Trump International Hotel and Tower (New York City)
The Trump International Hotel and Tower, originally the Gulf and Western Building, is a high-rise building at 15 Columbus Circle and 1 Central Park West on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, New York City. It was originally designed by Thomas E. Stanley as an office building and completed in 1970 as the headquarters of Gulf and Western Industries. In the mid-1990s, a joint venture composed of the General Electric Pension Fund, Galbreath Company, and developer Donald Trump renovated the building into a hotel and residential tower. The renovation was designed by Philip Johnson and Costas Kondylis.
The Trump International Hotel and Tower is tall and has contained 44 physical stories since it was built. The building originally had an aluminum-and-marble facade and was surrounded by a public plaza on Broadway and Central Park West. There was a movie theater and shops in the basement as well as a restaurant on the top floor. After the building was renovated, a glass facade was installed. The lower portion of the tower is used as a hotel, while the upper floors house residential condominiums.
Planning for an office skyscraper on the site dates to 1965, when developers Hyman R. and Irving J. Shapiro planned to replace an existing two- or three-story building there. After the Shapiros' firm made two failed proposals for the site, Realty Equities Corporation took over development in 1967. Upon its completion, the building served for more than two decades. By the early 1990s, the tower was bankrupt and the GE/Galbreath/Trump joint venture had taken over the structure. Gulf and Western successor Paramount Communications occupied the building until 1995, after which it was renovated; the residences opened in 1996 and the hotel rooms opened in 1997. The hotel was renovated in 2010.
Site
The Trump International Hotel and Tower is at 1 Central Park West, along the northern side of Columbus Circle, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City. It occupies a trapezoidal plot of land bounded by Broadway to the west, 61st Street to the north, and Central Park West to the east. The land lot covers, with a frontage of on Central Park West and a depth of. The building is abutted by 15 Central Park West to the north, Central Park to the east, and Deutsche Bank Center to the south. In addition, it is across Columbus Circle from 2 Columbus Circle and 240 Central Park South to the south. Entrances to the New York City Subway's 59th Street–Columbus Circle station, served by the, are directly outside the building.The block had contained Durland's Riding Academy in the early 20th century, as well as a ball field. The lot was purchased in 1911 by magazine magnate William Randolph Hearst. The plot was developed with the two-story American Circle Building, designed by Charles E. Birge, by 1914. The building, known as the American International Building, had a superstructure that could support the weight of a 30-story tower, though the additional stories were never built. Hearst had envisioned the creation of a large Midtown headquarters for his company near Columbus Circle, in the belief that the area would become the city's next large entertainment district. However, the proposal collapsed in the Great Depression and only the Hearst Magazine Building, three blocks south, was built. Hearst's low-rise building on the north side of Columbus Circle remained standing until the 1960s, with a prominent Coca-Cola sign displaying time and temperature.
Architecture
The Trump International Hotel and Tower was originally the Gulf and Western Building, designed by Thomas E. Stanley and constructed in the late 1960s. It was built by HRH Construction. From 1995 to 1997, Philip Johnson and Costas Kondylis renovated the building into the current Trump International Hotel and Tower. Cantor Seinuk served as the structural engineers for the renovation. The 44-story building is tall and is designed with. This gives the building a floor area ratio of 18. As apartment buildings were limited to a FAR of 12, Trump divided the tower into two separate structures for zoning purposes: a 17-story hotel at the base and a 28-story residential tower above.The tower is managed by the Trump Organization, a company run by developer and later U.S. president Donald Trump. The hotel units are owned by the General Electric Pension Trust and Galbreath & Company, who partnered with Trump in the 1990s residential conversion. The Trump Organization owns one of the condominiums, the parking garage, the restaurant space, the room-service kitchens, and the bathrooms in the lobby. The building and hotel are managed by the Trump Organization. The building's board of directors is composed of six residential owners, two hotel owners, and the president of the Trump Organization.
