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By: Benyamin Davidsons
Extell’s Central Park Tower, the world’s tallest residential spire and home to a Nordstrom department store, has been slapped with a new lawsuit.
As reported by Crain’s NY, on Thursday a suit was filed in Manhattan’s Supreme Courtalleging the construction on the supertall building caused damage to some paintings at the neighboring Art Students League on West 57th Street. The incident reportedly occurred during a major storm in the summer of 2020, in which water leaked through skylights of the historic five-story center, into a painting studio because construction debris had clogged the gutters, as per the suit. The league already filed an insurance claim for thed amages and was paid, court documents show. Now, however, the insurer, the Hanover Insurance Co., wants to be reimbursed for money it shelled out as a result of the claim. The lawsuit, filed against Nordstrom and Extell Development Co., requests $494,000 plus interest and fees. “The construction-related debris had not been properly collected, stored and/or disposed of at the tower construction site,” the suit says, “and it was instead disposed of and/or otherwise carried/placed into the subject gutter.”
The defendants have yet to file a legal response to the case. An Extell spokeswoman said the firm had not yet seen the suit and therefore could not comment.
Extell’s residential supertall skyscraper at 225 West 57th Street, along Midtown Manhattan’s Billionaires’ Row, boasts 131 floors and reaches a height of 1,417 feet, or1,550 feet to tip. A seven-story Nordstom, opened in 2019, encompassing 320,000-square-feet of space at the base of the building. Knownas the tallest residential building in the world, it features 179 exclusive condos.
The skyscraper, completed in 2021, had cost $3 billion to build. It boasts a Lalique lobby, illuminated by a monumental chandelier with 2,000 pieces of crystal, as well as about 50,000 square feet of amenity space in the Central Park Club. The exclusive amenities include a 60-foot-long outdoor swimming pool, cabana deck, spa, a double-height windowed sports court, private park, residents lounge with billiards and a screening room, the poolside Terrace Bar, and a private restaurant on top which is the highest ballroom ever built in NYC. The high-tech fitness center features coaches, trainers and restorative treatments. Developer Extell had tapped Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture and Robert Forest for the building’s architecture. Two-bedroom units at the tower start at $6.5 million, per StreetEasy. A seven-bedroom penthouse is listed available for $250 million, potentially making it one of the most expensive homes in the world.
Extell, led by Gary Barnett, is no newcomer to real estate hurdles and has handled it’s fair share of lawsuits in the past. Notably, when planning to construct Central Park Tower, Extell had been sued by nearby 70-story 220 Central Park South by Vornado Realty Trust, who alleged the new supertall tower would block its views of Central Park. Per Crain’s, Barnett came up with a novel response, offering to expand his tower sideways 30 feet to the east, via a cantilever. In order to achieve this, Barnett proposed to buy 6,000 square feet of air rights from the art league for $30.3 million. The not-for-profit, member-owned league, founded in 1875, which has had well-known students including Georgia O’Keeffe, Jackson Pollock and Ai Weiwei, was divided on whether they should sell the rights. Ultimately, the group did agree to sell the air rights in 2014, allowing the Central Park Tower construction to move forward, with the cantilever beginning at 290 feet above Midtown.
