TalB

Mayor takes new stab at closing L.M.D.C.
Volume 21, Number 19 | The Newspaper of Lower Manhattan | Sept. 12 -18, 2008

Mayor takes new stab at closing L.M.D.C.

By Julie Shapiro


Downtown Express photo by Elisabeth Robert

Mayor Bloomberg called for disbanding the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation in an appearance in Battery Park on Sept. 10.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg wants to disband the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation and transfer its functions to the city.

Bloomberg called on Gov. David Paterson Wednesday to end the state-city agency’s six-year run at the helm of Downtown rebuilding. That would slice into the bureaucracy that is delaying work at the World Trade Center site and particularly the former Deutsche Bank building, Bloomberg told reporters.

“The multiple levels of authority just keep getting in the way,” Bloomberg said. “I don’t think necessarily that the city can do a better job than the L.M.D.C., but it’s another layer of bureaucracy.”

Bloomberg, who appoints half the corporation’s board, wants the L.M.D.C. to turn its weightiest responsibility — the demolition of the former Deutsche Bank building — over to the Lower Manhattan Construction Command Center, another city-state agency.

“We’ve got to get the Deutsche Bank building down and down safely,” Bloomberg said. Replacing the L.M.D.C., which owns the building, with the L.M.C.C.C. means “one less” agency involved, Bloomberg said.

“Somebody has to do the work,” he said. “With the L.M.C.C.C., we have a say in it.”

The city would also take over the L.M.D.C.’s economic development efforts. The federally-funded corporation was created by former Gov. George Pataki at the end of 2001 as a subsidiary of the Empire State Development Corp. After Bloomberg took office at the beginning of 2002, the governor granted the city equal appointments to the agency, but it has always been dominated by the governor.

Paterson released a statement Wednesday about W.T.C. rebuilding that did not mention the L.M.D.C.

“The mayor and I share a sense of disappointment and frustration at the unacceptable pace of the ground zero rebuilding,” Paterson said in the statement.

Bloomberg first outlined his idea in an op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal Wednesday. Paterson, in his statement, called the essay “an important contribution to our ongoing dialogue,” but he would make no commitments until the Port Authority, which owns the W.T.C. site, releases its update on W.T.C. budgets and schedules later this month.

Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver told Downtown Express he was glad to see the mayor finally make ground zero a priority, after years of “too many other priorities and too many other developments.”

“It’s unfortunate that it took seven years to do that, but I’m glad we’re here now,” Silver said.

However, Silver said the mayor should focus on getting his city agencies to cooperate with the L.M.D.C. rather than disbanding it.

“They’re doing the job,” Silver said of the L.M.D.C. “They are the only agency that’s designed to coordinate between all the agencies involved in the construction and cleaning up at ground zero…. I don’t think it should be eliminated.”

Bloomberg fielded questions about the future of the L.M.D.C. at a press conference Sept. 10 that was held to invite New Yorkers to sign a steel beam for the 9/11 memorial.

Asked whether the state would surrender some of its rebuilding power to the city, Bloomberg replied, “I assume everyone at the state level would try to do what’s right. I can’t imagine anyone would let petty [politics] get in the way.”

The L.M.D.C. would have to stay in existence, at least in name only, to channel the federal funding from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. When Pataki tried to disband the L.M.D.C. in 2006, he was not able to go through with it because HUD stood in the way, according to city and other sources. HUD never acknowledged that. The city began taking on a larger role in L.M.D.C. projects after Pataki was thwarted by HUD.

Bloomberg said Wednesday that Paterson could dissolve the L.M.D.C. without HUD’s permission.

“The federal government has nothing to do with it,” Bloomberg said. “The L.M.D.C. is a state organization.”

After consulting with a member of his staff, Bloomberg clarified that the L.M.D.C. would have to stay in existence on paper, but Paterson has the power to transfer all of its responsibilities away.

Brian Sullivan, a HUD spokesperson, declined to comment, saying in an e-mail to Downtown Express that the L.M.D.C.’s future is “essentially a state and local issue.”

“HUD’s not involved in this discussion,” Sullivan wrote.

L.M.D.C. and L.M.C.C.C. spokespersons declined to comment on Bloomberg’s proposal.

The crux of Bloomberg’s argument to disband the L.M.D.C. is the lack of progress at 130 Liberty St., the former Deutsche Bank building. Under the L.M.D.C., the Deutsche Bank decontamination and demolition has been plagued with delays and mishaps — the most serious being the fire in August 2007 that killed two firefighters, which District Attorney Robert Morgenthau is investigating. The D.A. is considering charging the city with the deaths of the firefighters in indictments later this month, according to news reports. The L.M.D.C. is also being investigated by Morgenthau.

