TalB

Port Authority to Intensify Its Ground Zero Role - City Room - Metro - New York Times Blog
July 29, 2008, 9:29 am

Port Authority to Intensify Its Ground Zero Role

By David W. Dunlap


The Port Authority board plans to take a more active role in oversight at the World Trade Center site. (Photo: David W. Dunlap/The New York Times)

Under renewed criticism and pressure to advance the redevelopment of the World Trade Center site, the chairman of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey told his fellow commissioners on Monday that special monthly board meetings will begin in September to consider nothing but the issues posed at ground zero.

“I believe a project with this singular importance for the agency and region warrants even stronger and more regular engagement at the board level,” the chairman, Anthony R. Coscia, said in an e-mail message to the other commissioners.

He continued:

The special meetings will create an opportunity for the board to give staff more policy direction regarding the rebuilding effort, provide an additional layer of board oversight, and ensure that the board is able to take action on W.T.C.-related items at a pace consistent with the desire for an accelerated construction schedule.

The World Trade Center board meetings will be held closer to the site than regular monthly meetings, which are conducted at the authority’s headquarters on Park Avenue South. Stephen Sigmund, a spokesman for the authority, said the meetings would be open to the public and that information on time and whereabouts would be posted on the Port Authority Web site.

Mr. Coscia concluded his e-mail message by saying, “The special meetings will enhance the transparency of board’s decision-making as it relates to the agency’s role in the rebuilding process.”

__________________
I have respected your views, so I expect you to do the same for me.

skyskrayper_one

By Flickr: _Action Jackson's Photostream

TalB

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/12/ny...l?ref=nyregion
Police Want Tight Security Zone at Ground Zero

By CHARLES V. BAGLI
Published: August 11, 2008



Planners seeking to rebuild the World Trade Center have always envisioned that the 16-acre site would have a vibrant streetscape with distinctive buildings, shops and cultural institutions lining a newly restored street grid. From the destruction of Sept. 11, 2001, a new neighborhood teeming with life would be born.

But now, the Police Department’s latest security proposal entails heavy restrictions.

According to a 36-page presentation given by top-ranking police officials in recent months, the entire area would be placed within a security zone, in which only specially screened taxis, limousines and cars would be allowed through “sally ports,” or barriers staffed by police officers, constructed at each of five entry points.

Roughly a dozen guard booths would be established at street corners where pedestrians or vehicles are most likely to enter the area, while the western lanes of Church Street would be reserved for emergency vehicles.

All service and delivery trucks for the trade center site would be directed to an underground bomb screening center at the south side of the complex. Tour buses would drop off and pick up passengers at Liberty and Greenwich Streets. But no bus would be summoned from the underground security center and garage until all the passengers are present, a requirement that could leave large clots of tourists waiting for stragglers.

The plan is designed to prevent a third terrorist attack on the site, said Paul J. Browne, deputy police commissioner for public information, and, he said, would have little effect on either traffic or pedestrians. It is among the more striking features of the Police Department’s overall plan for Manhattan security, which also includes measures to photograph every vehicle entering Manhattan, and scan its license plate, and then keep the information on file for at least a month. The department hopes to have the plan in place by 2010, by the time Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg leaves office.

Landlords, company executives, public officials and some urban planners acknowledged the need for security at ground zero, but worried that the procedures would undermine the effort to reweave the trade center site into the city’s fabric. They fear that the proposed traffic restrictions could create tie-ups in a congested neighborhood and discourage corporate tenants from renting space, or shoppers from visiting the stores in the area.

“We want to make sure everyone is safe,” said Julie Menin, chairwoman of Community Board 1, which includes ground zero. “But it can’t be set up like the checkpoint at the New York Stock Exchange, which is inhospitable to anyone living or working in the area. Seven small businesses closed within a year of N.Y.P.D. setting up the checkpoint at the stock exchange.”

The restrictions could be a particular challenge for the three massive office towers planned by the developer Larry A. Silverstein, which would sit within the security zone. The towers were designed with entrances on Greenwich Street, between Vesey and Liberty Streets, where black cars and taxis could easily serve their corporate tenants.

According to the master plan for the site, the buildings also include a lot of retail space — about 250,000 square feet — for office workers, tourists and area residents. Advocates for Lower Manhattan are worried about the effect of traffic restrictions and a heavy police presence.

“Of course this has to be done with an eye toward security,” said Elizabeth H. Berger, president of the Alliance for Downtown New York, a business group. “But that doesn’t mean checkpoints at every turn. It’s important that the office towers, the retail, the memorial and the performing arts center succeed.”

The security zone would extend west from Church Street, between Vesey and Liberty Streets, and include portions of several adjacent blocks.

Mr. Browne, addressing criticism that the security plan would undermine a normal commercial and cultural life in the neighborhood, said, “I think this will reassure people that this is probably the safest business environment anywhere.”

Mr. Browne said the plan, which is still being revised, would not involve checkpoints where pedestrians and visitors would have to open their bags for police inspection. “It’s designed principally to prevent a car- or truck-bomb attack,” he said, “but it’s also been designed with traffic concerns in mind.”

The proposal is part of the Police Department’s Lower Manhattan Security Initiative, a version of which has been presented to agencies involved in rebuilding Lower Manhattan by Raymond W. Kelly, the police commissioner, and Richard A. Falkenrath, the deputy commissioner for counterterrorism. Like London’s security cordon, known as the “ring of steel,” the initiative relies on mobile teams of heavily armed officers as well as technology including closed-circuit television cameras, license plate readers and explosive trace detection systems.

But the trade center site plan involves a much higher degree of security.

