Project Overview

Located on the corner of Seventh Avenue and West 47th Street in Times Square, the historic Palace Theater was originally built in 1939. The theater has gone through several changes over the years, from vaudeville, to movie palace, and then to the only Broadway theater physically located on Broadway.

The growth of Times Square has led to a lack of prime street-level real estate. In 2019, TSX began a major renovation project to keep the Palace in existence and expand the use of the building. The project would lift the historic Palace Theater 30’ above street level, creating an open concept retail space below. Then a 47-level hotel would be constructed above.

STRUCTURAL TECHNOLOGIES was involved early in the investigate-design-build stage. The team worked with the engineering team to select a design concept that would achieve their goal of supporting the theater and added floors above with three concrete girders. The concrete girders are 40’ deep, 5’ wide, and 140’ long. Due to the size of the girders, post-tensioning reinforcement would be required. There was a substantial amount of steel and openings throughout each girder making the placement of the PT tendons difficult. A 43-strand system was used. Two 1,700-ton stressing jacks, larger than any commonly used post-tensioning equipment in the country, were refurbished and used for the installation.

During the design development phase, the team discovered that there was too much vertical steel around the anchorages to realistically place the local zone reinforcement required by the tendon layout design. STRUCTURAL TECHNOLOGIES worked with Kline Engineering to design steel (double anchor) bearing plates (40”x26”x5”), eliminating the need for any local zone reinforcement behind the anchorages.

The girders required four separate vertical pours due to the depth. STRUCTURAL TECHNOLOGIES provided the necessary coordination onsite to place these ducts for each pour. A STRUCTURAL TECHNOLOGIES trained foreman led installation of 210,000 LF of post-tensioning cable. Stressed and fully grouted a total of 24 – 43-cable tendons and 12 – 31-strand tendons were used.