The Freedom Tower

The New York Observer says the Port Authority “is planning to announce the total amount in overruns is about $1.7 billion for the whole site. The amount presents the public sector with a large gap to fill in a time of strained budgets; however, the dollar figure is not quite as cataclysmic as early reports suggested, which put the gap at as much as $3 billion.
The overruns apply to the public sector portion of the site, which includes the Freedom Tower, the Santiago Calatrava-designed PATH hub, the common infrastructure, the vehicle screening center, the memorial, and the museum (but not the three Larry Silverstein-built towers). The amount budgeted for those components is $8.4 billion, which comes from a variety of sources.
Of the $1.7 billion in overruns, about $500 million is due to excess costs at the PATH hub, which has a design considered to be extraordinarily complex. The station currently has $2.5 billion available in funds, including contingencies, most of which comes from the Federal Transit Administration.
The Freedom Tower, which is gradually rising above street level, is likely to be more than $100 million over its $2.9 billion budget. Other components of the site, including common infrastructure and security, also require hundreds of millions more in contributions.”

The financial windstorm shaking Wall Street may have slowed New York’s drive to rebuild the World Trade Center and revitalize Manhattan’s downtown neighborhoods, the Financial Times of India reports.

The near collapse of the financial industry in recent days and especially today — New York’s engine of growth driving jobs, office rents and apartment sales prices and rents — will likely take a bite out of the city’s economy, experts say. “Lower Manhattan, whose crown project, the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site and its 10 million square feet of commercial real estate, is seen as the most vulnerable.

“The entire chain of failures will also hamper our ability to rebuild my hometown of Lower Manhattan, to recover the jobs we lost after September 11, and to regain our status as the nation’s third-largest central business district,” State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, a Democrat who represents Lower Manhattan, said recently.

The 2.6 million square-foot Freedom Tower originally was expected to be completed by 2009, with three other buildings opening through 2013. But construction and bureaucratic delays have pushed that schedule off the page. The Port Authority of New York & New Jersey, the agency that owns the site, is scheduled to issue new timetables and cost estimates on Tuesday. Ironically, the Port Authority’s inability to stick to a schedule may work to Manhattan’s advantage, planning and real estate experts say.

“It’s a godsend,” said David Arena, president of the New York business for real estate services company Grubb & Ellis Co. Manhattan’s current 357 million square-foot office market is expected to take a hit from the layoffs created by the downfall of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, the troubled insurer American International Group (AIG), Bank of America Corp’s buyout of Merrill Lynch — who leases 4.2 million square feet downtown — and the overall shrinkage of the financial industry.

Office market rents are expected to fall about 7 percent annually over the next three years, according to Grubb and Ellis. The average asking rent at the end of August stood at $68.39 per square foot, and $50.72 for downtown. Office vacancy rates, which now stand at 5.7 percent for Manhattan and 6.9 percent for downtown, could go as high as 9.5 percent before the end of the 2009, Arena said.

But most think the World Trade Center project should go ahead because Manhattan has a shortage of new office buildings and will eventually need them. “I think that the financial world is never going to be the same, but that doesn’t mean it will disappear,” Owen Gutfreund, director of the Barnard and Columbia Urban Studies Programs of Columbia University, and former vice president of investment bank Lazard Freres & Co.”

Alaska Gov. and Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin spent about 40 minutes inside the WTC Tribute Center across the street from ground zero today with Lee Ielpi, chairman of the board of directors of the Sept. 11 Families Association.

As she left the Tribute Center, Palin paused to visit a memorial to firefighters who died on 9/11.

Not far from America’s financial epicenter, universally known as “Wall Street,” is a huge, empty crater where the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center once stood, the blog baumanblog.sovereignsociety.com says.

Within weeks of the disaster that annihilated those once-glorious free market icons, fear served as the justification for a panicked U.S. Congress to enact the so-called PATRIOT Act.

Without even seeing the text of the bill, the congressional herd mentality to “do something!” produced one of the greatest assaults on the American Constitution ever passed into law. Its odious impact on our liberties still remains today. And barring the miracle of a new Congress emerging with both courage and common sense, it will continue on for years to come.

And now we find ourselves six Septembers after 9-11, 2001 in a different, yet all too familiar national media “panic.”

Once again self-described “experts” are telling us that the Congress must act immediately to bailout faltering Wall Street, adding nearly a trillion dollars to the national debt. (The existing public debt alone figures out to be $31,600 for every man, women and child in America, and this new demand will add another estimated $2,300 for every American).

But wouldn’t hindsight prompt us to think before acting this time around?

