The Freedom Tower

A Ground Zero Memorial - but not the planned museum - will be in place by the 10th anniversary of the terror attacks, Port Authority chief Christopher Ward vowed Thursday night.

Quoted in the New York Daily Newsm Ward told a Community Board 1 meeting “What we hoped for, dreamed of, will be completed,” The  meeting was attended by Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver (D-Manhattan) and other officials.

Ward’s promise came on the same day relatives of Sept. 11 victims railed at him in a letter over his admission last month that Ground Zero construction is over budget and years behind schedule.

Ward said the letter was “thoughtful” and expressed “the deep emotions of the family members.”

He said he now foresees a memorial that includes “a plaza, trees, and most of the design elements” opening by Sept. 11, 2011.

It would be “a somber place to allow for appropriate marking of the 10th anniversary,” he said, while warning that “accomplishing this will very difficult.”

He explained the “plaza does not stand alone” but is linked to the transit system and other underground facilities. You cannot build a memorial by forgetting its interconnection to the rest of the site.”

New York’s Freedom Tower is the symbol of American resilience after the mayhem of September 11 when terrorists destroyed the World Trade Centre and attacked the Pentagon, says Theage.com.au.

“And it’s also symbolic that a foreigner, Melbourne-born structural engineer Marc Colella has been given the responsibility of making sure the tower stays standing.

“Don’t think this is just an event that happened on American soil,” he says.

Mr Colella was initially surprised that such an emotionally charged project was given to an outsider.

While the opportunity to lead the project came “completely out of the blue”, hard work, perseverance “and a bit of luck” gave the 35-year-old the chance to showcase his talent.

Mr Colella visited Monash University, his former alma mater, recently for a presentation on the technical aspects of the highest-profile building site in the world.

The Freedom Tower, also known as Tower 1, will be 105 storeys tall, the same height as the Twin Towers. But a 120-metre spire that will house communication equipment pushes the building’s height to a symbolic level: 1776 feet, for the year of America’s declaration of independence.

“Americans are big on their symbolism,” says Mr Colella.

Perhaps the ultimate symbolic hope was to have the tower finished on September 11, 2011, but Mr Colella says “that’s just not gonna happen”.

The tower is expected to be completed by late 2012.

But it’s not just symbolism that Mr Colella has had to consider. After living in New York for 61/2 years, he says, “You’ve got to manage the way you’re perceived a lot more”.

“You have to put yourself forward in the right manner, with the right intentions. In New York, you’ve got to get that respect, or else they just bury you.”

While he admits there is tremendous pressure on the Freedom Tower project, Mr Colella says “it’s the Aussie way” to rise to a challenge.

“It’s more than just an engineering site. There are a lot of agencies and interests involved.

“The emotional and political implications complicate matters even further. You have to divorce yourself from emotion and treat this just like any other project.”

theage.com.au

This idea from the City_journal.org:
“Since al-Qaida demolished the World Trade Center nearly seven years ago, New York’s naked emperors—Governors George Pataki and Eliot Spitzer and architect Daniel Libeskind—have viewed an historic rebuilding challenge as an opportunity to invent a square wheel and then deny for years that it can’t roll. This week, the Port Authority, which runs the site, released a report admitting that little progress had been made there—still more evidence that the government has responded to an external attack with a self-inflicted disaster. But all the dillydallying may provide an unlikely opportunity for Governor David Paterson and World Trade Center developer Larry Silverstein, who should examine an entirely different approach: building new twin towers at Ground Zero.

It may sound crazy to say that we should consider throwing away years’ worth of planning. But we’ve barely moved toward completion since 2002; in fact, last week’s report threw out cost estimates or timetables for rebuilding. “The schedule and cost for each of the public projects on the site face significant delays and cost overruns,” wrote Chris Ward, the new director of the Port Authority, to Paterson last Monday. Further, “at least 15 fundamental issues critical to the overall project” are “not yet . . . resolved.”

