Liberty Landing
Liberty Landing will transform an Art Deco building into much-needed housing in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood through adaptive reuse and a multi-story expansion. The design recovers the site’s history as a place of refuge and brings healthy, high-performance homes to New York’s most vulnerable neighbors.
Originally designed by Shreve, Lamb, and Harmon, the same architecture firm behind the Empire State Building, the structure first opened in 1931 as the Seaman’s House YMCA and served as a dorm-style residence for sailors and merchant mariners who were in New York on shore leave. It later functioned as a drug rehabilitation center and site of incarceration in the 1970s, and during these years, New York State converted the building into a women’s prison called the Bayview Correctional Facility. Following Hurricane Sandy, it was evacuated and has sat vacant since 2012. In both design and operations, Liberty Landing will bring back a sense of shelter and refuge to the site, redressing the building’s prison past.
Liberty Landing will preserve and restore the building’s historic street-facing façades and structure while entirely reimagining its interiors into a mix of studio, one-, and two-bedroom apartments. The new extension will be set back from the existing façade, creating a contextually resonant overbuild above the current structure. A planted terrace on the ninth floor will function as an accessible outdoor space for the building’s residents. The design will restore and repurpose a chapel on the second floor as a residential library, as well as relocate a series of nautical mosaic murals from the former indoor swimming pool to be featured in the new residential lobby.
Liberty Landing is developed by Camber Property Group and Osborne Association in partnership with Empire State Development. Osborne will operate the supportive housing, and Urban Pathways will operate the short-term transitional residence program.
