Astoria Palace Astoria Palace has 7 floors above ground and it includes mostly administrative (office) space, its main tenant being Ernst & Young. It includes a public pedestrian path on the ground floor connecting Palisády Street with Panenská Street with Staromestská Street and it also contains a heavily used public transport bus stop and entrance into the pedestrian underpass below Hodžovo Square. The structure was planned since 1993 and its construction was delayed several times. The building had to include the entrance to the underpass under the square and coincide with its renovation. The building's investor was I.P.R. Slovakia, a Slovak-Cypriot company. Construction started in October 2004, when traffic restrictions took place in the form of blocking the rightmost driving lane at the square (coming from Štefánikova Street), blocking the major busy street for an astonishing 3 years, until August 2007. The building was completed in 2008, but without finishing the pedestrian underpass. Reconstruction of the underpass was carried out by the Astoria Passage company, a sister company of the Astoria Palace building investor, to which the underpass was rented out for 10 years. After the long delayed opening of the underpass, it was found out that the escalator was making loud noises. Moreover, the underpass remained much the same as when built under socialist realism, with one exception being a significant reduction of space to make more room for small shops. This also meant that there was still no escalator leading to the Presidential Palace and the whole underpass remained off limits to the handicapped, although special platform elevators for the handicapped have later been installed in November 2009. In place of the building, there was formerly the square itself, meaning mostly empty space consisting of a busy bus stop. In the upper part of the space, there was the entrance to the pedestrian underpass and air conditioning vents blowing hot air in the winter, allowing for people to get some warmth when waiting for their evening or night buses. The area also contained benches to sit while waiting for the bus and constituted a logical ending of the square from its side. Because of this structure, the bus stop shrunk several times and it is now prone to draft, as cold wind sometimes blows through the narrow passages of the Astoria Palace ground floor. Tatracentrum Project by Ľubomír Závodný, Matej Siebert, Radomil Kachlík, Peter Vavrica in 1999–2001 Construction