The Freedom Tower

As if there weren’t enough problems at Ground Zero with the discovery of human remains after all this time, there’s a new wrinkle.
Another group is balking about moving into the Freedom Tower when the skyscraper is completed. The Public Employees Federation says they are fighting plans to move state workers to the Tower. This news came from delegates who assembled in Lake Placid early this week for their annual convention.
The delegates approved a resolution to encourage the state of New York to not move any agency offices into the Tower. When the Twin Towers collapsed five years ago, 31 PEF tax and finance employees and three from transportation were among the 2,700 lives lost in the 9/11 attacks.
The union says public employees are being used as political pawns and are being forced to occupy the Tower by their employers.

The World Trade Center cross, fashioned out of steel beams that survived the WTC terrorist attacks, has been moved to a nearby church. The cross symbolized hope at the Ground Zero site and was created by workmen and volunteers who worked to find the remains of victims and clear the site of debris. It was moved to a nearby church in a procession that included families of victims, ministers and construction workers.
It is a two ton, 20 foot high cross. It was moved on a flatbed truck on October 5 to St. Peter’s Church three blocks from Ground Zero.
It was a somber procession. As it moved, iron workers sand “God Bless America” as hundreds of people walked behind the cross. It was erected outside of the church facing Ground Zero.

A Freedom Tower contractor is having problems of its own. Petrocelli Electric of Queens was hired to help build the foundation at Ground
Zero.
The company has been named as part of a corruption investigation being carried out by the FBI. The FBI seized Petrocelli’s records, one of two companies targeted by the feds in an investigation of a Queens New York State Assemblyman Brian McLaughlin. The New York Daily News and the New York Times are both reporting that Petroce3lli and Wellsbach electric are under investigation by the FBI.
The two companies are under investigation in a union scandal. In an indictment, the government says the contractors regularly provided McLaughlin with luxury cars and funneled cash to McLaughlin. In exchange, McLaughlin allegedly ignored the faxt that contractors used nonunion help on union jobs.

The ideas behind the brick by brick construction of the Freedom Tower has always been more than the reconstruction of the World Trade Center buildings after 9/11. It was the building of an American citadel, as Wall Street Journal writer Alex Frangos has said. He calls it housing for federal law-enforcement groups among other government agencies, not just a replacement building for the fallen buildings of the Trade Center.
While government agencies have stepped forward to sign leases in the Freedom Tower, many believe their presence will scare away the private tenants who might otherwise consider renting space in the building. “The FBI isn’t who a big law firm wants to be next to,” says John K. McIlwain, senior resident fellow at the Urban Land Institute, an industry research group. For one thing, he explains, the type of “bottom-end” lobby and other economies that budget-conscious government tenants demand differ from the more luxurious touches preferred by the private sector.
Frangos says there is a broader problem. McIlwain says there is “no perceptible office demand” for the planned 8.8 million square feet of office space, most of which will hit the market at about the same time in 2012. When government is being counted on for a quarter of that space, he says, “you know you have a problem. That’s not the kind of tenants you want” to attract private businesses.

“Two extra years of course corrections and painful negotiations, along with heaps of mud-throwing and back-stabbing, earned the city less than nothing.”
This is the lament of New York Post columnist Adam Brodsky.
Why? Because the new arrangement hands control of 40 percent of the space to bureaucrats - the very ones, in fact, who’ve already bungled the project.
Two years ago Thanksgiving 2004 it was one big happy family, the Port Authority, Gov. Pataki, Mayor Bloomberg, the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. and developer Larry Silverstein all signed an agreement based on Silverstein’s original lease from the PA to operate the Trade Center.
‘Nearly a year after the Thanksgiving Day agreement, Hizzoner suddenly decided Silverstein had to go,” Brodsky said. “NEW Yorkers should be glad that the Twin Towers space may soon be restored. But they certainly have a right to be sore over how the deal went down. And over the fact that, in having the PA return as a landlord, New Yorkers are actually worse off now than when this process began.”
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Wired mag has taken a good look at the technology that will make the new superscraper that will stand on the original spot of the Twin Towers,” say bloggers at “Addicted to Digital Media.” “Starting with a fortified steel and 3ft concrete core; the design’s steel frame will interconnect to distribute load in the event of another terrorist attach or cataclysmic event.
The tower has a 200-foot-tall, bomb-resistant concrete base surrounded by a multi-layered glass-curtain wall designed to be impervious to any kind of explosion.
“Based on the identified threats there wouldn’t be a disproportionate collapse of the structure,” says Carl Galioto, a technical partner involved in the design in an issue of Wired published on 9/11/06. “In many cases there wouldn’t even be a distortion; key elements of the tower would not be deformed out of place.”

