When word came out last March that Santiago Calatrava was going to build a luxury residential tower on South Street, we were cautiously excited. Sure, we'd never be able to afford to live in one of the "townhouses in the sky" but they would certainly be another jewel in the cities skyline and you can't have too much good architecture. Of course we weren't holding our breath as most of the time when something that interesting gets announced, especially in New York, something goes wrong and the project never materializes.
So it was with some interest that we saw in the Post on Thursday that 80 South Street (the official name for the building) looked like it was going to go forward and that apartments were being sold (with a penthouse going for $50 million!).
The building of the building story got even more interesting today when the Times Real Estate section got it's mitts on it (second item). First off, they claim that the penthouse isn't going to cost $50 million, it is going to cost $59 million! Second, it seems that the building is being built using an unusual (for NYC) development scheme in which apartment buyers pony up a 25% deposit before the building even has financial backing (apparently this is common in places like Miami, but it sounds sketch to us). And finally, and this is buried in the bottom of the story and struck us as really weird: Frank J. Sciame, who is building the tower, "sold the land for the building to another developer in March for $34.5 million" with a plan to buy it back before construction begins next March.
So will Calatrava's cubes happen? Our gut says maybe, but probably not the way it has been presented. What do you think?
