TalB

Firm gets World Trade Center gold
Firm gets World Trade Center gold

BY DOUGLAS FEIDEN and GREG B. SMITH
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS

Sunday, September 28th 2008, 12:39 AM

The Port Authority plans to pay an engineering firm and its partners $374 million for design work on the World Trade Center Transportation Hub and five other Ground Zero projects, documents obtained by the Daily News show.

The bonanza for STV and partners comes with the projects years from completion, final design elements and price tags uncertain and nothing visible to passers-by but a vast pit west of Church St.

It also comes with questions about conflicts of interest. During the time STV was winning contracts from the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey, it was negotiating to buy an affiliate of a firm run by Anthony Sartor, the PA board member overseeing World Trade Center redevelopment.

Because of this, the commissioner in charge of rebuilding the 16-acre site was forced to repeatedly recuse himself from numerous votes regarding the mega project.

In August, STV wound up not buying Sartor's company. Nevertheless, during the time his firm was negotiating with STV Sartor attended an unusual meeting between the PA and STV to discuss the transportation hub - a project the PA predicts will net STV and partners a stunning $302 million.

That works out to $503 per square foot for a 600,000-square-foot transportation hub. In comparison, the architect hired to complete the 2.8 million-square-foot Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle got about $22.50 per square foot, sources said.

Besides the transportation hub, STV and partners were hired by the Port Authority to design an underground vehicle security center, WTC streets and infrastructure, and aspects of the performing arts center, the Freedom Tower and the September 11 Memorial.

The most expensive contract went to a joint venture, Downtown Design Partnership, to design the hub. DDP consists of STV, another engineering firm, DMJM Harris, and architect Santiago Calatrava.

The hub will connect multiple transit lines, including PATH trains and NYC Transit Authority subways, and features an extravagant winged entranceway. Its total costs have soared from $2.5 billion to $3.5 billion and may go higher.

In January, STV began negotiating to purchase a smaller engineering firm, Paulus, Sokolowski & Sartor, an affiliate of National Grid Energy Services. Sartor is CEO of Paulus and president of National Grid, although in a statement to The News he claims he hasn't had an equity stake in Paulus since 2000.

Sartor says he notified the Port Authority of STV's intentions to buy Paulus and began recusing himself from PA votes regarding STV's contracts.

In July, however, Sartor showed up at a meeting in the Park Ave. townhouse of the hub's architect, Calatrava, along with representatives of STV and other members of the Port Authority, according to a participant at the meeting.

The participant said the architect Calatrava did most of the talking and that he didn't recall Sartor speaking at the gathering.

"Commissioner Sartor acted prudently in this matter to eliminate both the appearance and any potential for a conflict of interest," said Sartor's spokesman, Timothy White.

Weeks after some aspects of STV's plans to buy Sartor's affiliate were disclosed in the New York Observer, the transaction was terminated.

Most of the payments to STV and partners were listed in Port Authority documents obtained by The News dated June that included "forecast at completion" costs. The estimates top all figures previously disclosed.

On Friday Port Authority officials insisted the estimates were not final, noting a specific list of costs and completion dates will be released this week.

"The forecast at completion numbers are pure speculation. We're in the middle of an assessment for the entire World Trade Center site, which we'll have out next week," said spokesman Steve Coleman.

The concentration of multiple contracts with one firm and its partners comes as the costs of all the multilayered Trade Center projects have ballooned and construction has fallen years behind schedule.

dfeiden@nydailynews.com

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

TalB

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/11/ar...calatrava.html
Post-9/11 Realities Warp a Soaring Design

By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
Published: May 10, 2009


Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times

The architect Santiago Calatrava with his current model for a transportation hub at ground zero in downtown Manhattan.


Courtesy of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey

A computer rendering of the interior of the World Trade Center transit hub as set out in Santiago Calatrava’s current design.

When Santiago Calatrava unveiled his design for a luminous glass-and-steel transportation hub for ground zero in January 2004, government officials touted it as a 21st-century version of Grand Central Terminal — one of the few bright spots in a development plan crippled by politics, petty self-interests and the weight of the site’s history.

We should have known better. During the next several years the project’s cost spiraled to $3.2 billion from $2 billion. The scheduled completion date was delayed, first by a couple of years, then several more. Mr. Calatrava, determined to save his design, worked slavishly to get the budget under control. In a misguided effort to avoid more controversy, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey enveloped the project in secrecy, essentially shutting the public out of the design process.

But even for those of us who had given up on the idea that anything good would ever emerge from ground zero, the unveiling of an elaborate new model of the revised design on Saturday at the Queen Sofía Spanish Institute was heart wrenching.

The model gives us the clearest picture yet of Mr. Calatrava’s vision. Dozens of minor improvements have been made; his structural pyrotechnics look as dazzling as ever.

Even so, Mr. Calatrava remains unable to overcome the project’s fatal flaw: the striking incongruity between the extravagance of the architecture and the limited purpose it serves. The result is a monument to the creative ego that celebrates Mr. Calatrava’s engineering prowess but little else. And it reinforces the likelihood that one day, decades from now, when the site is finally completed, it will stand as a testament to our inability to put self-interests aside in the face of one of America’s greatest tragedies.

