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Negotiations Break Down Over Controversial HOK-Designed Palisades Office Building

Negotiations Break Down Over Controversial HOK-Designed Palisades Office Building

Conciliatory efforts have failed in the fight over LG Electronic’s plans to build 143-foot-high, HOK-designed office complex atop New Jersey’s Palisades across the Hudson River from Manhattan. The new headquarters, to be located in Englewood, has been the subject of much debate as several advocacy groups, individuals, and officials from the Metropolitan Museum say that the 8-story building would disrupt the idyllic view of the wooded Palisades from the Cloisters, the MET’s outpost in northern Manhattan.

Earlier this year, a coalition of groups and individuals—including Scenic Hudson, the New York-New Jersey Trail Conference, and the New Jersey State Federation of Women’s Clubs—filed a lawsuit against a variance and zoning in hopes of encouraging a redesign of the building. The two opposing parties agreed to meet with a court-supervised mediator this spring, but according to LG Electronics, these negotiations were unsuccessful.

LG claims that the parties had agreed “not to discuss the matter in the media while the process was underway, yet at several points during the sensitive negotiations, groups aligned with the intervenors undertook activities that broke the spirit of the court’s instructions and repeated many inaccurate statements about the project.”

John Taylor, Vice President of LG Electronics, said that “the players themselves might not have been directly involved,” but there was “a stepped up campaign by the opposition during very sensitive negotiations of the mediation and it was not helpful to the process.”

Now that the parties have failed to come to a resolution, the case will go through court proceedings.

“As we said we are confident that we’ll prevail in the courts,” said Taylor. “We hope the judge will make a decision later this summer.”

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