Speaker Silver said that many of the problems with the Deutsche Bank site happened years ago, long before Gov. Paterson took office. This version of the L.M.D.C., led by Chairperson Avi Schick, is doing well, Silver said.

Paterson and Schick both attended Silver’s reelection party Tuesday night.

Deputy Mayor Robert Lieber stood alongside Schick at a press conference in 7 W.T.C. Tuesday and gave no indication that the mayor was about to advocate dissolving Schick’s agency. Lieber sounded satisfied with the city’s role on the site, saying that the city “finally has a seat at the table,” referring to the Steering Committee the Port convened to evaluate priorities and deadlines.

The Deutsche Bank site is essential to the future of the World Trade Center because it will be the entry point for Silverstein Properties’ construction trucks to build Towers 2, 3 and 4, Bloomberg said Wednesday.

The L.M.D.C. currently plans to have the building down by next summer, a prospect that the L.M.C.C.C.’s takeover would “greatly enhanc[e],” Bloomberg wrote in the Journal. Bloomberg wants the L.M.C.C.C. to issue monthly progress reports on the demolition.

“The public has a right to know whether we are meeting our goals,” Bloomberg wrote.

The L.M.C.C.C. was the public face of the Deutsche Bank project before the fire, but the L.M.D.C. took back that role after the fire. The L.M.C.C.C. now “provides technical and construction support to the L.M.D.C. and makes recommendations on how to deconstruct and abate the building,” said Deborah Wetzel, spokesperson for the L.M.C.C.C.

“The L.M.triple-C has a lot of institutional knowledge and a lot of familiarity with the building,” said Julie Menin, chairperson of Community Board 1. “They could really hit the ground running.”

Menin, who is also on the L.M.D.C. board, said she supported disbanding the agency as long as that didn’t delay work on 130 Liberty St. or prevent the community from getting the federal funding the L.M.D.C. has yet to distribute.

The community has long been critical of the L.M.D.C.’s management of the Deutsche Bank building, and local residents sounded the alarm on safety concerns years before the fatal fire. C.B. 1 had a fresh reason for concern this week after the Daily News reported that cigarette packs and beer cans were found in the Deutsche Bank building. A worker’s discarded cigarette started last summer’s fire.

“This is very disturbing,” said Paul Stein, who chairs the New York State Public Employees Federation W.T.C. Committee. Stein spoke at C.B. 1’s W.T.C. Redevelopment Committee meeting Monday night. “The L.M.D.C. has messed up badly,” he said. “We’re worried they’re going to mess up again.”

Workers are supposed to check their cigarettes at the entrance of the site, but URS Corp., L.M.D.C.’s representative on the site, found two empty cigarette packs and one with seven cigarettes remaining, along with two beer cans, on the building’s third floor Aug. 26, L.M.D.C. spokesperson Mike Murphy said. The L.M.D.C. called the city, who sent in the Fire Department to investigate. The Fire Department found more empty packs on the first and sixth floor, Murphy said. No work is going on on any of those floors and they are off-limits to workers.

The L.M.D.C. is waiting for the Fire Department to finish its investigation before taking action. A C.B. 1 member asked if the culprits will get more than just “a stern talking to,” and Murphy said the L.M.D.C. may reassign workers.

“We’re taking this seriously,” Murphy said.

The W.T.C. Committee unanimously passed a resolution calling on the L.M.D.C. to be more transparent about safety problems on the site. It was the first resolution about 130 Liberty St. the board passed since immediately after the fire.

Julie@DowntownExpress.com

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

Daquan13

Yeah, they are probably part of the reason why the extreme slowness swans around Ground Zero's planned facelift!

TalB

Wall Street crisis rattles dreams for new towers at World Trade Center site
Wall Street crisis rattles dreams for new towers at World Trade Center site

BY DOUGLAS FEIDEN
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER


Smith for News

With several financial giants collapsing - and others teetering - many experts wonder who will occupy the Freedom Tower and other World Trade Center skyscrapers developed by Larry Silverstein.

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.

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.

"The big question is what the crisis means for projects that are not fully financed," said Richard Anderson, president of the New York Building Congress. "Will all three Silverstein buildings go ahead, and if so, on what kind of time frame?"

dfeiden@nydailynews.com

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

Daquan13

I think that they putting the carriage before the horse.

Every damn time there's a financial downfall or crisis, rumors start flying like nobody's business about Ground Zero supposedly having "white elephants" for office towers!!

TalB

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/22/nyregion/22rocks.html
At Ground Zero, Scenes From the Ice Age

By DAVID W. DUNLAP
Published: September 21, 2008


David W. Dunlap/The New York Times

Excavation at the World Trade Center site has uncovered, among other geologic features, a 40-foot glacial pothole.


