JPMorgan’s new Midtown East HQ approved by City Council

The City Council approved JP Morgan Chase’s plans Wednesday for a soaring 70-story tower to replace the Union Carbide Building in East Midtown.

The project is set to raze and replace the existing 52-story building at 270 Park Avenue with a Foster + Partners-designed skyscraper, and is among the first properties to take advantage of the the business district’s 2017 rezoning. As part of the deal, $42 million in investment towards pedestrian and transit upgrades will go toward improving a subway entrance, repairs to Metro North, widening streets, and creating a new entrance on west 48th Street. The plan will work to “revitalize East Midtown in one big swoop,” said one local lawmaker.

“This is a really big deal because it’s the first project that brings life to this East Midtown rezoning, which was about making East Midtown continue to be a transit rich business district,” said Council member Keith Powers at a press conference before the vote. “So this is the first project out of the gate.”

The new tower will consolidate all of JPMorgan Chase’s employees in one building and will come with a 10,000 square-foot privately owned public space after Community Board 5 and elected officials pushed for more square footage.

In 2018, JPMorgan Chase filed a zoning text amendment seeking to shrink the size of that space at the base of the building from 10,000 to 7,000 square feet. The bank had argued that the building’s configuration, which sits above a train shed for Grand Central Terminal, would make a larger open space unfeasible. But critics panned the plan and urged Chase to make the plans comply with the requirements outlined in the East Midtown rezoning.

In February, Chase said it had worked with its architecture team to reconfigure the design to fall in line with the rezoning’s requirements, and was also able to make it open-air instead of enclosed. Demolition plans were filed in January for 270 Park Avenue, which architecture buffs and preservationists have argued against razing. Shovels are expected to hit the ground later this year.

“We have many more projects in East Midtown coming through, but this is really the one that sets a precedent to go beyond what’s required to do much more around transit and pedestrian improvements,” Powers said.