 8 Urban Design & Landscape Architecture to the building's Instagram account.
Illustrations of the outdoor gardens and leisure spaces that surround the tower
The tower's reinforced concrete frame is rapidly rising after a seemingly slow process of preparing the landfill site's foundations. Now already seven floors up, the building will soon surpass the roadway of the Manhattan Bridge and will ultimately surpass its blue Beaux-Arts towers by 500 feet. Until then, Extell has enlisted three acclaimed artists to enlighten and beautify the construction site, as well as illustrate to the community the visions that have motivated the structure’s birth. One Manhattan Square will stand as a vertical village on the Lower East Side when completed, but for now, Margaret Urías, Nicholas Forker, and Jessica Tynk have done well to revamp its horizontal base.
Margaret Urías drew inspiration from the neighborhood surrounding the Manhattan Bridge to design her mural. Entitled “In This Square,” her artwork resembles historic maps and photographs, as well as population density maps and fire insurance maps. The outcome is an abstract black and white tribute to “the lost past, the eclectic present and a hypothetical future.” Urías has a celebrated history in the mural department. Last fall, she created a mural on the ground floor of residential skyscraper Ava Dobro in Downtown Brooklyn.
Nicholas Forker’s claim-to-fame came in 2011 when he became the first artist to paint a mural at SoHo clothing store Rag and Bone. His take on the project was inspired by his own ancestral ties to the Lower East Side, as his family immigrated to the neighborhood at the turn of the century. His mural, entitled “In These Streets,” features a bright colored sequence of Lower East Side tenement buildings.
Last but not least, Jessica Tynk’s creation “In This Sky” features a colorful comic strip of architectural details from the Manhattan Bride and other nearby landmarks. After researching the city’s many skyscrapers, she came to appreciate the images of the construction workers up in the air like acrobats. She painted her mural in a desire to commemorate the architects and engineers who make New York City possible.
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