Goldman Sachs Tower

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Goldman Sachs Tower as seen from the Circle Line ferry.

Goldman Sachs Tower at dusk, with the Moon hanging overhead.

Goldman Sachs Tower (30 Hudson Street), in Jersey City, New Jersey, is the tallest building in New Jersey, and the tallest in the United States of any building not in its metropolitan area's largest city[1]. It was designed by Cesar Pelli, best known as the architect of the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur and the Key Tower in Cleveland. The World Financial Center located just across the Hudson river, was also designed by him. The tower, except for the black roof, resembles 1IFC, and to a lesser extent, 2IFC, two buildings of the IFC complex he designed in Hong Kong.

Completed in 2004, the tower is easily visible from the Manhattan and Staten Island boroughs of New York City. On a clear day, the building is visible from as far away as Sandy Hook. It has 42 floors and is 238 m (781 feet) tall.

The Goldman Sachs Tower is in Jersey City's Exchange Place area close to a PATH station (about 200 yards north) and sits immediately on the waterfront overlooking the Hudson River and Lower Manhattan.

The building is a Goldman Sachs office tower, and is one of the fifty tallest buildings in the United States. It houses offices, a cafeteria, health unit and full service fitness facility including a physical therapy clinic. The property is managed by Hines Property Management. A bank is also on the ground level. The building is easily accessible by the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail at the Essex Street and Exchange Place stops.

Once a derelict and mostly industrial part of Jersey City, the Exchange Place area forms part of New Jersey's Gold Coast, a revitalized strip of land along the formerly industrial west bank of the Hudson. Economic development, in recent years, has spurred large-scale residential, commercial, and office development along the waterfront.

Originally the tower was meant to be the centerpiece of an entire Goldman Sachs campus at Exchange Place, which was to include a training center, a university, and a large hotel complex. After many of the company's Manhattan-based equity traders refused to move their offices to New Jersey, the building's top 13 floors have remained vacant with no current plans for their occupation.

Although the location was largely rejected by the company's financial executives, 4,000 Goldman Sachs employees made the move to the building, including much of the company's real estate, technology, operations, and administrative departments. As of 2006, the company has begun construction of another, slightly taller, tower to house the bulk of their sales and trading departments just north of the World Financial Center, directly across the water from 30 Hudson in Lower Manhattan. The company plans to shuttle workers between the two buildings on private ferries when necessary, calling this their "Venice strategy".

The building is Certified under LEED-NC Version 2.0 of the U.S. Green Building Council.