The seeds of the design’s failure were there from the very beginning, in the byzantine politics of ground zero. At Grand Central the main hall plugs directly into a dense network of tracks. The power of the space stems as much from the constant movement of people across it — spilling down its grand staircases and in and out of the gates — as from the great vaulted spaces that frame it. It is a stunning tribute to a mobile society and the freedom that implies.

An obvious place to put a station at ground zero would have been at the northeast corner of the former World Trade Center site, just above the PATH tracks and the No. 1 subway. But by the time the Port Authority began planning the hub, this area had been declared sacred ground, and the loaded politics surrounding the site made it impossible to rearrange any of the pieces. Instead the hub was set on a large plaza on the other side of Greenwich Street, where it could connect to the N and R subways and the Fulton Street subway station further to the east.

To enclose the hub, Mr. Calatrava created a vast central hall, something like Grand Central Terminal’s, 50 feet below ground and underneath a soaring elliptical glass-and-steel dome. The dome was supported by a system of curved white beams that suggested the rib cage of a gigantic prehistoric bird. Two enormous wings rise out of the top of this form, partly sheltering a plaza on either side.

The magic of the design was a structural sleight of hand. In a traditional vaulted roof the two sides press in toward the central spine, which helps support them. Mr. Calatrava’s mechanical roof would open along this spine — with its wings moving up and down — and when it did, the entire structure would seem to be defying gravity.

Yet the impressive roof trick also served to detract attention from what was going on underground. To bridge the distance between his central hall and the trains Mr. Calatrava was forced to create a second hall that serves the PATH platforms at one end. At the other, a doorway connects to a corridor leading to the Fulton Street subway station a block away. The massive domed hall becomes a void at the center of a convoluted underground labyrinth that stretched four blocks from Battery Park City to Broadway.

The reason for the hall’s enormous scale was further put into question when state and city officials dropped the idea of creating a link to La Guardia and Kennedy airports. Though Mr. Calatrava’s hall was 14,000 square feet bigger than Grand Central’s, it would now serve only a small fraction of the passengers.

Mr. Calatrava has been struggling to solve these problems for years now. The model at the Spanish Institute shows a new version of the roof structure, which will have fixed wings to cut down on costs. The entries to the No. 1 and the N and R trains have been moved to the main axis at either end of the hall, making them more accessible. An elegant grand staircase now leads up to the Fulton Street corridor.

But more often than not, what you feel is the immense strain Mr. Calatrava and his clients are under to try to justify the hall’s existence. Retail space has been added along the base of the great hall and along a second-floor balcony, which should draw a few visitors but risks transforming the entire space into one of the world’s most excessive shopping malls.

And in a particularly perverse decision PATH riders won’t be able to get from the train platforms directly to the street. Instead they will have to walk halfway along the hall’s upper balcony and past dozens of shops before exiting into one of the flanking towers — a suffocating experience no matter how beautiful the spaces turn out to be.

These problems are amplified by Mr. Calatrava’s seeming refusal to disturb the sculptural purity of his creation. Some have already pointed out that only two small entries, at each end of the dome, connect the main plaza to the hall, as if the architect were afraid of exposing his inner world to the chaos outside. I noticed something else on my visit to the show: a ring of marble benches now surrounds the base of the glass dome, so that standing in the plaza you will be able to see only a small segment of the great hall below. Instead the eye is drawn up to the grandeur of Mr. Calatrava’s structure. Life is secondary.

All of this would be discouraging enough given the number of other worthy transportation projects in New York City. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority had to redesign its new Fulton Street station to keep within its tight budget, even though it will serve thousands more passengers a day. Despite years of planning, Pennsylvania Station’s cramped dehumanizing spaces remain one of the most shameful chapters in the city’s architectural history, partly because authorities can’t find a way to pay for a renovation.

Mr. Calatrava’s design also embodies a deeper, more troubling history: the toxic climate of those first years after the Sept. 11 attacks. While the city grieved, politicians were vowing to rebuild as fast as possible, as if that would somehow accelerate the healing process. Practical considerations were set aside. Jingoism ruled. Egotism dominated over softer, gentler voices.

Under such conditions it should surprise no one that what once promised to be one of ground zero’s most triumphant architectural achievements is hollow at its core.

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

TalB

WTC may go $1.1B over budget: Report rips poor management of PA as costs spiral out of control
WTC may go $1.1B over budget: Report rips poor management of PA as costs spiral out of control

BY Douglas Feiden
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

Thursday, May 21st 2009, 4:00 AM


The final designs for Towers Two, Three and Four of the Freedom Tower.

New York's Big Boondoggle just got bigger.

The World Trade Center Transportation Hub is near-certain to bust its $3.2 billion budget - and there's a chance it will cost more than $4.3 billion to build, the Daily News has learned.