“Strengthening the new tower is a central vertical core running through its length that’s fortified with a 3-foot thick concrete and steel wall. 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.”
The digital bloggers and Wired say the architects hope to avoid any possibility of the kind of progressive collapse witnessed in the case of the Twin Towers where 110 stories fell to the ground in 10 to 15 seconds.”

From Gabriel Arana’s personal blog, “From Wharf and Welt,” we get this as the rag tag pieces of steel columns, insurance payments, on and off again tenants, corner stones and all of the others things that hopefully will put this Humpty Dumpty Freedom Tower project back together again:

“I was thinking about Albert Speer’s Theorie vom Ruinenwert (theory of ruin-value) that guided building construction and architectural design during the Nazi regime,” says Arana who is currently living in Ithaca, New York.

“As the Freedom Tower goes up in downtown Manhattan, the principle–to build in order to produce, in a thousand years time, elegant Roman-like ruins evidencing a powerful lost civilization–is not considered in the design and construction of our diaphanous glass skyscrapers.

When the Freedom Tower is completed, it will echo its limestone counterpart in Midtown, the Empire State Building, and be the tallest building in the world, at least for a while. As pinnacles of the world’s two largest business districts, the pair will stand as contrastive historical markers in the timeline of our national consciousness.

The Empire State Building went up during the Great Depression as unemployed workers across the country lined up at soup kitchens. It became, upon completion a year and 45 days after construction began, an instant populist monument and an escapist expression of man’s desire to lift up into the clouds, leaving the ignobility of the earth below. It was “architecture as idea”–an amorphous idea, but one that has something to do with ambition, with dreams and their accessibility.

The Freedom Tower, on the other hand, is a defiant retort.”

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey is about to become $317 million richer. Two insurance companies have reached a settlement with the PA that will send insurance payments generated by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to the agency after five years of wrangling over the money.
The PA will get $130 million from Gulf Insurance Company and $187 million from the Travelers Indemnity Company under the settlement. World Trade Center developer Larry Silverstein went to court with seven insurance companies during the summer. The insurers balked at paying Silverstein when ownership of the World Trade Center was turned over to the PA. Silverstein already receive $4.6 billion in insurance payments to build the Freedom Tower and other buildings at the WTC.

A new shipment of steel to be used in the construction of the Freedom Tower has arrived in the United States. Jumbo steel columns weighing 806 tons are coming from Luxembourg. The last of four shipments came into Baltimore aboard the Atlantic Conveyor.
Two previous loads came into a Virginia port and a third came in at Camden, New Jersey.  Various lengths of steel needed to have steel plates welded to it to create beams that could not be produced in a single beam anywhere in the world, according to Port Authority officials and builders.
The total shipments weight about 50,000 tons. They were fashioned at the Arcelor mill in Differdange, Luxembourg. Each section was loaded onto ships in Antwerp, Belgium and transported 4,700 miles to America.

While construction of the Freedom Tower and the other buildings scheduled to be built at the WTC site, these projects will continue to generate widespread criticism. We sort through the complaints and find that much of it is too pedestrian to report here. It is still important to note legitimate concerns because the project is far from flawless.
One worthy of our attention comes from 911 memorials.org, a website that regularly reports news about 911 memorials in New York and from sources around the country.
This is from their website:
“We have always maintained that if anybody had faith in the current master plan for downtown then the developer who is taking the financial risks should be given a free hand to build whatever he wanted at Ground Zero — even the world’s tallest parking garage.

 Little did we know that Larry Silverstein would actually do something very similar.
The newly designed Freedom Tower has 20 stories of fear at its base — a 200 foot high, unoccupied concrete block to protect itself against truck bombs.
This of course is unprecedented in New York real estate where views are everything.
And the Freedom Tower in theory should have the most spectacular of views — overlooking a national memorial with no obstructions whatsoever. The whole Libeskind plan had called for the memorial to be in a sunken piazza specfically so there would be great views.
And views cut both ways. The excitment of New York has always been that windows look both ways. So now the view from Ground Zero will not be the inspired office tower rising phoenix like from the ruins, it will be a 200 foot high concrete block. You can’t hide this sin with curtains — even if they are high tech light emitting.
It’s little wonder that Nicolai Ouroussoff in The New York Times pans the design in a review headlined, “A Tower of Impregnability, the Sort Politicians Love”
To show just how low the debate has sunk on thinking of this memorial Ouroussoff evokes the dreaded Nazi comparison noting:
But if this is a potentially fascinating work of architecture, it is, sadly, fascinating in the way that Albert Speer’s architectural nightmares were fascinating: as expressions of the values of a particular time and era. The Freedom Tower embodies, in its way, a world shaped by fear.

It is indeed kind of scary looking at the similarities between the Freedom Tower and the Nazi Pavillion designed by Albert Speer.”