Reno project is over-budget 'embarrassment'

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This construction project is demanding a very late checkout. 

The Waldorf Astoria Hotel’s slow, enormously expensive condo conversion has overstayed its welcome, said one peeved insider who had no reservations in sharing his baggage about the project. 

“It’s so over budget that it’s become an embarrassment,” an NYC 30-something member of the storied Midtown property’s renovation team told The Post this month. 

The art deco lodging’s transformation into a combination hotel and residence, with 375 condominiums and 375 revamped suites, was once supposed to be completed by 2019. Years since that deadline came and passed, the insider said the 47-story structure is a far-from-finished “concrete slab” in need of at least another two-plus to three years’ worth of work. For construction to be capped any earlier than 2025, he said, would be something of a miracle. 

The Park Avenue project’s financials have swelled so much higher than initially anticipated that, earlier this month, the US chief executive of the hotel’s owner, the Chinese Anbang Insurance Group Co., abruptly quit. Costs are anticipated to run north of $2 billion, according to previous reports — and combined with Anbang’s record $1.95 billion purchase of the property in 2015, that may edge costs into the $4 billion range.

As for how badly out of control he estimates the budget has gotten and will continue to climb, the insider stammered “Oh God, oh God” and was unable to come up with a number. The company he works for doesn’t usually concern itself with budget, he added, but in the case of this project, it’s gotten so out of hand that even his insulated team is overtly aware of the issue.

“I wasn’t surprised,” the insider said of the real estate honcho’s sudden exit, noting that as a “medium-size fish,” he’d never interacted with the individual. “It’s two years since construction started and the design still isn’t final.” 

Since opening in 1931, the Waldorf has hosted every US president from Herbert Hoover to Barack Obama. In 2017, the hotel closed and work began to transfigure much of the 1.65-million-square-foot landmark into the Towers of the Waldorf Astoria. The luxury residence within the hotel is set to have 50,000 square feet of private, resident-only amenities, including an 82-foot-long pool, a cinema, a billiards room, a gaming room, a fitness center and a bar. Residents will also have access to the additional 100,000 square feet of amenities hotel tenants have access to. 

All this remains in limbo. Much of the blame for the delay, according to the source, can be placed on the architect: Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, a firm whose work includes One World Trade Center and is working on the Penn Station expansion. 

“For a normal project, you have one point of contact, and in this instance, the architect has several. It gets confusing,” he said. The architectural team also has a “painful” habit of “sneaking in design changes” without telling anybody. “Typically, we’d get a description of changes, but this architect is like, ‘We’re not gonna tell them we moved the wall 3 feet’ and suddenly there’s a beam that nobody knew about in the way of a water main,” he explained, adding that in his nearly 10 years of experience in the industry, this project has stood out for its chronic hold-ups, communication failures and being “badly managed.”  

“The sheer number of design visions we get have caused two-plus years of delay,” he detailed, noting the hotel’s mechanicals, electric, plumbing and fire systems have all had to be redesigned — at great time and financial expense — as a result of unnecessary, architect-demanded revisions. 

He and his team “get paid for it regardless,” but still he finds the constant revising-related delays “silly and wasteful.”

Recently, the situation has begun to calm down somewhat, but even for such a large project, the Waldorf Astoria renovation has proved uniquely difficult, and he’s excited for it to be over. 

“It’ll be cool when I don’t have to think about it anymore,” he said, adding “and I’ll be able to walk by the Waldorf and say ‘I designed that.’ That’s the best thing about being a designer in NYC.” 

Neither Anbang nor Skidmore, Owings & Merrill returned The Post’s request for comment.

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