Indeed: all New York has to show for its hoping and waiting is a partial support structure for the Freedom Tower—which, when it’s built, will be a sad white elephant. And all that the state promises today is more waiting: waiting for officials to figure out how a poorly designed, half-billion-dollar memorial can withstand the weight of the trees that are supposed to go on top of it; waiting for them to figure out a workable plan for the fancy, multibillion-dollar, Calatrava-designed transit hub, where inevitable changes will mean more changes and delays to everything else on the site. Can anyone be confident that the eventual results won’t be physical evidence of unimaginable folly?

On 9/11, al-Qaida murdered 2,974 people and destroyed two iconic office towers that dominated New York’s skyline, another lone office tower nearby, and some smaller support buildings. We can’t recover stolen lives. But what would it take to make New York physically whole again, while paying tribute to 9/11’s history and victims? One obvious answer is to build two iconic office towers that dominate New York’s skyline once again, surrounded by some smaller buildings. Notice that the one project that has achieved completion after 9/11—Silverstein’s Seven World Trade Center, the lone office tower near the main site—did so partly because Silverstein realized that al-Qaida’s attack wasn’t a mandate to reinvent the obvious. He simply built a more elegant tower to succeed what al-Qaida had destroyed, modernized for the twenty-first century in terms of safety and aesthetics and placed in a superior setting.

New York could take a similar approach with the rest of the site. New twin towers wouldn’t be the old ones; nobody can pretend that 9/11 never happened. They’d offer modern, sleek designs, as Seven World Trade Center does, and they’d be built to private-sector specifications. They’d need twenty-first-century, post-9/11 safety upgrades. The site would also need an appropriate memorial and well-designed public spaces.”
This is not a new idea but it is a popular one.

Michael Goodwin says New York is usually one tough town, but it’s hard to imagine a softer civic touch than the one that greeted the admission last week that Ground Zero is a mess, the New York Daily News writer says. “When, after nearly seven years of false starts and promises, officials finally admitted that everything is hopelessly behind schedule and over budget, New Yorkers’ general reaction was to applaud the honesty and turn the channel.Don’t get me wrong, I like honesty from my government as much as the next sucker. But we shouldn’t confuse the seven-year-itch for confession with a solution for what ails Ground Zero. And therein lies the real outrage of the downtown disaster - officials still don’t have a real plan to fix it.

Even worse, they don’t seem to know what’s wrong. Or maybe they can’t bring themselves to be quite that honest.

If they did, they’d have to confess to original sin. They’d have to admit they’ve forgotten the fundamental meaning of 9/11 and that the memorial to those who died in the worst attack ever carried out on American soil should have been the first thing built.

Rudy Giuliani perfectly described the right approach in his farewell address as mayor. With the fires still smoldering, Giuliani, speaking from nearby St. Paul’s Chapel on Dec. 27, 2001, called Ground Zero ‘holy” and “hallowed” and declared, “we shouldn’t think about this site right behind us as a site for economic development.’ “

Anthony Coscia, chairman of the Board of Commissioners of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, has announced that China Center, financially supported by a Chinese real estate company to promote Sino-American trade, became the first to sign a lease for the Freedom Tower being built on the World Trade Center site, reports the World Journal.
China Center signed a 23-year lease to
rent 190,000 square feet office space on the 64th through the 69th floor of the Freedom Tower. Christopher Ward, director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey said China Center’s lease proved that private companies believe in the World Trade Center’s future as the financial and business center of lower Manhattan.

The International Herald Tribune reports that the Bush administration is letting go of its World Trade Center health czar.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says its director met Thursday with John Howard and told him his term wouldn’t be extended as director of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.

Howard held that post for six years, and two years ago he became the Bush administration’s point person for post-Sept. 11 health issues.

Advocates had said Howard’s departure would jeopardize efforts to establish a federal monitoring and treatment program for ground zero workers who say they were sickened by World Trade Center dust.

