The Freedom Tower

Even after developer Larry Silverstein and the Port of Authority convince workers at state and federal agencies to occupy space they’ve agreed to rent in the Freedom Tower, Silverstein still has three other buildings to build and rent.
It will be a daunting task, despite the fact that one of these skyscrapers will be the headquarters of the Port Authority itself, owner of the trade center.
Workers made it clear yesterday that returning to work in any building going up at the Ground Zero site. This isn’t just the talk of a few scared individuals. The president of the Public Employees Federation, ken Bryniem, says he is getting calls from workers who tell him they don’t ever want to return to Ground Zero for any reason. The buildings were attacked twice, one in 1993 and the last time in 2001. Eighty four PA employees died in 2001. Thirty one members of the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance were killed when the south tower fell.

The only blunder that even comes close to this blunder is 911 itself.

“City and state officials are celebrating their commitment to fill space in the Freedom Tower. But there seems to be less cheering — and considerable distress — among people who might actually have to report for work every day in the symbolic replacement for the destroyed World Trade Center,” the New York Times reported.
How could every politician even remotely associated with the World Trade Center disaster and the reconstruction of Ground Zero have been so near sighted not to have realized that politics as usual in this case could not dissuade rational people from seeing this pink elephant in every room where the redevelopment of site has been discussed for the last five years.
Oh, they might have been able to get a clue when design after design was thwarted, turned down, twisted and rejected by even the most indifferent observer. There might have been some signals coming from firefighters who journeyed to this “job site” from firehouses around the world to search for the remains of 911 victims. They always brought the quiet dignity and sincerity few politicians can muster, even with the best flacks and handlers guiding their every move.
The governors of New York and New Jersey, the usually astute New York City Mayor Michael Blumberg and both the Republican and Democratic candidates running in the race for the top job in the Empire State all signed on to this Titantic blunder. Yesterday they committed themselves to sign leases to occupy one million square feet of the Freedom Tower of the more than two million square feet of space in this building developers have had mighty problems filling. When the governors and the mayor joined forced with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, they made one colossal blunder. They forgot to ask the people who work for them if they’d just go along for the ride.
Today, union after union, employees of agency after agency said no, they would not go to work if their bosses paid them to work in the Freedom Tower.
Oh my God, what a blunder these blockheads have committed. The tax collector, the meter maids and the bean counters for the public agencies in charge of buying light fixtures say they’re not risking their lives for a paycheck from people who failed to protect their colleagues at least twice before at the same address where that gave blunder new meaning.
I see a flurry of news conferences being planned right now where the Pink Elephant sitting in the center of Ground Zero still won’t be discussed. Neither will an idea I heard this afternoon from a college student in Connecticut that seemed to make more sense than anything I’ve heard from the designers, the Port Authority and the developers, the mayor of the largest city in the world and everybody else sitting on what is probably the most expensive real estate in the world. I haven’t look close enough yet but yesterday one of the brains behind this blunder said they were renting space down there for about fifty bucks a square foot. You can’t rent a tree house in Arkansas for that kind of money, never mind in a highrise in New York, New York.
There’s a clue right there. Something’s up. Something big too.
A student in my class at Western Connecticut state university is the kind of student I love. She’s nervy, careful and measured in what she says, but when she’s sure, she squeezes off a head shot. Oh yes, she’d read the stories in yesterday news or at least heard what passes for broadcast news on CNN. No, it wasn’t CNN because she says she doesn’t have a television. She must have read it somewhere online because she pondered the idea of people moving into the Freedom Tower for a moment in class yesterday, then she quietly said something that sent that pink elephant scurrying from 306 White Hall in Danbury to a safer room on campus.
“No one in my generation is going to work in that building,” she said. “No one. Its too soon.”
A young man sitting behind her was visibly upset by what she said, so he spoke up too.
“Well me,” he said, “I’d work there. I’d work there and I’d dance on the roof.”
A roof that many believe will catch fire again, I said.
He didn’t flinch or bat an eyelash but he flashed me a look, an unmistakable look that another man would recognize immediately. It said “go ahead. I dare you to try it again. I dare you come back. I’ll be waiting for you this time.”
It was a threat and I knew it wasn’t aimed at me. It was a headshot too and if he had really been shooting, the shot would have been dead on and I know who he was aiming at and it wasn’t that pink ass elephant I saw scurring down White Street andd across the midtown campus heading for higher ground.

Now that the feds, the states of New York and New Jersey and the city of New York have thrown in together to rent more than a third of the space in the Freedom Tower, the candidates for New York State governor are backing the plan too.
Democrat Eliot Spitzer and Republican John Faso are both backing the plan Gov. George Pataki has supported all along. Spitzer has criticized Freedom Tower plans but it seems Spitzer, like Faso who was expected to go along with the plan, has seen the handwriting on the wall.
Now all these politicians have to do is convince private tenants to sign on too. The word downtown on the streets surrounding Ground Zero is that it will be an uphill battle.

The mystery over who will occupy the Freedom Tower, at least one million of the 2.6 million square feet of the building, has been settled.
The federal government and the city of New York and the governors of new York and New Jersey all came together and said they’d rent the spoace as the first tenants to sign long term leases. Who would venture to rent space in the buildings going up at Ground Zero has long been the subject of widespread speculation.
“With today’s announcement, we are another significant step closer to our goal of restoring the World Trade Center site as the hub of commerce in Lower Manhattan,” Mayor Michael Bloomberg said.
These government agencies stepped into the breach when it became clear that developers were worried about attracting private tenants to occupy the tower, which will be the tallest building in the complex and in the city if it reaches the 1,776 feet height called for in the design plans.

