One of the visionaries behind the High Line wants to bring more upscale attractions to NYC, this time in the form of a wellness theme park.
Robert Hammond, the executive director and co-founder of High Line operating group Friends of the High Line, will lead the development of a $350 million New York location for European resort chain Therme, Crain’s reported.
Hammond is confident New Yorkers will respond well to Therme in the Big Apple based on what he learned establishing the High Line, noting that city dwellers want multifaceted green spaces, places that are “a park and a botanical garden and a gathering place and programming,” he told the publication.
“Therme combines nature, community, well-being and art together in a similar way” as the High Line, he added.
Therme first opened in 2009, and today has a location in Bucharest, Romania and three German locations — one in the Black Forest, one in Euskirchen and one in Sinsheim. It will combine the amenities of fitness centers, water parks, plants, communal bathing and art events, according to Crain’s.
The NYC development is still in its infancy but will need to somehow adapt the resort’s approximately 250,000-square-foot layout to a vertical format (current locations occupy as much as 20 acres, an impossibility in NYC).
While a location search has not yet begun, Therme North America executive chairman John Alschuler adds that developers hope to find a waterfront space with remnants of the borough’s industrial past. The vision is quite similar to the almost identically named but unrelated Italian resort chain Terme, which opened a venue on Governors Island this September.
The venue is set to open sometime after 2025.
The price of a day pass is set to start at approximately $40. The chain’s brand of affordable luxury has been a huge success at its existing locations, and 40 percent of Bucharest’s population has visited the location there, according to Alschuler.
“Therme Group has active projects in some of North America’s most iconic locations,” Therme’s website vaguely offers, where its “vision” aims “to create the world’s most advanced wellbeing resorts.”
