The latest bad news at ground zero is that costs continue to mount for the rebuilding of the World Trade Center. A report that found costs rose 85 percent since the project began in 2006, to $14.8 billion, placed a great deal of responsibility for these cost overruns on prior leadership at the Port.
Yesterday, Mayor Bloomberg defended the Port's leadership and the importance of rebuilding, Read More
The Port Authority has just released the preliminary findings of its agency-wide review, the biggest, if least surprising, news of which is that the cost of redeveloping the World Trade Center continues to sky rocket. The price has risen from the $11 billion estimated in 2008 to a current estimate of $14.8 billion. That is almost twice as expensive as the project was initially expected to cost when first announced in 2006, with a price tag of $8 billion. Read More
This morning, upon further reflection, The Observer was prepared to retract last week's story about the negativity hanging over the World Trade Center site yet again. A reader had contacted us to say that it was a silly notion, considering that what had changed was something far more significant—rationality had come to the the project, replacing the emotions that had too long dominated the scene. Read More
So maybe it wasn't a bombshell after all, the "news" yesterday that Larry Silverstein might not be able to finish 3 World Trade Center all the way, leaving it instead as a seven-story retail and mechanical stump for the time being. In a statement, the downtown don insists he will find a tenant, and he has about two years to do it before he must truly pull the trigger and decide to cap the tower or to keep building. Read More
Was last year magical for the World Trade Center site, or was it merely a mirage? The Observer has heard more than once of a sort of media blackout—promises of cooperation so as not to taint the 10th anniversary of 9/11 with the same backbiting, political infighting and constituent-driven trench warfare that had reigned almost since the towers fell.
Instead, there were celebratory milestones. One World Trade Center was finally skyrocketing toward heaven, putting up nearly a floor per week. Condé Nast signed its game-changing lease for half of said tower. Governor Andrew Cuomo announced an agreement with the long-suffering Greek Orthodox Church. And of course, the 9/11 Memorial opened on time, and quite a bit further along than originally hoped. The city was triumphant.
Was that real progress, though, or simply a one-year reprieve out of respect for the dead? With the exception of last week’s news that Condé would be taking additional space at 1 WTC, the bad news has been piling up all year. Read More
While Mayor Bloomberg and Governor Cuomo fight over the fate of the 9/11 museum, which almost certainly won't open as planned on September 11, 2012, the 9/11 Memorial Foundation quietly announced some good news at the end of December. The foundation has selected a five-member board for the still very much up in the air ground zero cultural center.
The move is largely logistical, according to Downtown Express, which first reported the arrangement. If a board had not been selected, the project would have forfeited $100 million in funds from the essentially defunct LMDC. Read More
Most of the attention on the 9/11 memorial has been focused on Lower Manhattan for this, the 10th anniversary of the attacks. There was the grand opening on Sept. 11, of course, but also budget woes at the museum and wrangling over the fate of a Greek Orthodox Church.
For a more festive memorial, however, travel across the waters of New York harbor to Staten Island, where a crèche honoring the first responders who died 10 years ago has been installed. Read More
On Monday, The Observer was atop the Standard for the launch party of ASAP. Dizzy with champagne, we did a double-take while waiting for the elevator on our way out. It was not the booze, but indeed the World Trade Center had been lit up for the holidays, just like last year. Now, with Read More
We always kind of knew this intuitively, but The Architect's Newspaper did a really nice job of putting World Trade Center retail into perspective. Read More
Attendance at the newly opened 9/11 memorial has been underwhelming, to say the least. Despite the millions of dollars that went into the project, over 30% of people who have reserved tickets to visit the site in recent months have failed to show, DNAinfo reports.
It's not all bad news, though. Despite the AWOL ticket holders, tens of thousands of people are still visiting the site each week. Read More
One of the enduring challenges at the World Trade Center—besides who will lease up the offices—has been what the base of Tower 1 would look like. Fears persisted that the 185-foot concrete shell demanded by the N.Y.P.D. would look like exactly that, a giant bunker. The solution, arrived at by a harried team of architects in less than a month back in 2005, was waves of crenelated glass that would turn the entire structure into a giant crystal.
The only problem was, that approach proved almost impossible to produce when the fabricators began creating mock-ups of the structure earlier this year. The glass would shatter too easily, a major issue for a high-traffic tower that could be susceptible to another attack. The architects at SOM returned to the drawing board and created a solution that is at once very similar to and totally different from their original proposal, a new plan that was approved yesterday by the board of the Port Authority.
The main goal was achieving an aesthetic solution to this ongoing challenge, though it turns out the biggest different between the two plans is economic—the new curtain wall will cost less than half the price of the original one, $37.2 million. Read More
Brooklyn's new (entirely uncontroversial) Barclays Center is slated to open next September with pomp and circumstance brought by Brooklyn's own Jay-Z before (hopefully) playing host to what will be the newly-minted Brooklyn Nets sometime around Halloween. But the current lockout that has currently caused cancellation of more than a quarter of this NBA season seems to be worsening as players have rejected a new offer and are now filing federal suit to force NBA ownership into court.
The NBA be damned, we officially have a gameday at "The Brit BrickHouse" (we're entirely taking credit if this nickname catches on).
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It was only a year ago that the St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church beside the World Trade Center looked doomed, at least to a side street if not all together. But Andrew Cuomo, in one of his first direct acts at the Port Authority, brokered a deal to put the church back in its pride-of-place spot across from the 9/11 Memorial, as George Pataki promised a decade ago.
The Architect's Newspaper looks into the new arrangement and turns up some new details about the plans for the church, as well as some new renderings that make a compelling case for the church. Read More
The Observer is both heartened and saddened by the news that the fine designers at SOM have come up with a solution for the base of 1 World Trade Center. On the one hand, this means the tower will have a nice shiny base after all to make it look not so monolithic Read More
Recently percolating rumors about the NYC Human Resources Administration taking up space at 4 WTC upon its completion might be just that, according to The Post.
4 WTC is shaping up as Larry Silverstein's less expensive option to his 7 WTC development, with spaces reportedly going at $10-$15 less by square foot, but that isn't apparently stopping Silverstein & Co. from trying to find potential private sector tenants to outbid public ones like the Federal Government's General Services Administration, which just took up a space at 1 WTC. Read More
