I'm hoping that because the ground floors for the 3rd Ice District Tower is not occupied yet, they're still anticipating building something.
That building (whether due to neglect, poor maintenance, poor original construction etc) had a litany of issues from hazardous building materials to water infiltration and everything in between.
Given 555 and the condition the building had fallen into a mere 15 years after opening, I'd be pleasantly surprised if anything but the cheapest path was taken underneath any kind of aesthetic details.
Yes, I think buildings from that era tended to have a lot of hazardous materials which made renovation more difficult and expensive.
They could have simply enclosed it and created a rear-round winter garden on the south edge and a glazed vertical shaft to provide natural cooling as was done with Manitoba Hydro’s building in Winnipeg, the British Museum, 20 Hudson Yard, the Marriott on Times Square etc.etc.
I'd kind of wondered how long it would last. I went there a few times to buy beans because they'd been my main supplier for years and I wanted to support them after the market closed in the old GWG building, but it's pretty desolate up there during the coffee times of day. You'd either have to be staying at the hotel to chance upon them when they're open, or you'd have to be someone familiar with them and deliberately go looking for them. They can't even rely upon the movie theatre to bring people in because they only run matinees on weekends, and On the Edge is closed weekends.
With them, at least the hotel seems to bill them as their restaurant, and they have some kind of overlap with movie theatre operations. But it does seem like a worse location than just being on 103 street or 104 street.
Sad but not surprising, that was a terrible location as few people knew they even existed up there.