Construction Begins on $330M NYPA Headquarters

WHITE PLAINS—Construction on the first new commercial office building in Downtown White Plains in nearly four decades—the new headquarters for the New York Power Authority—has begun after a Project Labor Agreement was reached between the building trades and the general contractor for the project.

Officials with the Westchester Putnam Building and Construction Trades Council and Louis Cappelli, a principal of general contractor LRC Construction of White Plains, confirmed that a PLA had been signed last week on the new NYPA headquarters to be built at the Hamilton Green site being developed by Cappelli Enterprises and RXR. The New York Power Authority will relocate from its current headquarters property at 123 Main St. to its new 16-story headquarters at the former site of the White Plains Mall in mid-2027.

The PLA comes after months of negotiations with the building trades and after the New York Power Authority acquired the pad site from Cappelli’s LRC Construction and RXR for $30 million in February. Cappelli told Real Estate In-Depth that the New York Power Authority project will likely total $330 million to complete.

Cappelli said that LRC/RXR worked collaboratively on the project design drawings, which are complete. Gensler is the architectural firm on the project and ME is the mechanical engineering firm working on the headquarters project. The building will be approximately 260 feet in height and will total approximately 310,000 square feet.

The NYPA building and a small residential building totaling 127 units owned by Cappelli/RXR will be constructed simultaneously. Completion of both the NYPA headquarters and the residential building is slated for June 2027 and will complete the Hamilton Green development. Cappelli estimated that with the NYPA project, the total Hamilton Green development cost will be approximately $900 million. The project will feature about 600 housing units and approximately 40,000 square feet of retail space.

“It (the PLA) was a good opportunity for us to re-engage with the building trades of Westchester. The last PLA we signed was in 2009 for the Ritz Carlton (in White Plains),” Cappelli said. He claimed that although his firm had not agreed to a PLA in more than 15 years, his projects over that span “have predominantly been 50% union trades.”

Construction News reports that Jeff Loughlin, president of the Building & Construction Trades of Westchester & Putnam Counties, Inc., said, “The PLA now in place is a tremendous vote of confidence in union labor by everyone associated with this project—including NYPA, the Cappelli organization and the many officials in the City of White Plains. They recognize the value and the quality construction that union companies bring to a landmark project like the new NYPA headquarters.”

Cappelli added that his firm has also begun discussions on the massive redevelopment of the Galleria Mall site in Downtown White Plains, which is currently in the approval process. The estimated $2.5-billion project is being proposed by Cappelli Enterprises, Pacific Retail Capital Partners and Aareal Bank. He said that the unions and the development team “are committed to making it (the PLA) happen.”

In addition to the Hamilton Green and Galleria sites, another potential development project could emerge at the current NYPA headquarters site at 123 Main St. across the street from the Hamilton Green property. NYPA has determined that the building is outdated, but has not decided yet what it plans to do with the property now that it has moved forward with its new corporate headquarters.

The new NYPA headquarters is likely the first, Class A office building constructed in Downtown White Plains since 10 Bank St. opened in 1989.