Brookfield MXD Will Build West Side ‘Bridge'

NEW YORK CITY-“Today, we are literally building a bridge on the West Side,” John Zuccotti, presiding over Brookfield Office Properties‘ kick-off ceremony for construction of its Manhattan West mixed-use project, said Tuesday. The bridge to which Zuccotti, BOP’s co-chairman, referred was both literal and figurative. The platform that will serve as the five-million-square-foot project’s common area will be comprised of 16 bridge segments over the Metropolitan Transportation Authority‘s West Side Rail Yards, and Manhattan West itself will serve as a linkage of Related Cos.‘ Hudson Yards to the west and the forthcoming Moynihan Station redevelopment to the east.

However, as Zuccotti and Mayor Michael Bloomberg made clear, it’s also the latest in a series of West Side developments spanning from Battery Park City in Lower Manhattan to Riverside Park on the Upper West Side. “It’s amazing how much development there has been on the West Side, an area that nobody thought had the potential to be a hot neighborhood,” Bloomberg said at Tuesday’s ceremony. He cited $6 billion worth of completed projects in the Hudson Yards area alone since the 2005 rezoning that made both the Related and BOP ventures feasible.