The Marq — 126 Lafayette Street, Manhattan

The Marq has topped out at 126 Lafayette Street in SoHo, Manhattan. The 25-story building rises 273 feet and holds 99 rental apartments across roughly 108,000 square feet.

Project Scope

Marvel designed the building for developer High Street Residential, the residential arm of Trammell Crow Company. The programme works out to about 1,090 gross square feet per apartment, which after cores, circulation and amenity space points to larger-than-average rental units rather than a studio-heavy stack.

Building to this height on a constrained Lower Manhattan lot puts the structure on the critical path. Limited laydown area, night deliveries and a hoisting plan that has to work around narrow streets and neighbouring loft buildings all compress what a suburban site would treat as routine. On lots like this the tower crane position is effectively fixed before design is finished, because everything else follows from where steel and concrete can land.

Why It Matters

Recent New York rental construction has concentrated in outer-borough towers and large assemblages. A 99-unit building on a small Lower Manhattan site sits at the other end of that market: no podium, effectively no parking, and economics that depend on rent per square foot rather than on volume.

Jobs this size also draw a different bid list. Concrete, curtain wall and vertical transportation packages on a 25-story infill building go to mid-market subcontractors who can work tight sites, not to the firms staffing supertall cores. That matters for pricing, because those subs are competing against a different set of opportunities than the ones chasing Hudson Yards-scale work.

Topping out puts the remaining schedule in facade and fit-out. For a rental building, that back half determines lease-up timing, and in a market where SoHo commands premium rents, each month of delay carries real revenue rather than just carrying cost.

Project Team & Details