Plaza
The Gulf and Western Building was initially surrounded by a public plaza slightly above the sidewalk. The Central Park West frontage was raised two steps above the sidewalk there. Originally, the northwest corner of the plot had a seating area surrounding a staircase to a basement movie theater, the Paramount Theater. The only aboveground portion of the theater was a cylinder in diameter, which had an LED sign, a ticket booth, and an entrance to the theater. A stair and escalators led from ground level to the theater. The stairs were illuminated by theatrical lighting and were somewhat similar to the staircases designed by Wallace Harrison for the Metropolitan Opera House.The portion of the plaza at the southern tip of the plot, facing Columbus Circle, is sunken below ground level. The circular plaza includes a large staircase leading to the New York City Subway's 59th Street–Columbus Circle station. There was also a building entrance in the sunken portion of the plaza. The sunken plaza had been added at the suggestion of by the Urban Design Group, which believed Broadway would be redeveloped significantly following the development of Lincoln Center several blocks north.
The Columbus Circle globe, a 30-foot-wide silver globe of the Earth by artist Kim Brandell, was installed in front of the building during its conversion into the Trump International Hotel and Tower. The globe is inspired by the Unisphere in Queens, the New York City borough where Trump had grown up. According to Trump, the globe had been installed at the suggestion of a feng shui consultant he had hired. The globe was to include the words "Trump International" in letters, but the letters were not installed because city officials objected to the idea. When the globe was installed in 1997, nearby office workers complained that it was causing too much glare. The original plan had been to coat the globe in a golden surface, which would have reduced the glare, but Trump's feng shui consultants had recommended against it.
Facade
Thomas Stanley had intended the Gulf and Western Building to "provide a nice transition from Central Park", though the design was widely criticized upon the building's completion. The Gulf and Western Building's facade originally had steel columns, which were clad in marble from the plaza to the fourth story. Black granite was used in the spandrels above the second-story and third-story windows, while a marble belt course ran above the fourth floor. The marble was meant to complement the New York Coliseum and 2 Columbus Circle. On the fifth story and above, the facade was composed of prefabricated gray-glass windows with aluminum frames, as well as extruded vertical aluminum mullions that were painted white. A red sign reading "G&W" was originally mounted atop the building. The facade panels had become misaligned by the early 1990s, which necessitated the caulking of loose facade panels, as well as the installation of mullions and large pins to secure the panels.When the building was renovated in the mid-1990s, the facade was re-clad in dark glass and steel. Trump had requested that glass be used, despite the fact that some of Johnson's more contemporary projects like 550 Madison Avenue used stone. Johnson had initially intended to model the new design on the Seagram Building, which he had helped design in the 1950s. As such, the windows between the columns were originally designed as flat windows, before Johnson considered designing the openings with projecting two-sided windows instead. The final design was similar to Johnson's One PPG Place in Pittsburgh. The redesigned facade has non-reflective, slightly projecting three-sided windows.
The facade's steel is painted a gold color, a hue Trump used in several of his other projects. Johnson attributed the gold color to Trump's preference. Trump had originally wanted the facade to be bright gold, but he decided to use a matte finish instead after hiring a feng shui consultant, who told him to change it to reflect the clouds in the sky. Johnson had suggested removing the glass spandrels between floors to reduce costs, but Trump declined, saying the spandrels "sparkle like a diamond".
Structural features
The Gulf and Western Building was erected with a mechanical core at its center. The outer stories were reinforced with steel columns at intervals of. When the skyscraper was constructed, it would sway slightly during strong winds. According to structural engineer Ysrael Seinuk, the building would sway as much as laterally because of the lack of other tall buildings nearby to absorb the wind loads. Additionally, winds from the north would travel more quickly down Broadway than along Central Park West, due to the presence of a collection of tall apartment structures on Central Park West. This effectively turned the Gulf and Western Building into an airfoil, which would twist in high winds.As early as 1982, structural cracks prompted the building's owner to install a wind brace from ground level to the roof, measuring. When the building was renovated in the mid-1990s, Seinuk added two concrete-and-steel shear walls in a cruciform arrangement. Under the original renovation plans, diagonal steel trusses would have been installed in the mechanical core from the 1st to the 14th floors. The 15th and 16th stories, which were converted to mechanical stories, would have had double-height outrigger trusses connecting the core and perimeter, as well as a belt truss with inverted "V"s at the perimeter. On the upper stories, the number of columns in the periphery would have been doubled, reducing the space between columns to. This plan had been abandoned by 1995 in favor of a concrete wall through the building's center, rising to the 33rd floors.