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Soaring 815 feet above the Lower East Side waterfront between the Manhattan and Williamsburg Bridges, Extell Corporation’s One Manhattan Square is hard to miss, given that it’s the only 72-story edifice in the neighborhood—and likely to remain so if enraged locals stop other towers planned for the area.
That might not be hard: The surfeit of super tall luxury buildings on Billionaires Row and elsewhere has created a glut of unsold palatial apartments. Apparently, there are some limits to excess, even for the oligarchs who are the target demo for such homes.
So what to do? The answer, of course, is to attract perspective tenants with amenities and One Manhattan Square has loads of them—100,000 square feet to be exact. These include a spa, a basketball court, a bowling alley and a “state of the art” fitness center, which is presumably meant to counteract all that unhealthy stuff to indulge in at the residential wine and cigar bars. Did we mention the adult tree house for residents? Yeah, there’s that, too.
The tree house is part of what the developers are billing as New York City’s largest private garden. Residents who are kids at heart can clamber up the structure and look out over 45,000 square feet of green space that also contain allées of sumac and birch trees, a fire pit, a tea pavilion, a putting green, a communal herb garden, a stargazing observatory, ping pong tables and a covered dog run. (Wait, what was that we were saying about excess?)
Well, that’s NYC for you, but look on the bright side: All that greenery will scrub out some small percentage of the greenhouse gasses in the area.