The pile driving work continues at the Marriott project site downtown. Quoting an anonymous source familiar with the project, about 10 more caissons are left to be piled, and grade beams are being built. Per wikipedia, a grade beam is a reinforced concrete beam that transmits the load from a bearing wall into spaced foundations such as pile caps or caissons; a grade beam spans the the space between the caissons, distributing the weight among the caissons and ensuring the hotel’s structural stability. In image three, you can see the pile driver at work drilling a caisson, using a rotary bore so that it can more easily penetrate deep into the soil. The expectation is that the project will begin to rise starting in just a couple weeks, and builds its way skyward over the course of the summer and fall.
On a side note, check out that new window inserted into the Rothschild Building. Much better than the blank brick wall that was previously there.
The $32 million, 10-story, 159-room hotel is slated for an opening in Q3 of 2016 (July-September). The hotel will include a fitness center, a restaurant with indoor and outdoor seating, and 3,000 sq ft of meeting space.
The hotel has been designed by Atlanta-based Cooper Carry Architecture and development is a joint venture of Urgo Hotels of Bethesda and Ensemble Hotel Partners, a division of Ensemble Investments. Urgo’s portfolio includes at least 32 other hotels totaling 4,500 hotel rooms. Interior design will be handled by Design Continuum, W.H. Lane of Binghamton is the general contractor, and Rimland Development contributed the land to the joint venture and is a partner. Long Island-based Rimland was the original firm that pitched the project in 2008 as the “Hotel Ithaca”, before the old Holiday Inn downtown went independent.
Ithacating in Cornell Heights 
[…] Deep, pile foundations, like the ones used at the Lofts @ Six Mile Creek (micro-piles), Marriott (caissons) or some of the big box stores, are a safe option because they go down to more solid soil layers, […]