Jersey City Urby, 200 Greene Street: Review and Ratings

Review of 200 Greene Street by Carter Horsley

This very dramatic, 69-story apartment tower at 200 Greene Street between Morgan and Bay streets is the first of three planned for this site in Jersey City near the Hudson River across from Lower Manhattan.

It is also known as Harborside, 34 Exchange Place.

All towers will be similar with shifted floor plates created a “jenga” style silhouette.  This 713-foot-high tower, which is known as Jersey City Urby, will contain 762 rental apartments and the complex will have a total of 2,358 units when completed.  This tower is scheduled for completion in 2017.

Ironstate Development, the Roseland Residential Trust and Mack-Cali Realty Corporation are the developers.

It is the second Urby building as Staten Island Urby opened in 2016

Concrete and HLW are the architects.

Bottom Line

This “drunken” tower totters over its conventional neighbors in Jersey City and is the second tallest in New Jersey and the first of three similar towers on its site.  The trio are the Saturday Night Fevers of the region and promise to be even more amazin’ than its taller World Trade Center counterparts across the river.  The shifted stacks of the towers will vary in height and position, but will share façade treatments. Get on down!

Description

Though not as wildly shifted and luxurious and as high in feet but not floors as 56 Leonard Street, designed by Herzog & de Meuron in Lower Manhattan, this is a sedate version of the new “crazy and wild” architectural aesthetic as exercised by SHoP Architects at the Domino Sugar waterfront site in Brooklyn or its “joined at the hip” American Copper Buildings near the Manhattan entrance to the Queens-Midtown Tunnel.

This tower and 56 Leonard are variations on the “jenga” concept of shifted blocks and that word is derived from a Swahili word for “build” and is the name of a game created by Leslie Scott with children’s wood building blocks acquired from a sawmill in Takoradi, Ghana and subsequently marketed by Parker Brothers.

The slight shifting here is not as pronounced as some cantilevered projects because the shifting alternates and reverses resulting in a relatively vertical structure with some bumps. 

While eye-catching, the push/pull visual play of the tower is not terrifying, but terrific.

Amenities

The building will have an illuminated crown with a pool, communal kitchens and BBQ and has a fitness center, a café, a garage, a garden, a heated outdoor pool and adjacent deck for outdoor games, and ground level retail including a coffee shop.

Apartments

Apartments have washers and dryers.

Apartment L1+ is a two-bedroom unit with a long entry foyer that leads to an open kitchen with an island and a 23-foot-long living/dining room with a large circular column near its middle.  The bedrooms have sliding doors.

Apartment L1 is a two-bedroom unit with a long entry foyer that leads to an open kitchen and a 16-foot-long living/dining room with a large circular column very near the center of one of the window walls.

Apartment M3 is a one-bedroom unit with an entry foyer that leads past a sliding door to the 10-foot-wide bedroom that also has sliding doors to the 17-foot-long, living/dining room.  A long hall has an open kitchen.

Apartment M4 is a one-bedroom unit with an entry foyer that leads past an open kitchen to the 18-foot-long living/dining room and a 9-foot-wide bedroom with two sliding doors.

Apartment M2 is a one-bedroom unit with an entry foyer that opens onto an open kitchen and leads to a 14-foot-long living/dining room.