The design of the building, a work in progress ever since plans to rebuild at the World Trade Center site,  has been completed, owners of the property say.The design of the building that will occupy the former World Trade Center is done and it will stand 1,776 feet over lower Manhattan and will open in 2012.

The design incorporates lessons learned from the horrific events of September 11, 2001 when over 2,500 people died in the New York City attacks, according to the website NYC-Tower.com, with interconnected redundant exits, a chemical and biological air filtration system, a dedicated firefighter staircase, superior fireproofing, pressurized and widened stairwells and special safety areas on each floor.

The 2.6 million square foot building has a base dimension of 200 by 200 square feet and a rooftop height of 1,368 feet with a 408-foot high antenna on top, according to the website. The design also includes a memorial dedicated to those who died in the terrorist attacks.

The original twin World Trade Center towers, completed in 1973, had 110 floors supported by 244 vertical columns that surrounded a central core of elevators, stairwells and building mechanical systems, according to an article by Jackie Craven that appeared in About.com.

While critics posed questions about the structural stability of the original towers, the fact remains that no skyscraper is built to withstand the impact of a commercial jet liner flying at 500 miles per hour. Furthermore, the World Trade Center survived the 1993 truck bombing that, according to those who orchestrated the attack, was supposed to topple at least one of the buildings.

http://architecture.about.com/od/disastersandcollapses/a/twintowerfall.htm

http://www.nyc-tower.com/

According to media reports, crews excavating the World Trade Center site this summer for the foundations of a new skyscraper uncovered features carved into the bedrock by glaciers about 20,000 years ago, including a 40-foot-deep pothole.

The Associated Press reports that exposing the solid rock beneath at the ground zero site in lower Manhattan is critical for supporting what will be Tower 4 of the new World Trade Center, being built by Silverstein Properties.

“You want to make sure you’re not perching something on a ledge,” said Anthony Pontecorvo, a supervising structural engineer at Mueser Rutledge Consulting Engineers, which is working on the project.

While removing the overlying soil is an engineering necessity, the digging has given scientists a rare window into the deep past and formations like the huge pothole.

“There are areas in local parks that have small vertical potholes exposed,” Cheryl J. Moss, the senior geologist at Mueser Rutledge, told The New York Times. “But I’m not aware of anything in the city with a whole, self-contained depression on this scale.”

  Wall Street’s wipeout is taking its toll on Ground Zero - sparking fears that a forest of empty towers could rise on the 16-acre site, the New York Daily News reports.

“With jobs and companies disappearing and the tax base under siege, the viability of mega-rebuilding plans at the World Trade Center is on the line, insiders say.

Factor in a glut of office space that’s expected to flood downtown and Depression-era forebodings about the economy and a perfect storm is bearing down on lower Manhattan.

“A tidal wave is coming - and we’re going to be the first ones hit,” said City Councilman Alan Gerson, who represents the district.

The No. 1 challenge: filling 10.1 million square feet of commercial space in five skyscrapers, much of it designed specifically for financial giants that no longer exist or are struggling to survive.

Hanging in the balance are the iconic, 1,776-foot Freedom Tower to the north, a replacement for the toxic Deutsche Bank tower to the south and three enormous towers on Church St. built by developer Larry Silverstein, including one that will be taller than the Empire State Building.

The towers are set to rise almost simultaneously on the site during the next five years - despite a credit crunch, the liquidation of Lehman Brothers, the demise of an independent Merrill Lynch, the bailout of AIG and cloudy prospects for both Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs.

Some worry about the return of the “hollow high-risers” - a phrase first used to describe the original World Trade Center when it opened in 1973 with no private-sector tenants.

“The Freedom Tower very possibly will turn out to be a white elephant,” said George Marlin, an investment banker and former executive director of the Port Authority.

“I think it’s premature to predict empty towers, but clearly the staggering economy will affect the demand for office space in lower Manhattan,” said Rep. Jerrold Nadler, the West Side Democrat whose district includes Ground Zero.

The Port Authority, which owns and is developing the site, is confident despite the market meltdown. “Even within the economic cycle we’re in now, we think all the buildings will get built, and someone will come in and fill them,” said PA Executive Director Chris Ward.

Silverstein notes he has faced doubters before. When he started building 7 World Trade Center in 2002, the downtown vacancy rate was 17%, but the building now draws top rents, he points out.

“The naysayers then and now don’t seem to understand that we are building in anticipation of future demand, not based on today’s market,” Silverstein said.

