At once across Wall St from Fed Hall Nationwide Memorial and Without delay across Broad Street from the NY Stock Exchange, this conversion project of 2 commercial structures to luxury apartments has the most inspiring Lower Manhattan location. It is composed of the five-story luxury apartment at twenty-three The Street that originally was the HQ of J.
P. Morgan's banking operations and the 42-story office luxury condo that wraps around it and was initially the Equitable Trust luxury condo. A report by David W. Dunlap in the May eleven, 2004 copy of The NY Times about the project had the strapline : "Condos, Not Roll-Tops, on Finance's Holiest Corner." The luxurious apartment at twenty-three Wall St was built in 1914, one year after the passing of J. P. Morgan, which was linked in 1957 to 15 Broad Street. According to Mr. Dunlap's article, "The luxury condos were later redone as HQ of the Morgan Guaranty Trust Company, company forerunner of J. P. Morgan Chase & Company." twenty-three The Street is an official NY Town landmark and in 1998, the NY Stock Exchange intended to raze all the luxury apartments on this block with the exception of twenty-three the Street for a new stock exchange and office tower, but that plan was scuttled after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. That plan included a design by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill for a 50-story tower diagonally opposite to twenty-three Wall St that had an interesting glass cover that at random appeared to "drip," a design later employed by SCLE in similar fashion for a new condo tower for the William Beaver development 1 or 2 blocks to the south. In 2003, A. I. & Boymelgreen of Brooklyn acquired these 2 luxury apartments for $100 million and claimed plans to spend about $135 million on their rebuilding and conversion into 326 apartments. Ismael Leyva is the project designer working with Philippe Starck, the French designer famous for his design that put furniture with very spiky points in the lobby at the Royalton Hotel on West 44th Street. Mr. Desolate also worked on the re-luxury condo of the Supreme and Hudson Hotels in midtown Manhattan and the Mondrian Hotel in L.A. And the Delano in Miami.
The project's net site describes Mr. Starck as "the leading exponent of expressionist architecture." First costs for the apartments ranged from about $335,000 for a studio to about $3.5 million for a three-bedroom apartment. Mr. Starck is reasonably showy and in Mr. Dunlap's article he was quoted as saying the project, which should have a bowling street, basketball and crush courts, lap pool and a little theater, will embody "honesty, respect, sensitivity, surrealism, poetry, surprise, vision which have no price on the other side of the street." Residents however, have free access to the roof at twenty-three Wall Street where Mr. Starck drew up a garden with trees, teak decking, a giant pool fed "by a tall, crook-shaped pipe, looking like a giant faucet," and a "topiary wall with window like openings in which lanterns will hang." The view from the roof is electrifying as it looks instantly at the highly decorative pediment of the Big Apple Stock Exchange. A 1,900-piece, Louis XV candelabrum that hung in the key banking hall at twenty-three Wall Street was installed in the lobby of the Broad Street luxury condo and Mr. Dunlap's article noted that it would hover "inches off the floor, with plasma screens showing residents ' faces interspersed among the crystals." 15 Broad Street was designed by Trowbridge & Livingston in 1928. It replaced a luxury condo that had been occupied since 1891 by Davis, Polk & Wardwell, a legal firm that moved out during its construction but returned and stayed there for another 35 years. The bowling street is in the basement in space that was once used as a shooting range for the bank's security guards. Shaya Boymelgreen, the president of LB Lev Leview / Boymelgreen came to the U.S.in 1969 and thereafter set up a book shop, Eichlers, which specialised in Jewish literature. He later sold Eichlers and then went into the diamond business before entering property, beginning with some projects on the Lower East Side and then doing some in Brooklyn.
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