Hudson Park is a transit-oriented multifamily rental development—adjacent to the Yonkers Metro-North train station in the heart of Yonkers, New York—consisting of four separate buildings built in three phases over a 17-year period. The project is located on a former industrial site of eight acres located between the train station and the Hudson River. The first phase includes 266 apartments in two separate nine-story buildings, the second phase includes 294 apartments in one building with two towers of 12 and 14 stories, and the third phase includes 213 apartments in one 24-story tower. The project also encompasses 18,606 square feet of retail and office space. Hudson Park was undertaken by Collins Enterprises and involved a public/private partnership and cooperation among various groups, including the city of Yonkers, the Yonkers Industrial Development Agency, the state of New York, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, and numerous private capital sources. Hudson Park will consist of 773 rental apartments when completed in 2018.
Park 8Ninety is a 127-acre business park in Missouri City, Texas, just southwest of Houston. Ultimately, 1.8 million square feet of warehouse and flex space is planned, beginning with a speculatively built first phase of 439,704 square feet in three buildings with high ceilings and wide column spacing. Existing tenants include distributors and manufacturers, many serving nearby hospitals or the building trades..
The infill site has excellent highway access but had been overlooked because it was entangled by multiple utility easements that made drainage difficult. The municipality of Missouri City worked with developer Trammell Crow to implement an off-site stormwater detention strategy that raised the site’s elevation and created a new recreational lake at an adjacent city park.
Wiley H. Bates High School in Annapolis, Maryland, a cultural landmark that sat vacant for more than 20 years, has been reinvented as Wiley H. Bates Heritage Park, a development incorporating housing for low-income seniors, community services for seniors and young people, and a museum of the school and its community. Bates School, which opened in 1933, was the city’s first freestanding secondary school for African Americans and was named after a local man who was born into slavery and later became one of Annapolis’s wealthiest citizens.
Developed by Bouygues Immobilier and recognized as one of the largest sustainable developments in the Paris region, the building occupies a 1.5-hectare (3.7-acre) landscaped site and has been awarded the High Environmental Quality (HEQ) label—the newest official certification from the Centre Scientifique et Technique du Bâtiment, a French body focused on improving construction through science and technology. The project was 95 percent leased before completion; 39,500 square meters (425,174 sq. ft.) of the office space is occupied by the European and French headquarters of Microsoft, and 5,500 square meters (59,202 sq. ft.) by Lundbeck pharmaceutical laboratories.
Built on the site previously occupied by the Rand Corporation’s headquarters and more recently a surface parking lot, Tongva Park and Ken Genser Square—once collectively known as the Civic Center Parks—encompass 7.4 acres (3 ha) in the heart of Santa Monica. The completion of these parks in 2014 represents the first step toward completing a plan for the 67-acre (27 ha) civic center area, which re-envisioned the area as a vibrant neighborhood with improved linkages to the Santa Monica Pier, Palisades Park, downtown Santa Monica, and Santa Monica State Beach.
The Sabine-to-Bagby Promenade, one of the largest investments in public parkland ever carried out by the city of Houston, has resurrected a neglected, trash-strewn section of the historic Buffalo Bayou waterfront as a signature gateway to downtown. The project, which created more than 3,000 linear feet (914 m) of parks along the waterway, adds 23 acres (9 ha) of parkland to downtown Houston. It is helping the city to at least begin to realize the civic and recreational potential of the bayou, the waterway that gave birth to Houston in 1836.
The Perspective Charter School’s new building, which was completed in August 2004, reflects its founders’ principles for an ideal school environment. Perspectives was one of the first public charter schools in Chicago; the success of its first campus, which is in South Chicago, spawned the formation of this campus in the South Loop, a neighborhood that is characterized by light-industrial shed buildings and renovated loft residences. The new school building occupies the acute end of a 1.25-acre (0.51 ha) triangular site that had been a parking lot. The 30,000-square-foot (2,787 m2) facility serves 350 students in grades six through 12—86 percent of whom come from economically disadvantaged households. Classrooms are oriented around a two-story multipurpose room that is decorated with multilingual graphics taken from the school’s mission statement. This room serves as the structure’s “living room” and is used as a cafeteria, main assembly hall, and central social space.
After centuries of use as a military base, a 13-hectare (32 acre) land parcel in the historic center of Breda has been reborn as a public domain. Based on a plan created by architect Rem Koolhas (Office for Metropolitan Architecture), Chassé Park, a multiuse urban infill community has sprouted up where barracks once housed soldiers. It comprises 700 housing units, including 100 units of public housing; 30,000 square meters (322,917 sf) of office space; 2,000 square meters (21,528 sf) of retail space; 1,500 underground parking spaces; and eight hectares (20 ac) of public parkland.
The Anaheim Redevelopment Agency had two primary goals in mind when it sought a public/private partnership to convert a 5.3-acre (2.1 ha) former truck transfer facility along Anaheim Boulevard to housing: 1) the revitalization of vacant, once industrial properties in downtown, and 2) the development of affordable housing. The agency used a competitive request for proposals (RFP) process to select John Laing Homes (JLH) as its partner to develop the site. The homebuilder was chosen in large part because of its creative and innovative designs and its demonstrated ability to work effectively with community leaders. The completed project includes 20 single-family detached homes and homes and 36 townhomes.
Completed in January 2007, the Columbia Residences is a 225-unit, 395,000-square-foot (36,697 m2) luxury condominium building that includes both adaptive use of the historic hospital structure and new construction. The development team, which also included architect Shalom Baranes Associates, worked diligently with neighborhood associations and city historic review to arrive at a thoughtful redevelopment solution. This involved restoring the original hospital structure, demolishing the non-historic remainder of the building, adding two L-shaped wings along the building’s east and west sides, and adding three levels of below-grade parking. The new wings, each of which contains at its base approximately 11,000 square feet (1,022 m2) of street-level retail space, were designed to protect the sight lines of the original building and to complement its unusual Mediterranean architecture.