A pair of Lower Manhattan building projects have been recognized with 2017 Excellence in Development awards from the Urban Land Institute of New York (ULINY), a non-profit that seeks to promote, “the responsible use of land and in the creation of sustainable, thriving communities.” The ULINY awards are unusual in that they focus on all aspects of the development process, rather than only its architecture and design, which is the norm among similar competitions.
While the Institute considered and conferred awards upon projects in seven categories all over New York State (recognizing buildings as far away as Rochester and Buffalo), it chose Downtown projects in two divisions: Excellence in Civic Space and Excellence in Hotel Development.
The Civic Space award went to “the Hills”: a quartet of new, manmade but natural-looking peaks on Governors Island. Grassy Hill (at 25 feet high), Slide Hill (40 feet), Discovery Hill (also 40 feet), and Outlook Hill (at 70 feet) offer breathtaking, 360-degree panoramic views of New York’s skyline and harbor. Although the Hills have been carefully designed and landscaped to resemble natural terrain, they were created using almost 300,000 cubic yards of landfill, much of it salvaged from the wreckage of Governors Island buildings that were knocked down to make way for the park, which includes a play area with several slides (one of which is the longest slide in New York City), a granite stair/scramble reclaimed from the Island’s former seawall, and Cabin, a permanent, site-specific art installation. The ULINY jury also took special note that the design of the Hills is, “resilience-minded, as the topographical features lift portions of the Island above the future 100-year flood zone.”
In the Excellence in Hotel Development category, ULINY recognized the Beekman Hotel and Residences, a combination of rehabilitation and new construction that converted the landmarked (but long-disused) Temple Court building, located at Five Beekman Street, into the 287-room Beekman Hotel. The project additionally includes a new, 51-story residential tower that has a symbiotic relationship with the older structure: the tower houses all of the mechanical systems needed to operate the hotel, without compromising the latter’s historic integrity or architecture. The crown jewel of this project is the magnificent nine-story atrium, topped by a pyramid-shaped skylight. While the Temple Court building dates from the 1880s, the atrium is a something like a new amenity for Lower Manhattan, because it was closed to the public for decades before the adaptive-reuse plan that turned the structure into a hotel.