$15B Hudson Yards project about to start

New York City didn't let the loss of the 2012 Olympics keep it from moving on to another venture: building up the largest undeveloped parcel in Manhattan.

The old Hudson rail yards on the West Side might have become the Olympic stadium had the city won the summer games when it bid on them years ago. Instead, a $15 billion small city within a city will soon start rising on 26 acres by the Hudson River, with the construction on the first building set to start this year.

Eventually, Hudson Yards is expected to change Manhattan's skyline dramatically.

The cluster of commercial and residential high-rises will be flanked by parkland, a cultural center, restaurants, shops, a hotel and a school, according to the latest renderings obtained by The Associated Press.

The main developer, Stephen Ross, said groundbreaking is planned sometime in October for the 12 million square feet of real estate space, New York's most ambitious private construction since Rockefeller Center was built in the 1930s amid the Great Depression.

Some have dubbed the neighborhood "Manhattan's final frontier." Bounded by 10th and 12th avenues and West 30th and 33rd streets, it's the borough's largest tract of land left for major development, followed by the World Trade Center being rebuilt downtown a decade after the terrorist attack.

Surrounding the rail storage yards in this once bleak industrial area were potholed roads leading to car and horse-drawn carriage garages, warehouses, low-rent brownstones, cheap delis and strip clubs.

Hudson Yards' first building, set to open in 2015, is a $1.3 billion, 46-floor tower -- nearly half of it to be occupied by Coach, the manufacturer of luxury leather goods. Its glass atrium will stand alongside the High Line, a mile-long, elevated public greenway transformed from a defunct freight railway weaving through the artsy Chelsea neighborhood to the south.

The inaugural tower is part of a master plan designed by the Manhattan architectural firm Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, which has produced the tallest towers in China, Korea, Hong Kong, France and Britain.

Still, in New York, "to build these very large structures on top of the tracks is a huge challenge," says the firm's co-founder, architect Bill Pedersen. "It's like dental work, threading through down below." An $800,000 platform will cover the field of open tracks that will continue to be used by the Long Island Rail Road, stretching under the nearby Pennsylvania Station.

Ross told the AP that the chosen architect for another high-rise along central, tree-lined Hudson Park and Boulevard is David Childs, who designed New York's tallest building, One World Trade Center, to be occupied by 2014.

"They're creating a whole new landscape, a whole new district of New York City," says Bob Yaro, president of the not-for-profit think tank, Regional Plan Association think tank.

America's biggest city is turning its Olympic defeat into an urban planning adventure.