Goldman Sachs came to Community Board 1 last month bearing gifts: $4.5 million in contributions for community projects. In return, the board gave its advisory approval for zoning changes that will allow the company to build an 800-foot-tall headquarters at the corner of West and Vesey streets.

		"It makes us happy to have Goldman Sachs as a neighbor," Anthony Notaro, chair of the board's Battery Park City Committee, said of the contributions. Three and a half million dollars will help fund the construction of a Battery Park City library branch in a building planned for a site at Murray Street and River Terrace. The remaining $1 million will be used for a community center that is supposed to be included in a proposed residential development on a lot bordered by West, Warren and Chambers streets, known as Site 5C. "Lower Manhattan's first community center has come a major step closer," said Bob Townley, whose organization, Manhattan Youth, will run the center. "But we still have a long way to go." The total project, he said, will cost $4 million to $5 million. The community board was also shown what the Goldman Sachs building will look like, in a presentation by lead architect Henry Cobb of Pei Cobb Freed and Partners. The design, Cobb told the board, will follow the contours of the street grid formed by Broadway and West, Vesey and Murray streets. The west side of the building will be curved to "echo the curve of the Battery Park City buildings facing the water," he said. "It is shaped to express the quite radical difference in these two sides of the setting, in the city side on the east and the water side on the west." The lower floors of the two-million-square-foot building will occupy the full lot and house the firm's six 75,000-square-foot trading floors, each of which will accommodate up to 1,000 traders. One hundred forty feet up, the building will be set back 70 feet to create a more slender tower that Cobb said would reduce shadows on the ballfields across the street.
On the West Street side, there will be a wide walkway lined with planters and two rows of trees, as well as the existing bike path. On the building's west side, across from the movie theater, the plan is for a narrower sidewalk sheltered by a glass canopy, and street-level retail stores. The board told Goldman Sachs that those stores should be geared to local residents' needs. This will likely be the last non-residential development in Battery Park City. It had been considered the probable location for an underground garage for tourist buses coming to the memorial and the rebuilt World Trade Center site. That garage is now expected to be built under Liberty Street, where the soon-to-be-deconstructed Deutsche Bank building currently stands. While there was little opposition, the board expressed concerns about limousines flooding local streets. Timur Galen, a Goldman Sachs managing director, assured the board that a special parking area for limousines will be created on the West Street side of the site and that cars will be summoned as space there becomes available, thus preventing long lines of idling vehicles.