Located nearly 1,000ft (304.8 metres) above the ground, the Skyslide is a see-through enclosure 45ft long (13.7 metres) and made of 1.25in thick (3.18 centimetre) glass.Ī member of the media prepares to take a ride down a glass slide at the US Bank Tower building in Los Angeles (Richard Vogel/AP)ĭeveloper Silverstein Properties bought the US Bank Tower last year for 430 million US dollars (£303 million) and plans to spend 60 million dollars (£42 million) on upgrades to make it more appealing to businesses in creative fields, the Times reported. The slide and deck opened in 2016 with the idea of making the tower a tourist attraction. The new owner of the US Bank Tower will remove the Skyslide and Skyspace public observation deck, the Los Angeles Times reported. A renovation will do away with a slide that gave thrill-seekers a brief ride on the outside of a skyscraper in central Los Angeles. And for the squeamish out there, they say the slide can withstand an 8.0 earthquake and 110-mile-per-hour hurricane force winds. It's not hard to see they've definitely done something different with their ride over the rooftops of downtown Los Angeles. "You can only achieve something different if you dare to do something big," Rumantir said. "And it's just creating a lot of great opportunities to build really iconic buildings like Wilshire Grand."īack at the Skyslide, they admit they will soon lose the tallest-in-the-West designation, but they're letting that slide.
"I think the economy's very good for construction right now and you're seeing a lot of foreign investment coming into areas like Los Angeles and Seattle and northern California," said Brendan Murphy, vice president of Turner Construction. San Francisco is also in on the race to the top, building the 1,070-foot-tall Salesforce Tower to cap its new mass transit hub.įurther north, developers in Seattle have submitted plans for a structure called Four-C, estimated at 100 stories or 1,029 feet.
"Really what it gets us in the end is the opportunity for the public to come down here and say, 'I want to go to the top!'" Martin said. Just blocks away, the $1.2 billion Wilshire Grand Tower is less than a year away from completion.Ĭhris Martin's architecture firm designed the Wilshire Grand, which, when finished, will soar 1,100 feet in the sky, taking the title of tallest on the West Coast. "When we bought it, was tired, it was old, so we've done a lot to make sure the iconic is still iconic," said OUE America President and CEO Lucy Rumantir. The slide is just one part of an estimated $100 million top-to-bottom renovation of the building. This week, the chopper's overhead captured images of the final test runs before the big grand opening. Massive, mind-blowing marble machine has ski jump, roller coaster.Grab a virtual seat on Disney's new Tron Lightcycle roller coaster.Check out the world's highest glass bridge.The process started back in March when a Sikorsky helicopter - usually used for fighting wildfires - hoisted the 5-ton slide onto the building's rooftop. Now, the Skyslide is ready to open to the public this weekend. "Not everyone was on the same page when we came up with the idea for the slide.They said, 'Excuse me?'"īut the disbelief soon turned into reality. "This is an attraction to get people up to the top of this building?" Carter asked. "The slide is something fresh and never been done before," Gamboa said. John Gamboa is senior vice president of OUE America, the Singapore-based real estate firm that bought the tower three years ago for $367 million. It's just one example of a high-rise construction boom in the West, reports CBS News correspondent Carter Evans. And now, it's got a new feature attached to its side - a 45-foot-long slide nearly 1,000 feet above downtown Los Angeles.Īttached to the outside of the 70th floor of the skyscraper, the Skyslide drops you down to the 69th floor for 33 bucks. Since 1989, the 1,018-foot tall US Bank Tower has held the title of tallest skyscraper west of Chicago.
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