YIMBY featured a first glimpse of the Virgin Hotel back in August, and we previewed the base of the structure back in November. Now, we have more renderings of the 38-story and 460-room tower in its entirety (and at night!), thanks to designer VOA Associates.
The building’s most significant contribution will be at the street level, where 100,000 square feet of retail will activate a block of Midtown South that has long been forlorn.
Virgin Hotel, 1225 Broadway, image from VOA Architects
While Broadway has seen several new hotels open in recent years, the most prominent changes to NoMad will sprout to the east, at the intersection of 30th Street and Fifth Avenue, which will mark the new epicenter of Midtown South’s skyline. Proposals are in the works for three out of four corners, with each future tower likely set to stand over fifty stories tall.
The average height of luxury residential towers in the vicinity has seen a rapid increase, but hotels have remained fairly restrained in height, with the tallest generally topping out around the 400-foot mark. 1225 Broadway will stand 476 feet tall — hardly short, it will still be relatively visible from the surrounding neighborhood, which is dominated by pre-war mid-rises and the backdrop of the Empire State Building.
Around the corner on the same block, FXFowle is designing another 24-story tower at 846 Sixth Avenue, which Alchemy is developing. With demolition of the old structures on 1225 Broadway’s site wrapping up, that could leave the block bound by Broadway, Sixth, 29th, and 30th Streets in a perpetual state of construction until 2018 or so.
But once all the work is complete and this currently-underbuilt stretch of Midtown is brought to its potential, it should become quite the draw, especially given the scope of the Virgin Hotel’s retail component. The LAM Group is developing.
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