NYC Construction & Development News

Foster + Partners reveals a redesigned PENN15 supertall opposite Penn Station

Vornado Realty Trust unveiled an updated design for PENN15, a proposed 1,050-foot, 52-storey office tower at 15 Penn Plaza — alternately addressed 401 Seventh Avenue — directly across from Penn Station. The Foster + Partners scheme is slated to yield about 2.1 million square feet of office space plus lower-level retail, with a tiered massing that sets back on all four sides to carve out ten tenant terraces. It is the centrepiece of Vornado's 7.4-million-square-foot Penn District plan. No construction timeline has been announced.

New York YIMBY ↗

46-storey tower keeps climbing at 30-25 Queens Boulevard in Long Island City

Construction continued upward on a 46-storey residential tower at 30-25 Queens Boulevard, one of the taller additions to the Long Island City skyline currently under way — a reminder that the borough with the second-highest filing volume citywide is still absorbing large-scale residential development well outside Manhattan.

New York YIMBY ↗

46-story tower at 30-25 Queens Boulevard climbs over Long Island City

Baron Property Group and LargaVista Companies are rising a 525-foot residential tower at the corner of Queens Plaza East and Queens Boulevard, financed with $388.5 million in construction backing from Starwood Capital Group, Gotham Organization, and Blackstone Real Estate Debt Strategies. The CetraRuddy-designed building will yield 561 units — 169 of them affordable — plus 21,000 square feet of ground-floor retail, directly west of the Sunnyside Yards rail tracks.

New York YIMBY ↗

Amtrak reopens the first East River Tunnel tube, 14 years after Sandy flooded it

Line 2 of the East River Tunnel returned to service after a year of reconstruction, the first completed phase of a $1.6 billion rehabilitation of the four-tube crossing that carries roughly 450 Amtrak, LIRR and NJ TRANSIT trains a day. Crews replaced more than 24,000 feet of rail, 8,000 tons of ballast, 8,000 wooden ties and 20,000 cubic yards of bench wall concrete. Phase two, on Line 1, starts in autumn 2026; Amtrak says the work remains on budget and on track to finish by the end of 2027.

Amtrak Media ↗

The Torch passes the halfway mark at 740 Eighth Avenue

Extell's 52-storey, 1,029-foot hotel tower on the Times Square/Hell's Kitchen border reached the halfway point of its ascent. Designed by ODA with SLCE as architect of record and Suffolk Construction as general contractor, the 885,902-square-foot building will hold an 825-room hotel topped by a public observation deck with a drop ride. ODA says the upper half of the 500-foot protrusion is meant to evoke the Statue of Liberty's torch.

New York YIMBY ↗

111 Wall Street's office-to-residential conversion moves forward with 1,568 planned units

InterVest Capital Partners and MetroLoft Development have begun converting the 30-story Financial District office tower — designed by Gensler — into roughly 1,568 rental units spanning over 899,000 square feet, with a quarter of the units reserved as affordable under the city's Affordable Housing Conversion Program. The project also adds ground-floor retail and more than 100,000 square feet of amenity space.

New York YIMBY ↗

520 Fifth Avenue's Kohn Pedersen Fox supertall nears completion opposite Bryant Park

Rabina's 1,002-foot, 88-story mixed-use supertall — general-contracted by Suffolk Construction — has nearly finished installing terracotta panels on its podium levels, following completion of upper-story work and removal of the construction hoist late last year. The tower will yield 100 condominiums, a Moss private members club, 25 floors of office space, and ground-floor retail.

New York YIMBY ↗

City moves to build nearly 1,000 homes on long-vacant Queens site

The Mamdani administration and HPD announced a plan to redevelop a long-vacant site in Queens into close to 1,000 new homes, the majority income-restricted, alongside new community space — part of the city’s push to use city-owned land for housing at scale.

NYC Dept. of Housing Preservation & Development ↗

Foundations begin at 625 Madison Avenue after developers swap a residential supertall for a shorter office tower

Foster + Partners, Related Companies, and Andrew Mathias have started foundation work on a 34-story, 684-foot, 858,500-square-foot carbon-neutral office tower between East 58th and 59th Streets — a scaled-down replacement for an earlier 1,264-foot residential supertall proposed for the same Plaza District site.

New York YIMBY ↗

2 World Trade Center construction officially restarts with ceremonial groundbreaking

Silverstein Properties broke ground on the long-stalled 55-story, 1,226-foot supertall in the Financial District, designed by Foster + Partners — resuming a project that had sat unbuilt above its podium base for over a decade.

New York YIMBY ↗

Structural columns buckle at 235 East 42nd Street, triggering multi-block evacuation

Construction workers converting the 37-story former Pfizer headquarters near Grand Central into apartments spotted buckling support columns on the 21st floor, prompting the evacuation of the tower and at least nine neighboring buildings. Emergency shoring stabilized the structure within a day, and the Department of Buildings later declared it safe.

CBS News New York ↗

70 Hudson Yards climbs above its podium as NYC's first zero-carbon skyscraper takes shape

Related Companies and Oxford Properties' 832-foot, 52-story office tower — designed by Roger Ferris + Partners and Gensler, and anchored by Deloitte — has formed most of its podium levels since a late-March update, with scaffolding now supporting newly poured floor plates as the reinforced-concrete structure rises toward its planned 1.4 million square feet of office space.

New York YIMBY ↗