It’s the news skyline-watchers have been waiting for:
Vornado Realty Trust’s new East Side tower will soar higher than 75 stories, tall enough to perhaps trump The Donald’s new World Tower as the world’s tallest residential building.
At long last, Vornado has quietly filed plans with the city’s Buildings Department for the former Alexander’s site, The Post has learned.
The filing, awaited for years, reveals a tower with stores at the base, then four floors of offices, a 20-story hotel – and, above all those, 47 floors of luxury condos.
The plans indicate that Vornado chief Steven Roth finally means business about developing the block bounded by Third and Lexington avenues and 58th and 59th streets – long the city’s most perplexing empty lot, right across the street from Bloomingdale’s.
The plans have yet to be approved by the Buildings Department and might change.
But they offer the first substantive look at the much gossiped-over $400 million project designed by architect Cesar Pelli, who conceived the World Financial Center in Battery Park City.
The Vornado documents announce a structure with stores on the first and second floors; offices on floors three to six; “hotel suites,” some 20 per floor, on floors seven to 26; and “Class A” apartments on floors 28 to 75.
The plans call for up to seven apartments on lower floors, with as few as two or one on the upper ones, likely reflecting a narrowing of the tower, said buildings department spokesman Elise Fink.
Although the offices would fill only four floors, those can be very big at the base of a tower that would cover the whole block – adding up to a total of around 280,000 square feet.
Vornado has been in talks with financial-media giant Bloomberg for more than a year for the office space, but no deal has been announced. Representatives of the two companies could not be reached over the weekend.
So far, the project’s only signed tenant is Swedish sportswear giant H&M, whose first American store opened last year in a Vornado-owned building on Fifth Avenue.
Donald Trump’s new, 871-foot apartment tower on First Avenue at 47th Street, although advertised as “90 stories,” contains 72 floors with high ceilings. The Vornado plan calls for mechanical uses above the 75th floor that could, along with a crown or spire, make the building taller than Trump’s.
And Pelli is known for crowns and spires: he designed the world’s tallest building, Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Earlier reports have said that Pelli was working on a 900-foot tower at the Alexander’s site.
The Post reported in April that Vornado planned to go ahead with construction even without a signed Bloomberg deal, to beat a likely zoning change this year that would limit the tower to 490 feet in height.
“The plan is to get it in the ground,” a source said at the time, adding that Vornado had “lines of credit and cash reserves” to build without a construction loan.
Vornado’s hesitation in developing the site led to Roth being dubbed the “Hamlet of Lexington Avenue.”
Last fall, Vornado, spurred on by the zoning deadline, began pouring a foundation that’s nearly finished – but refused to say what would rise on top of it.