There’s a nine-story glass and terra-cotta structure peeking out over the corner of Ninth Avenue and West 14th Street that didn’t used to be there. It started to rise up two years ago behind the handsome brick row houses that have stood since 1842, heightening the chiaroscuro effect of old against new that the city’s Historic Districts tend to create.
“It’s all about that constant juxtaposition,” said George Schieferdecker, partner at BKSK Architects, which designed the restored rowhouse now known as 50 Ninth. “We tried to take advantage of all the characteristics of the old that make it special and unique and interesting.”
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Los Angeles supper club Delilah’s apparently liked the effect enough to recently choose 50 Ninth for its first New York location. And the top floor of the 40,153-square-foot office building is also already spoken for. Rolls-Royce leased the space in December and plans to use it as a design studio for clients buying custom luxury vehicles.
Owner Tavros saw the potential of this irregular block of buildings at the edge of the Meatpacking District years ago and bought the lot in 2014.
“At some point we realized that the Meatpacking District had become a really desirable office district,” said Tavros founding partner Dov Barnett. “More companies want to be here because of its proximity to all these cultural elements, and also to a lot of residential neighborhoods that the owners of these companies were living in.”
But it wasn’t smooth sailing to get 50 Ninth — a play on the other “59th” in Manhattan — built. After getting the plans fully formed, Tavros and BKSK won approval from the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission in August 2020.
“One of the commissioners said this is the most complicated approval he’d ever come across,” said Schieferdecker, explaining that 50 Ninth’s location behind a fort of row houses meant Landmarks needed to take into account its impact on several historic structures.
Plus, the commission tends to lean into the eclectic nature of the Meatpacking District’s architecture and wants control over how that continues in the future.
“They don’t like to lose the messiness of history,” Schieferdecker said. “There’s the rougher brick and the scale of things [in the neighborhood] that is sometimes awkward, but in fact historical. That’s very important to this whole assemblage, and is what makes it unique.”
Now it’s all coming together. The project finished construction earlier this year, and Tavros brought on Newmark to market the office portion of the project.
The work included a meticulous restoration of the façade of the Greek Revival-style row houses facing Chelsea Triangle, which BKSK sourced the reclaimed bricks for from St. Louis, Mo.
The terra-cotta rain screen that sits over the glass office tower reflects the red brick of the neighboring row houses. BKSK designed the screen so that it starts out “a little bit denser and gets less dense as it goes from bottom to top,” Schieferdecker said. “It sort of feathers up and away.”
Office tenants will look out onto the slate roof, and some floors include private outdoor terraces that nearly touch the top of the historic structures below.
“There are a lot of anomalous conditions in these old buildings,” said Schieferdecker. “When you’re in the office portion of it, set back from the historic buildings, you experience them in a variety of different ways.”
Update: This story has been updated to reflect that the project won approval from the Landmarks Preservation Commission in August 2020.
Abigail Nehring can be reached at anehring@commercialobserver.com.
