 Hi, my name is Todd Schleeman and I'm going to talk a little bit about the Standard Hotel, which is pretty much married to the High Line in the neighborhood. Just a little history. When we started this project, it was the very late 90s, CSX, the rail line still owned the High Line and they were in the process of giving it to the city. The presence of the High Line was still trying to become a little bit more than a twinkle in a couple of guys' eyes. We designed this with the thought we're going to just try to stay away from the High Line because we thought we should. You have to keep in mind that this building is as of right. The zoning envelope was a big box with a hole in it, which was the High Line passed through. It was under it and you could build over it. But we didn't need approvals, although we did go out into the community to try to say what we were doing. If we go back and take a look at what was going on there quite a while ago, it is true. It was a dangerous neighborhood because the trains were running down the street. That picture in the middle, the guy on the horse was out there to try to clear the path of the pedestrians who kept getting hit by these trains. As has been said, they elevated the tracks and it wove itself through the neighborhood. Still a big hub of commerce. Then in the 70s, actually, my office is three blocks away from the standard. We got there in 1985. These were our neighbors all the time. You come out at four o'clock in the morning as architects do. This is what we saw. It had some interesting transformations in terms of use. A lot of clubs, a lot of nightclubs, had found inexpensive places to conduct business. This is Florent. He left Soho and got to the meat market in 1985. I think he left in 2008 a legendary advocate for the meat market and trying to maintain its colorful culture. That restaurant is still there, R&L, which was always to me, Florent. Today, of course, it's transformed itself completely. It is very much the same kind of place in terms of the context and the sort of physical context. It's got a unique character, a very low-scale pedestrian environment, a lot of the canopies that stretched out over the sidewalks with a lot of rails where they would put meat on hooks and push them into the stores. When we got there, the photograph on the left is the building that was on our site. You could walk up a couple of flights of stairs and come out onto the high line, and it looked just like that. It was raw. The idea was that because our directive from Andre Belage was to make this a New York standard, we tried to think in terms of the character of the neighborhood and how we could instill that, and the high line was a big part of it. We thought, well, if it's a low-scale neighborhood, and I put this big building in there, it's not going to be very friendly. We lifted it up, and that collage on the right is a sort of diagram of the idea. We let the low-scale neighborhood run underneath the high line, and we thought we would put our building above that so that it could maintain the quality of the street. It sort of gets out of your peripheral vision when you walk through the neighborhood because it's up so high you see the way it attaches to the ground, but it's there. Anyway, so when we started construction, the Friends of the High Line had done a brilliant job of holding a competition, and Lisa and James, the product of their good work, is there now. But they began construction when we were coming out of the ground, so we had to build a platform underneath our construction to protect their construction workers who were working underneath. It was a beautiful ballet. In any case, we also had to span the high line, and we couldn't use the high line to support the structure. So we had to cantilever the steel trusses from either side, like they build a bridge, and then we built on top of it. So here it is today. One of the unusual features about this, Andre was interested in, he saw a hotel as a very public place. He kept referring to hotels as kind of the living room of the city. So you'll notice the photograph in the middle, there's this big open plaza, which as a real estate developer is crazy actually. I mean, it's 100% corner right there, retail. Why isn't that built out? And he said, no, no, no, let's just bring people in off the street. This is the living room for this community. And now, in the wintertime, it's an ice skating rink, and I think now there's a pizza hut there, but there's always art, and it's always changing. And it basically was a way to draw in the community to make this the New York standard. Actually, when it was first being constructed, you know, curb that blog, the real estate blog, there's so many comments where, wow, yeah. Gee, I thought they were tearing that down. Are they building it? It looks like a Soviet-era housing block. Well, and then all of a sudden it became the sex hotel, so it was really cool. Anyway, but the idea was to make it feel like New York, you know, kind of a tough, gritty envelope, this beautiful, smooth, transparent skin, very much like New York, a little tough and a little elegant. And in fact, it continues to be quite an event. It's funny too, because the fact that the high line and the standard sort of began together, you know, it's like one without the other wouldn't, just wouldn't be, I guess. So I'm going to leave you with this because it's kind of fun.