The Freedom Tower

The STATEN ISLAND ADVANCE says “Sept. 11, 2001, is a date that lives in infamy.
Nowhere, of course, more so than on Staten Island, where the impact of the World Trade Center tragedy remains a fact of daily life for many people. Though it’s at least 5 miles from us, what goes on at Ground Zero is still close to our heart.
This is why we deplore the public hawking there of death and destruction: Illicit mementos being sold by street vendors in a circus-like way.
There ought to be a law, as the saying goes.
In fact, there is — but it doesn’t work.
Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly says the department’s Peddler Task Force and 1st Precinct officers have repeatedly arrested illegal vendors at the site of the World Trade Center, only to have them come back over and over.
“Peddlers treat the relatively small fines as a cost of doing business and return to their illegal activity immediately,” Mr. Kelly pointed out.
Not only 9/11 hats and T-shirts are for sale. Illegal profits are being made on photos of flames and exploding debris from the deadly jetliner attacks by terrorists on the Twin Towers.
Over 2,700 innocent people were killed there on Sept. 11, including more than 200 Staten Islanders.”

The Boston newspapers have grits in their Op-Ed pages today. The Herald swiped at a nearby town police union with just cause.
“New York City police officers show up to work each Sept. 11 somber, surely, but with no expectation of earning extra pay,” the newspaper says.

“But the trauma suffered by cops in Peabody, Mass. - 250 miles away from Ground Zero - apparently will be soothed on that sad anniversary only by the promise of a day off or more cash in the pay envelope.

Has this union no shame?”
Apparently not.

The New York Times says the World Trade Center redevelopment project in the old days used elaborately staged events to bolster support for this controversial project. Most often, these announcements were almost always followed by disasters.

“Having learned a painful lesson in public relations, officials are now content to let actual milestones speak for themselves.

Observant passers-by have been able to spot just such a turning point, now that the massive concrete core of 1 World Trade Center, the Freedom Tower, has emerged into public view from the depths of ground zero. On Oct. 10, Collavino Construction poured 520 cubic yards of concrete, raising the top of the core 14 feet, thereby bringing it 13 feet 8 inches above sidewalk level.

The walls of the core range from three to four feet thick. The concrete is extremely high strength, with a rating of 14,000 p.s.i. — that is, a strength under compression calculated at 14,000 pounds per square inch.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey made no formal announcement, though it did note the moment on its World Trade Center Progress page.”

If New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg wins a third term as mayor, he may see the Freedom Tower rise before leaving office, Investor Daily reports. “But don’t underestimate his city’s can’t-do spirit.
This has not been a happy time for New York City. Wall Street is gasping for air, and New York has seen its standing as the world’s financial capital called seriously into question. Arguably, for the time being that “capital” is now Washington D.C.
Now the city has to process the idea of re-electing Mayor Bloomberg to a third term, which would require changing or defying the two-term limit of current law. Like any officeholder with a billion dollars in the bank and a belief his work is not yet finished, Bloomberg thinks it’s a fine idea to run again. He says he’s spurred on by the “unprecedented challenges” brought on by the financial crisis.
We’ll leave it to New York voters to decide if they regard Bloomberg as the man who can steer their city through the Wall Street wreckage. But we do know this: For the past seven years, the city has suffered a painful lack of leadership on its highest-profile issue — rebuilding at the World Trade Center site.
With so many city- and state-level jurisdictions, private-sector interests and egos involved in the reconstruction, the mayor can’t wholly be blamed for the fiasco, which architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable calls “probably . . . the greatest planning fiasco in the history of the world.”

But the site where terrorists destroyed the twin towers on Sept. 11, 2001, is in the heart of Bloomberg’s city, and he is the one official who can legitimately speak for all its citizens. If the mayor of New York City can’t mobilize public opinion to end the bickering and close the open wound of 9/11, then who can?

This is a question of interest not just to New Yorkers but to all Americans. Al-Qaida homed in on the World Trade Center because they wanted to deliver a death-blow to America’s economic vitality and leadership. At the symbolic level, they succeeded.”

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?

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.

The Wall Street crisis hitting the heart of the city’s financial district should slow construction of its biggest commercial real estate projects, the Associated Press says, including the World Trade Center and Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn. Quoting real estate experts the wire service moved a story saying that:

“Basically, people are afraid,” said Tom Geurts, a professor at New York University’s Schack Institute of Real Estate. “Although a project could be profitable, they are afraid to put their money in it because they don’t know what is going to happen.”

In the short term, businesses in partnership with Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and American International Group Inc., which had over $50 billion invested in commercial real estate around the country, had their deals threatened. Lehman and AIG were investors in many large real estate deals.

Barclays PLC’s takeover of Lehman’s assets included the midtown office building it owned and will keep many of the employees in the skyscraper, valued at $1.7 billion. Lehman bought the tower earlier this decade after leaving lower Manhattan in the aftermath of Sept. 11.

“That’s very good news, because otherwise 10,000 people would have been out of work and we would have had to deal with that. And we would have had another million square feet of office space on the market,” Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Wednesday. “This deal means that the building stays full.”

Port Authority’s Board of Commissioners went ahead today and approved several key contracts for the construction of the Freedom Tower.

WNYC’s Bob Hennelly was there and has this report:

Fully 95 percent of the contracts needed to complete the $3 billion Freedom Tower have now been signed. Port Authority

Chairman Anthony Coscia said despite the current downturn, the agency’s plans for the tower’s 2.6 million square feet of office space remained viable.

COSCIA: This is an agency that for 80 plus years has been building through cycles and supporting the New York, New Jersey regional economy through good times and not so good. We built some of our most iconic structures frankly during the depression era

REPORTER: In two weeks, Port Authority Executive Director Chris Ward is slated to release a report ordered by Gov. David Paterson that will include an updated timeline and cost estimate for the entire Freedom Tower complex and transportation hub.