The CDC says Howard will stay in office until July 14. Associate director Christine Branche will become acting director until the administration names a replacement.

The Economic Times (Times of India) says the World Trade Center’s owner announced a major design change to its multibillion-dollar transit hub this week, the same week the agency said that most projects at the site are behind schedule and over budget.

The design by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava called for the wings on the dome of the transit hub to open and close, but that won’t be the case, Port Authority of New York and New Jersey executive director Christopher Ward said Tuesday.

The change is expected to shave hundreds of millions of dollars from the hub’s budget, which has fluctuated between $2.2 billion and $3.4 billion.

Calatrava had designed a retractable roof that would shine a sliver of light into the transit hub’s concourse each September 11, with wings that would move with it, marking the anniversary of the 2001 attacks. The architect’s office declined comment Tuesday.

Ward said the change would prevent the hub from imposing on the structures near it, including the memorial and office towers.

“This is a tough choice, but it is the right choice,” he said at a downtown business breakfast.

The transit hub is one of more than a dozen issues Ward has said were slowing rebuilding at the 16 acre (6.5 hectare) site, including the behind-schedule dismantling of a condemned office building nearby.

“The schedule and cost estimates for the rebuilding effort that have been communicated to the public are not realistic,” Ward wrote in a report to Gov. David Paterson.

The memorial to the 2001 terrorist attack will not open by the 10th anniversary, Ward said Monday. Other projects on the site were scheduled to open by 2013, although the performing arts center never had a construction plan.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who chairs the foundation overseeing the Sept. 11 memorial, said Tuesday he had hoped the memorial could open sooner. Bloomberg spearheaded its fundraising, while the Port Authority is in charge of building it.

“I’ve pushed the Port Authority as much as I can,” the mayor said. “I’m not so sure they aren’t doing a good job. I think it’s easy to go and criticize them. I’m just pointing out that they set the priorities.”

Today’s headlines affirm what most New Yorkers have known for a while, says Newsday, the Long Island, New York Newspaper. We reported yesterday that a report on progress at Ground Zero tells us that Ground Zero is still at zero. “Nearly seven years after the World Trade Center collapsed, the barren tract continues to smolder in true New York style, with foundering reconstruction plans, budget troubles, lingering health questions, and plenty of blame to go around.

Christopher Ward, executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, has acknowledged a vast gap between the reality at Ground Zero and the state’s grand plans to revamp the site. An array of well-hyped projects, including a memorial, a transit hub, and new office towers, have been plagued by cost overruns and bureaucratic snags.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg seemed defensive of the glacial pace of progress, warning that it would be “very difficult to forecast in such a complex development project any kind of realistic date and cost.” Underscoring the reality factor, U.S. Senator Charles Schumer noted that all the public has had until this point has been “seven years of Alice in Wonderland fantasy plans.”

While the rebuilding lags, the controversy over the health impacts of the WTC disaster continues full throttle.

Lawyers for the city have attacked the claims of emergency and recovery workers suing the city for alleged health problems due to unsafe exposures at Ground Zero. The city says about 30 percent of the more than 10,000 claimants have no significant injuries. But advocates for the plaintiffs argue that medical records show a massive influx of illness among many 9/11 workers, including respiratory ailments linked to pollutants at the site.

Even as the court battle roils on, the state is moving toward expanding health care for WTC relief and recovery workers. A bill just passed by the State Legislature would extend disability benefits to more public service workers who participated in the Ground Zero effort.

The bill also extends the timeframe for 9/11 workers hired by private contractors to register for state workers’ compensation benefits. Fittingly, that deadline has been pushed back to September 10, 2010–probably in time to beat the first ribbon cutting at the rebuilt Ground Zero. But if this odyssey of urban politics has proven anything, it’s that what happens between now and then is anyone’s guess,” Newsday says.