That's a spike of as much as $1.1 billion from the Port Authority's "clear-eyed" estimate of only eight months ago, a review of Hub costs obtained by The News under the Freedom of Information Act reveals.

The December report by the Federal Transit Administration says it's 90% certain the Port Authority will blow a June 2014 deadline for opening the Santiago Calatrava-designed megaterminal.

The FTA study also estimated there's a 50-50 chance the Hub could cost $3.8 billion, shattering its budget by $600 million - with no funding for the extra costs.

"Project costs significantly exceed available FTA and local funding," the 61-page consultant's study said.

The grim news comes as Mayor Bloomberg hosts a summit today at Gracie Mansion in a bid to mediate a ferocious war raging between the PA and developer Larry Silverstein over the future of the 16-acre site.

Ballooning costs at the Hub - and their impact on the rest of Ground Zero - will be a hot-button issue confronting Gov. Paterson, New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver at the parley.

The price tag is expected to keep soaring: Add in overall project costs, like the Hub's below-grade, octupuslike infrastructure, and the tab is 90% certain to exceed $4.4 billion, the FTA report estimates.

There's a 90% certainty that building the grandiose train hall and its infrastructure - largely to benefit New Jersey's PATH commuters - will cost three times the $1.5 billion spent for the original World Trade Center.

There's also a 10% chance that the so-called Grand Central Terminal of lower Manhattan will leap in cost to $5.4 billion.

The FTA ordered the risk review to examine the PA's Oct. 2 World Trade Center assessment report, which set new time lines and budgets and which the agency dubbed a "clear-eyed analysis" of site issues.

The FTA consultants, New York-based Jacobs Carter Burgess, faulted the PA for its performance and competence in the report, finding the project's management "has not been strong" with "poor project controls (largely due to lack of experienced project managers)."

Both the FTA and the PA minimized the risks documented in the report:

"We're confident that we've mitigated the risks. The bottom line is that the Hub is on schedule and on the budget that we announced in October," PA spokesman Stephen Sigmund said.

He said construction cost escalation was no longer a problem, and that key bid packages - like a $338 million contract for Hub steel - were coming in at or below PA estimates.

FTA officials said the project's $3.2 billion cost was "achievable" with risk-mitigation efforts.

Blown timetables have marred the project from the start. Its original completion date was 2006, then this year, then 2011 and now June 2014. The FTA's report now cites a 50-50 chance of a November 2014 opening and a possibility of a May 2015 debut.

dfeiden@nydailynews.com

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

TalB

L.E.S. ‘beach pier’ won’t see W.T.C. steel storage
Volume 22, Number 21 | The Newspaper of Lower Manhattan | October 2 - 8, 2009

L.E.S. ‘beach pier’ won’t see W.T.C. steel storage

By Julie Shapiro

The Port Authority scrapped its plan to use Pier 42 for a staging area for World Trade Center construction after an outcry from local residents and elected officials.

The Port Authority wanted to use the Lower East Side pier to store steel beams for the PATH transportation hub starting early next year. Getting the beams to the World Trade Center site would have required about 60 truck trips a day through Lower Manhattan’s already-crowded streets.

“It was going to be a tremendous burden on the residents,” said Dominic Pisciotta, Community Board 3 chairperson.

Especially on top of the upcoming Brooklyn Bridge reconstruction and the many tour and commuter buses Downtown, the extra trucks would have been both a nuisance and a hazard, Pisciotta said.

“We were extremely concerned,” said Susan Stetzer, district manager of C.B. 3. “It was more loss of access to the waterfront. It was more trucks going all the way through from one side of Manhattan to the other. It was beyond a tipping point.”

Stetzer found out about the authority’s plan from another government agency in August and got local elected officials involved, including Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and State Sen, Daniel Squadron.

As a result of the pressure from the electeds and C.B. 3, the Port Authority announced last Thursday that it would not use Pier 42 for the steel. Instead, contractor DCM Erectors, based in South Plainfield, N.J., will bring the steel from New Jersey to the Trade Center site on an as-needed basis, traveling over the George Washington Bridge and down the West Side Highway at off-peak times. DCM will deliver more than 22,000 tons of steel to the site for below-ground work on the transit hub over the next couple years.

The new delivery method will be more efficient than using Pier 42, added Steve Coleman, a Port Authority spokesperson. The authority is also saving the money it would have paid to rent the pier from the city.

Squadron said it was “double good news” that the Port Authority listened to the community and upgraded its logistics plan at the same time.

Squadron and others had also been concerned that the Port Authority’s takeover of Pier 42 would prevent the pier from ever being turned into a community amenity. Under the city’s East River Waterfront plan, the unattractive, shed-covered, former working pier could someday become an urban beach, though the project lacks funding or a timeline. Squadron said it would be even harder to get funding for the beach if the Port Authority was using the pier.

And, given the World Trade Center site’s history of delays, several people also worried that once the authority got a hold of Pier 42, the agency would not quickly relinquish it.

“If they’re parked there till the World Trade Center is done…” Squadron trailed off.

Julie@DowntownExpress.com

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