Eight hundred tons of steel that will be used to craft the columns that will make up the base of the Freedom Tower is heading for Camden, N.J. by ship from Antwerp, Belgium.
It will be trucked to Lynchburg, Va. The I-beams are heading for the Banker Steel Company in Virginia where they will be reinforced with additional plating.
Industry experts say the I-beams are between 30 and 56 feet long and weigh about 730 pounds per foot. They are called “Jumbo Sections, according to press reports posted by The Roanoke Times, and it is made from the heaviest I-beams available. The steel is expected to arrive in Virginia in the coming weeks and the plating process will be done next month.

The Port Authority and World Trade Center Developer developer Larry Silverstein are on the clock. Silverstein and the PA own Ground Zero and they’re racing to meet a September 21 deadline to find enough tenants to make the proposed buildings on the site worthwhile.
The owners are trying to find enough tenants to fill one million square feet in the Freedom Tower building. A spokesman for the PA has said they expect prospective tenants to fill the spade by the deadline.
Signed leases by government agencies are critical to running the building or opening it on time. In a related development, the Downtown Express says another potential problem involving construction of the tower is related to security for the Church St. towers. “The N.Y.P.D. has reportedly not yet signed off on the security plan, and similar concerns delayed Freedom Tower construction by two years.” But “Silverstein said the three new towers will have tight security office entrances on Greenwich St., but the Church St. stores will have to be more open in order to be attractive to retailers. “People have to be able to walk into them,” he said.

Gov. George Pataki says the Freedom Tower is America’s greatest symbol of “our freedom and independence.”
Critics overseas see it differently.
“Its lifts and stairwells are protected by walls of concrete and steel 60cm thick - robust enough to withstand a bomb blast, perhaps even a plane strike. It has wider exit stairs, better emergency systems and fireproofing. Its office floors sit on top of a concrete vault 24m high - not a security feature but accommodation for a key electricity substation,” says the Mail & Guardian online, Africa’s first online newspaper.
“The new 102-storey Freedom Tower will incorporate even more safety features. In response to the police’s comments, it is set quite a way back from the street on all sides, and surrounded by bollards. And, like 7 World Trade Centre, its 69 office floors will also sit on an impregnable base - this time purely for security reasons. The solid core of the base will be disguised by attractive prismatic glass panels that would shatter like a car windscreen in the event of a blast.
…To many, the last thing the Freedom Tower symbolizes is freedom,” the newspaper said. “This is not a problem unique to the World Trade Centre, of course. The US landscape has been transformed, post-9/11, by barriers, X-ray machines, screening facilities - the apparatus of counter-terrorism.”
This is so painfully true, it hardly bares mentioning but just had to be said.

The Freedom Tower will be getting some company when it goes up and defines the New York City skyline.
Three architects presented designs last Friday for three office buildings at Ground Zero that will surround the Freedom Tower to compliment the downtown landscape.
The designers presented three dimensional models of Towers 2, 3 and 4 that will go up along Church Street.
Designers Norman Foster, Fumihika Maki and British architect Richard Rogers said he and the other two skyscraper designers have tried “to create a symbol of this part of New York, this terrible happening.”
The Freedom Tower would be Ground Zero’s center piece but the other buildings would go up be nearer the permanent PATH rail station and near extensive shopping areas.

The talk of the town yesterday was naturally about all of the 9/11 tributes and remembrances that occurred everywhere I went. It was both somber and sobering. Waitresses, bus drivers, the counter girls at McDonalds and everybody else almost everybody, every where I went had the Twin Towers and the people who died their on their minds and in their hearts. These weren’t patriot gestures. They were human responses to a very recent tragedy, attacks not seen on our shores since December 7, 1941 when an American community was attacked and we were plunged into World War II.
The governor of New York used the day to announce a set of new energy and environmental measures that will be used in the design and redevelopment of the World Trade Center properties, including the Freedom Tower, the World Trade Center Office Towers2,3 and 4 and the World Trade Center Memorial and Memorial Museum.
The governor said yesterday the buildings will all go up to achieve the “U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design.” This means the buildings will be 20 percent more efficient than the New York State Energy Conservation Construction Code. Developers also agreed to use fuel cell technology to increase efficiency and to provide clean, on-site electric power. The fuel cells will provide 4.8 mega watts of electric power, the largest fuel cell installation in the world.
The price of progress is always high, in this case, hundreds of stories high.

The subject always comes up and winds up dominating conversations eventually. Will the new buildings going up on the World Trade Center site, the Freedom Tower and all the others, still stand in the event another terrorist attack sends airplanes crashing into them again?
“Patriotism has driven it from the start, with some inevitably kitschy results, starting with its height (1776 feet). The building is a solemn monument to the fallen, but also an obvious target, a test of our will and ingenuity to ensure that history doesn’t repeat itself, says Lakshmi Sandhana, writing for Wired News.
“Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, or SOM, the architects designing the tower, have taken that imperative literally: If terrorists pilot a fully-fuelled commercial jet into their building, they believe it will stand.
“Based on the identified threats there wouldn’t be a disproportionate collapse of the structure,” says Carl Galioto, SOM’s technical partner. “In many cases there wouldn’t even be a distortion; key elements of the tower would not be deformed out of place. The tower’s steel frame is interconnected with beams and columns to redistribute loads in the event of an impact or blast so it remains standing, enabling occupants to leave safely.”
Its not supposed to happen anyway. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security says so but they’ve been really busy trying to keep Mexicans from crossing the border.