The operators of the Hudson River Navigation Company wished to build a ferry terminal at 57th St to develop the commutation, business and tourist industries of the Hudson River, using new high-speed water transportation technologies. The overall goal was to develop contemporary river transportation to a level approaching what it had been in earlier periods of New York’s history, when it was a prime means of transportation and the principal connection between New York City and upstate New York.

The project is located on the full block between 11th Avenue and the Westside Highway at 57th Street and extends to the adjacent ferry slips. Directly to the North is the Power House of the Interborough Rapid Transit Company, designed in 1903 by McKim, Mead and White to provide power to the first subway lines. The Trump Place development, a thirteen block long residential project on the site of abandoned rail yards that were approved for construction in 1995, stretches northwards beyond the power generating facility to 72nd Street.

The Mid-Town Ferry Terminal and Tower consists of three elements: a ferry terminal and four slips, a 54-story hotel and commercial office tower connected to the terminal by two bridges spanning the Westside Highway, and a park on the Eastern part of the site.

The Ferry Terminal is a four-story building with a single 360 foot long vaulted roof and consists of a Waiting Hall, retail space, and the administrative offices of the ferry lines. The space can also be used for conventions.

The Tower is an approximately triangular building in plan containing hotel, office and retail space. Its main façades are tapered at 2 ½ degrees; this entasis is resolved as the lines forming the edges of the glass and metal façade converge at a height of 1 mile above grade. The form is also slightly canted, resolving itself in counter-angles at top and bottom. Lastly, the façade surface is designed so that from either the north or south, especially as approached along the river, or on the Westside highway, the skyline of Manhattan is reflected in the convex form of the curtain wall.

The Park is designed to allow a clear view of the splendid industrial Classicism which articulates the flank of McKim, Mead and White’s building, while at the same time permitting the prow-shaped form of the new tower room to develop its distinctive profile.

The intent of these forms is to develop an iconography of the edge condition, a subject of particular interest in Manhattan, since it as an island city. In the project there is a visual tension between the ferry terminal, which tugs the tower towards the water, stretching the bridges like taut cables, and the tower, which ploughs into the land like an ice-breaker in the opposite direction. The edge of the city passes between these two opposing forms, just as in the condition of belonging there must be a reconciliation between the individual and the whole, between the island and its surrounding waters.