The medical community of Cleveland is, like, so pissed at us right now, and it all has to do with the World Product Centre. The World Product whatnow? OK, quick refresher: The West Side Rail Yards will allegedly one day become the commercial/residential/parkland paradise known as Hudson Yards. Banking on the revival of the Far West Side, developers bought up all the land around Hudson Yards to construct their own big boys. The Copacabana nightclub at 555 West 33rd Street (at Eleventh Avenue), near the Yards and a short skip from the Javits Center, was one of the plots of land gobbled up—by Gary Barnett's Extell. The megadeveloper has plans to build a 60-story office tower called the World Product Centre on the site, and now that those plans are out in the open, that's what has Cleveland in a tizzy.
The World Product Centre, designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox with interiors by FXFOWLE, will be completely dedicated to the medical industry. It will have offices, exhibit space, an auditorium for presentations and "incubator" support for buyers and sellers of medical-industry products. According to the new World Product Centre website, the tower will open in the winter of 2013 (the design is currently being debated over at Wired New York). Check out the 7-train entrance in the rendering above. Snazz.
Now, for years Cleveland has been planning its own "Medical Mart" backed by the Cleveland Clinic and local electeds. But as the Cleveland Plain Dealer reports, the plan has had some hangups for a while, and apparently the medical industry can't support two of these things. So which will get built first? The Plain Dealer's Metro blog had this to say about the WPC:
But it has one huge hitch that gives its stuck-in-muck Cleveland competition an edge: financing. The proposal here has public funding accumulating at a rate of $115,000 per day, $42 million a year for 20 years that also would produce a convention center. World Product Centre is searching for private financing amid economic turmoil of historic proportions.
And with the slow pace of action at the Hudson Yards—there may actually be a deal one of these days—we're not quite sure lenders are rushing to pay for this tower. Cool renderings, though.
· World Product Centre [worldproductcentre.com]
· New York prepares its own Medical Mart [Metro]
· The GiraSole Coming to Hudson Yards? [Curbed]For more stories from Curbed, go to curbed.com.