David W. Dunlap/The New York Times

A worker is framed by bedrock that was scoured by a retreating glacier 20,000 years ago.

Those who say the World Trade Center site is changing at a glacial pace have no idea how right they are.

A fantastic landscape in Lower Manhattan — plummeting holes, steep cliffsides and soft billows of steel-gray bedrock, punctuated by thousands of beach-smooth cobblestones in a muted rainbow of reds and purples and greens — has basked in sunlight this summer for the first time in millennia.

This monumental carving was the work of glaciers, which made their last retreat from these parts about 20,000 years ago, leaving profound gouges in the earth and rocks from the Palisades, the Ramapo Mountains and an area of northern New Jersey known as the Newark Basin.

Plumbing these glacial features and souvenirs has been critical in preparing the foundation for Tower 4 of the new World Trade Center, being built by Silverstein Properties. The concrete footings from which its columns rise must rest on firm bedrock. Engineers need a clear understanding of the rock’s contours.

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

Engineers knew in advance that there were “discontinuities” in the bedrock at the southeast corner of the trade center site, where Tower 4 is situated. Some of these were revealed in the 1960s during the construction of the original slurry wall. (George J. Tamaro, who supervised that job for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, is a retired partner of Mueser Rutledge.)

And when parts of the slurry wall were rebuilt after 9/11, engineers found areas where the rock anchors that stabilize the wall would not hold, meaning there were voids in the bedrock.

Borings through the ground also showed large discrepancies in the elevation of the rock underneath. “It was extreme from the variation you would interpret to what we actually encountered,” Mr. Pontecorvo said.

Obviously, the bedrock topography could not be mapped with enough precision until all the soil was removed and the surface was fully exposed. But besides being an engineering necessity, the unearthing of geological features, especially a 40-foot depression known as a pothole, has offered scientists a rare window into the deep past.

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

Ms. Moss and Mr. Pontecorvo are scheduled to give an illustrated lecture on the site at 7 p.m. Wednesday at the Tribute W.T.C. Visitor Center, 120 Liberty Street, opposite the pothole.

“It’s been called the Grand Canyon of Lower Manhattan,” Mr. Pontecorvo said.

Charles Merguerian, chairman of the geology department at Hofstra University and a consultant to Mueser Rutledge on the trade center project, put it even more simply: “Beautiful!”

“It is very unusual to see such features near sea level,” he added.

Shown photographs of the rocks, Sidney Horenstein, a geologist and environmental educator emeritus at the American Museum of Natural History, said, “You don’t find such an array of rock types in the few places in the city that the glacial deposits are exposed.”

Across much of the trade center site, bedrock level is roughly 70 feet below street level. In the southeast corner, however, the pothole adds another 40 feet to the depth, meaning that its bottom is about 110 feet below street level.

Yet when the pothole filled with rainwater this summer, it looked like nothing so much as a little mountain pond. Crevices around the edge were filled with pockets of densely packed cobblestones, possibly some of the very stones that the glaciers used to do the carving.

“As the ice passed over New Jersey,” Ms. Moss explained, “it picked up local rocks such as red shale and sandstone and gray basalt from the Palisades. As ice melted from the advancing glacier, raging streams of water flowed in front of it. The strong currents picked up the sand, gravel and boulders and carried them downstream across the World Trade Center site.

“As these rocks bounced across the bedrock, essentially sandblasting the surface, the softer layers started to erode out and the harder rock left behind became polished. In places, the water swirled in whirlpools of varying sizes, carving out deep potholes and larger basins.”

Along the east side of the pothole, the rock layers run vertically — not horizontally. The result, where the surface has been carved away in a concave form, is an abstract canvas of swirling, concentric rings; not unlike a gouge in a wall that reveals many layers of old paint.

This speaks of a period far more ancient than the glaciers, about 500 million years ago, when the edges of the colliding North American and African continental plates got shuffled together.

“That’s when all this got pushed into a vertical orientation,” Dr. Merguerian said. He estimated that the rock around the pothole had once been 20 miles below the surface, based on the presence of a high-pressure mineral called kyanite.

Ultimately, geology at the trade center site is in the service of construction, meaning that the pothole and other features are either being covered, filled in or blasted away. “It’s nice to look at,” said Robert B. Reina, a supervising structural engineer at Mueser Rutledge, “but it’s all got to go.”

Construction workers have developed an appreciation of this otherworldly site, even as they have labored to obliterate it. For instance, Joe Racanelli, a foreman, has been collecting those smooth and colorful cobblestones from New Jersey and lugging them home to the Bronx.

“I can’t help it,” he admitted.

And a mechanic who introduced himself simply as Al made it plain that this was one New York pothole he would miss.

“I think they should keep it,” he said. “Turn it into an aquarium. Fill it with fish. Do something special — not just another building.”

__________________
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