By Julie Shapiro
The Port Authority is spending at least $75 million to get the 9/11 memorial open by the 10th anniversary of the attacks.
Gov. David Paterson and Mayor Michael Bloomberg leaned heavily on the Port over the last several weeks to meet the 9/11/11 date for the memorial, and the Port complied by making changes to the W.T.C. PATH station that will speed up the memorial.
“Until it’s done there’s a gash in Lower Manhattan that really I think is a hole in our hearts as well,” Bloomberg said Thursday.
The Port Authority prioritized the memorial in its much-anticipated report on the World Trade Center site, released Thursday. The report shows more than $1 billion in cost overruns and delays of one to three years on several of the site’s major projects.
The PATH hub will cost $3.2 billion, up from $2.5 billion, and likely will not open until 2014. The Freedom Tower won’t open before 2013 and will cost $3.1 billion, up from $2.9 billion. The Vehicle Security Center won’t open before 2012 and will cost $633 million, up from $478 million. Disconcerting as those results are, Paterson said they are not as bad as he had feared, referring to earlier reports that showed projects delayed until 2015.
“In the first days of my administration, I couldn’t really find anyone that knew what was being built, who was building it, when it would be completed,” Paterson said. “For the first time, we have an understanding of the construction realities on the ground.”
Both Paterson and Bloomberg spoke approvingly of the Port’s commitment to have the basic elements of the memorial — the plaza, waterfalls in the tower footprints and parapets with the victims’ names — open by 9/11/11.
“We will have a gathering place for the 10-year anniversary which fits that day’s importance,” said Christopher Ward, the Port executive director who Paterson charged with getting the W.T.C. site back on track.
The memorial will not stay open permanently after the anniversary, but will be open “intermittently,” Paterson said.
To accelerate the memorial, the Port added columns to architect Santiago Calatrava’s design of the PATH hub’s underground mezzanine. That will allow the Port to build the mezzanine’s roof (which is the memorial’s floor) years earlier.
“We turned the project literally upside down,” Ward said.
The solution of decking over the PATH mezzanine will cost the Port Authority an extra $75 million.
Bloomberg said the Port Authority “didn’t go as far as we had hoped” on redesigning the PATH station, likely referring to an alternative plan reportedly put forward by Silverstein Properties to simplify the PATH design further. But he still called the Port’s work a step in the right direction.
Another consequence of the push to get the memorial open by the 10-year anniversary is that the 1 subway train and PATH trains will face service interruptions starting in 2009. The 1 train will terminate at Chambers St. for six weeks in the summer of 2010 and possibly for part of 2009. PATH service to the World Trade Center will be suspended on many weekends from 2009 to 2011.
Paterson called the outages “one of the tough decisions” the Port Authority had to make, and he said he wouldn’t ask the sacrifice of riders if he didn’t think the 10-year anniversary date was possible.
Better news for the community is the Port’s creation of the Office of Program Logistics to communicate with residents, businesses and elected officials and mitigate the effects of the construction. Work at the site will peak in 2011 and 2012 with more than six times more manpower on the site than is there now.
Another piece of good news is that Greenwich St. will open in 2012, several years earlier than expected, because the Port Authority simplified the supports for the No. 1 subway line.
One change the Port Authority emphasized Thursday did not apply to a particular project but rather to the bi-state agency’s way of doing business: The Port Authority promised accountability for the deadlines and budgets presented.
“Life is risky, but we will manage to the risk,” Ward said. “The governor, the mayor and the public can hold us accountable.”
Bloomberg appeared ready to do just that, as he and Ward stood together at a press conference Thursday.
“If we don’t hit our milestones,” Ward said, “you will hold us accountable, and we will explain — ”
“You can rest assured,” Bloomberg interrupted, drawing laughs from a crowd of reporters.
Notably missing from the Port Authority’s report was a schedule for Towers 2, 3 and 4, which developer Silverstein Properties is building; a budget or schedule for Tower 5, which will rise where the damaged 130 Liberty St. currently stands; a budget for the memorial and museum; and a budget or schedule for the performing arts center.
Larry Silverstein released a statement Thursday saying he was studying the report to gauge its impact on his buildings. The Port Authority is more than three months late in giving Silverstein the site for Tower 2 and is paying him a $300,000-a-day penalty for the delay. No one mentioned the delays on Thursday during the Port Authority’s board meeting and subsequent press conference.
The performing arts center often looks lost in the shuffle, much to the chagrin of residents, and it barely appeared in the Port’s 69-page report.
“The performing arts center is a project which is still in its, I won’t say infancy, is still in its planning implementation phase,” Ward said Thursday. “But the very design that we are going forward with and the engineering below grade is anticipating that that project will move forward.”
The PAC currently has $55 million in the bank from the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, but the rest of the money still has to be raised. It is unclear who will raise the money or when fundraising could begin. Bloomberg, speaking Thursday about the impossibility of raising more money for the memorial, named the same difficulty that would currently face PAC fundraising.
“We’ve raised as much in major contributions as we can given the economic realities that the city and country are going to be facing in the next couple years,” said Bloomberg, who is chairman of the memorial museum foundation.
In June, when Ward set out the 15 W.T.C. challenges the Port would have to resolve, he suggested moving the temporary entrance to the PATH station to speed several projects on the site, including the performing arts center. That move no longer looks like an option.
Paterson struck an optimistic note Thursday, but he acknowledged that the tough work still lies ahead.
“This doesn’t make this job any easier,” