NJ Chapter ACI Dinner Meeting - 99 Hudson Street Project
March 26, 2026 to March 26, 2026
Starting Time:
5:30 pm EST
End Time:
9:00 pm EST
Galloping Hill Golf Course
3 Golf Drive
Kenilworth , NJ United States
Description:
About the Presentation - 99 Hudson Jersey City, New Jersey
The tallest residential building in New Jersey, 99 Hudson rises 79 stories and 889 feet above its namesake river in Jersey City, offering stunning NYC views from its 781 condo units and extensive resort-style amenities. An Art Deco-inspired design by Perkins Eastman, this reinforced concrete structure is clad in a high-performance building envelope featuring floor-to-ceiling glass and limestone curtain wall.
DeSimone’s final structural design of 99 Hudson eliminated the need for a Tuned Mass Damper or Liquid Damper— making it one of the few structures of this height worldwide to achieve the required structural performance without the use of supplemental damping systems—effectively reducing overall project costs for the client.
Constructed on a tight site with waterfront soil composed of unstable fill, we designed a mat foundation with rock anchors beneath a 26-foot-deep elevator pit, closely spaced 4-foot-diameter drilled caissons socketed into bedrock, and H-piles supporting the garage columns. The team’s innovative use of preassembled, high-strength rebar cages for the shear walls pared three months from construction schedule.
To define and support the tower’s tapering form and multiple setbacks, we coordinated closely with the architect to resolve a number of key challenges, including load path discontinuities, ultimately designing an efficient vertical structural system featuring column transfers to redistribute loads and cantilevered elements to support spacious amenity spaces.
To address the slender tower’s vulnerability to the Jersey City waterfront’s high winds and potentially extreme weather conditions, we designed a robust lateral system consisting of reinforced concrete shear walls and a cast-in-place concrete frame with flat plate slabs and columns to effectively control wind-induced drift.
About The Speaker
Hongbo (Melissa) Wang, PhD, PE, leads multiple engineering teams at DeSimone, managing the structural design of complex residential towers and mixed-use, high-rise buildings. Her experience includes reinforced concrete structures, fast-track projects, and earthquake engineering.
Melissa’s special area of expertise focuses on seismic mitigation strategies and energy dissipation devices such as Tuned Mass Dampers (TMDs), viscous dampers, and base isolations. She often applies her research knowledge to developing Tuned Mass Dampers for wind engineering on DeSimone’s most challenging tall building projects.
A licensed engineer, her portfolio includes 99 Hudson in Jersey City, rising 79-stories and 900 feet to stand as the tallest residential building in New Jersey, Winthrop Center in Boston, a 53-story, LEED Platinum- and WELL Gold-certified, mixed-use tower featuring the largest office Passive House in the world, and 220 Central Park South, a luxury residential high-rise in Manhattan.
Melissa currently leads the structural design for 50 Hudson Street, the second phase of a two-tower Hudson River waterfront project in Jersey City, and 8 Carlisle Street, a 64-story mixed-use tower in Tribeca.
She earned her PhD and MS in Structural Engineering at the University of Buffalo, SUNY, and an BS in Civil Engineering from Heilongjiang University of Science and Technology, Heilongjiang, China.