Still, potential problems loom. The buildings were designed with massive, column-free trading spaces to accommodate the needs of Wall Street behemoths, experts say. Many of those companies are now on the ropes.

Silverstein’s projected 79-story, 2.3-million-square-foot Tower 2, for instance, has four sprawling trading floors, and his 71-story, 2.1-million-square-foot Tower 3 has five.

Already, Merrill Lynch has pulled out of talks to move into Tower 3, while JPMorgan Chase scaled back its building plans at the former Deutsche Bank tower site.

Silverstein faces another challenge: His three towers come with a $6 billion price tag at a time when banks are tightening up on credit. His windfall from insurance payouts and tax-exempt Liberty Bonds totals $4 billion, so he’ll still need $2 billion more from the banks.”

Near the beginning of the slender romantic comedy “Definitely, Maybe” there is a beautiful, wistful long shot, through an airplane window, of the New York skyline as it looked in the early ’90s,” a recent story in the Hartford Courant tells us. In that skyline, the ‘Twin Towers loom majestically over Manhattan.

Finding the Towers on film is not difficult. Nearly every episode of “Friends” seems to have an establishing shot of them, as if “Central Perk” weren’t clue enough that our story takes place in New York.

But it’s something different to run into our old friends in a movie that cares about them.
Few filmmakers did when they were still standing. Woody Allen all but omitted the Towers from the opening montage of “Manhattan,” his celebration of the city he once loved. As Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” swells in our ears Allen gives us postcards of the city, even lingering lovingly on Yankee Stadium, which is not in Manhattan, but there is not a single direct shot of the World Trade Center buildings.

The climax of the 1976 remake of “King Kong” took place at the Twin Towers but was so ineptly staged it might have been London Tower for all anyone could make out on screen.

No wonder it flopped.

Rob Reiner didn’t make the same mistake in “Sleepless in Seattle,” his homage to confectionery sugar. When Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan finally run into each other, it’s atop the Empire State Building, just like in “An Affair To Remember,” and not the Twin Towers.

This is why that brief shot in this year’s “Definitely, Maybe” stands out, as does its closing shot of the modern-day New York skyline. Each lends a touch of melancholy to what is, otherwise, merely a competently made genre picture.

Of course, “Definitely, Maybe” was made after Sept. 11, 2001, and thus it knows what it is doing. More recently, the documentary ” Man on Wire” drew rave reviews as it chronicled Philippe Petit’s high-wire walk between the two buildings. The movie does not give us what has become an obligatory coda, pictures of the Towers in ruins, but reminds us of the way they were on Aug. 7, 1974.

During the course of the year, The Harvard Law Record will showcase a series of photographs of New York City which are linked by a common image: the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. While the Towers were tragically erased from New York’s skyline seven years ago, they remain a pervasive part of the city landscape. The images evoke many questions-will the Towers remain when the Freedom Tower is completed? How does the realized image of the World Trade Center help or hurt the process of recovery and renewal still ongoing in New York City? Please visit our website at www.hlrecord.org where you can post reactions and express your opinion about the project with other readers. As always, we welcome feedback in the form of letters to the editor, submitted via email to record@law.harvard.edu.

We begin with two personal photographs from a more innocent time. At left, my father, James Kalloch, and me on the observation desk of World Trade Center 2 in 1994. At lower left, my parents, Susan and James, on the observation desk with the Empire State Building in the background. The World Trade Center fashioned itself the Top of the World. It surely lived up to its billing.

It has happened this week - the daily toll on major financial institutions has left wall street reeling. Crisis, extraordinary, unimaginable, astonishing - are some of the more principal words being used by financial analysts, according to Skynews.com.

The sums of money involved are staggering. Millions is small change. Billions is the norm.

Trillions are increasingly coming up in discussions about the debts of major financial institutions and the cash injections needed to bails them out.

Even the government has been left reeling. It refused to come to the rescue of the investment bank Lehman Brothers on Monday after being criticised for pouring already hard-pressed tax payers’ dollars into Bear Stearns - another sick investment bank earlier this year.

Never again said the US Treasury said. The following day it back tracked and propped up the world’s biggest insurer AIG with 85 billion. It had little choice.

The collapse of AIG, which insurers many of the world’s commercial banks against bad debt, would have been devastating, said analysts.

It would have jeopardised world markets and the broader economy said the treasury, justifying the about-turn.

None of which has stopped the downhill slide of stock markets or the rumours that more corner stones of the US financial world are in trouble.

Where will it end?

None of the respected financial experts here are prepared to guess. The simply don’t know. That in itself increase the fear and uncertainty.