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
The law firm Chadbourne & Parke is rumored to be checking out space at 1 World Trade Center. A report in The New York Times today hinted that a deal is close, but brokers familiar with the firm pointed out that a lease was far from done.
The Times wasn't the first to reveal that Chadbourne has been looking at the 2.6 million-square-foot skyscraper being developed by the Port Authority. Last year, the New York Post's ace real estate columnist Steve Cuozzo pointed out that the firm was one among a handful of law firms considering the building. 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
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
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
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
For too long, it seemed like the 9/11 Memorial might never get built, certainly not in time for 10th anniversary of the attacks. (There is a reason The Observer categorizes all our ground zero stories as "The Neverending Story." The 9/11 Memorial opened to the public last week, but with access tightly regulated—it's still a very active construction site—it can be a little hard to believe it. But in case there was any doubt, we now have that most official of proof something exists: the memorial has been added to Google Maps. Read More
In perhaps the final capstone to the 9/11 commemorations, Larry Silverstein has found his final tenant for 7 World Trade Center. Considered a boondoggle by many when Mr. Silverstein decided to rebuild the glass tower shortly after the attacks, it opened in May 2006 and was slow to find tenants, the first of which was the New York Academy of Sciences.
Slowly but surely more firms arrived, and now MSCI has joined them on the 47th through 49th floors of the 52-story building—it was the tallest structure downtown until recently being surpassed by its big brother. Read More
The World Trace Center site may be the most famous construction project since the Tower of Babel, if not the most contentious.
But most of the work has taken place behind some 13,000 feet of blue construction fencing, and so to the extent that we have watched the progress, we’ve mostly relied on the images sent out from behind the fence—many of them the work of Joe Woolhead. The official photographer for Larry Silverstein and the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, he has spent almost every day for the past seven years documenting the slow pace of construction at Ground Zero. If it was not one of his images gracing a magazine spread or appearing in a documentary still, then he almost certainly was helping to guide the lens of Annie Liebowitz, Robert Polidori, NOVA, or Korean news crews—whomever might be parachuting in for a shoot.
No one has spent more time at the World Trade Center site than Joe Woolhead. No one knows it better. To see it through Joe Woolhead’s eyes, or lens, is to witness the halting, hectic, heartfelt transformation of the 16-acre site from ground zero to the World Trade Center, from a warzone back into a workaday corner of the city. Read More