Last month, the city and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the site, resolved a longstanding source of tension by giving Mr. Kelly and the Police Department broad control over security at the complex. Under the plan, the department would establish a World Trade Center Unit with about 600 officers and develop the overall security plan.

Word of the plan has circulated among real estate executives and business leaders for weeks. The Partnership for New York City, which includes chief executives from many of the city’s largest employers, has a meeting with Mr. Kelly on Sept. 8 to discuss it.

“There is concern in the downtown business community that the security plans are going to make the logistics of doing business more difficult, everything from getting deliveries to moving clients and employees around,” said Kathryn Wylde, president of the partnership. “Is it going to work, or make doing business and getting people downtown more difficult? I don’t know.”

Some critics questioned whether the Police Department had conducted a traffic study to assess the effect of its vehicle restrictions in the neighborhood and the gridlock that could result from blocking off Greenwich and Fulton Streets and parts of Church Street.

Mr. Browne said the department was planning to minimize the potential delays by establishing a Trusted Access Program for bus, taxi, limousine and delivery drivers who need to enter the area regularly. To limit the number of trucks near Mr. Silverstein’s towers, the plan calls for building a raised median down the center of Church Street with a row of bollards, or barriers.

In the years after the attack on the trade center, city and state officials, civic and community groups, the Port Authority, families of those killed at the complex and others have debated exactly what should be built on the site. While some argued for a large memorial and others sought to rebuild the twin towers, many people favored reopening Greenwich and Fulton Streets rather than recreating the trade center superblock and its barren plaza. They also sought to animate the streets by including shops and a performing arts center.

That vision was incorporated into the master plan and an environmental review and adopted by the city, the state and the Port Authority. “Nobody contemplated that you wouldn’t have free entrance to the site,” said Alex Garvin, the former urban planner for the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation. “It was generally accepted that the streets would be like the rest of Manhattan, lined with retail stores.”

__________________
I have respected your views, so I expect you to do the same for me.

costarican blu

Wow the new architectural style remember so much to the perished old towers; but just a little bit twisted i think! And now with this new structural system of foundations and general structure, i hope that it's more difficult to bring them down! great advance newyorkers greetings

TalB

Port slows down W.T.C. work for residents
Volume 21, Number 18 | The Newspaper of Lower Manhattan | Sept. 12 18, 2008

Port slows down W.T.C. work for residents

By Julie Shapiro

While the Port Authority looks for ways to speed up the rebuilding of the World Trade Center, one Port official said Monday that they are slowing some work to satisfy residents.

The Port Authority is more than 10 weeks late in excavating the sites for Tower 2 and the Tower 4 offset, and that’s no accident, said Glenn Guzi, a Port program manager.

“Frankly put, we’ve slowed it down,” Guzi told Community Board 1 Monday night.

Pat Moore, a C.B. 1 member who lives at 125 Cedar St. across from the site, nodded with approval. This was a far different response than the Port Authority gave last winter when they were under a similar deadline for turning the sites for Towers 3 and 4 over to Silverstein Properties. Back then, the Port pushed noisy jackhammering to 21 hours a day right outside Moore’s window.

“The world doesn’t understand why [the W.T.C. site] is not completed and further along,” Moore told Guzi at C.B. 1’s W.T.C. Redevelopment Committee meeting. “I hope you say to them there’s a community of people everyone encouraged to move down here, [and they] have to be taken into consideration.”

The Port was supposed to turn the sites for Tower 2 and the Tower 4 offset over to Silverstein on June 30 and has been paying them a $300,000-a-day penalty ever since, a total of more than $20 million. At the beginning of the summer, the Port said the sites would be ready by mid-August. Silverstein is building Towers 2, 3 and 4 once the Port excavates the sites.

The Tower 2 work will be done within a week, but the Tower 4 offset — the portion of the Tower 4 site that supports the 1/9 subway box — will take another two to six weeks to excavate, Guzi said. In addition to slowing work for the sake of residents, unexpectedly difficult field conditions also caused delays.

After the meeting, David Stanke, who also lives across from the site, said the Port should not use the community as an excuse.

“They put themselves in a position where they need to abuse us to get it done, and now they blame us for not letting them abuse us,” Stanke said. He thinks the Port Authority should have figured out a way to protect the residents while working as fast as they could to get the job done.

At a press conference on Wednesday, Mayor Michael Bloomberg put a more positive spin on the residents’ feelings on Lower Manhattan rebuilding.

“For residents, it’s been exciting,” he said. “Yes you have traffic and noise and construction…but everyone is thrilled to see it take place. It’s better than nothing happening.”

Something the residents weren’t excited about at Monday’s C.B. 1 meeting was the likely closure of Vesey St. between Church and W. Broadway. That block is already closed to traffic but is a major pedestrian corridor, particularly now that the temporary PATH entrance moved to Vesey St. and W. Broadway.

“We absolutely, completely understand this would not be an ideal situation,” Guzi said. “We know it would have an adverse impact…[but] safety is a paramount concern to the Port Authority.”

Guzi emphasized that the closure is not yet definite, but Quentin Brathwaite, assistant director of W.T.C. construction for the Port, described the closure as though it was a done deal.

Because the site for Tower 2 is excavated to 80 feet below street level, the only place for construction staging is on Vesey St. or the west side of Church St.

“We are going to need the only possible space available to us,” Brathwaite said of expanding the site into Vesey St.

To accommodate pedestrians, the Port is working with the city to widen sidewalks on a detour route along Church St., Barclay St. and W. Broadway, Brathwaite said.

Guzi promised to come back to the board before the closure is official.

Julie@DowntownExpress.com

__________________
I have respected your views, so I expect you to do the same for me.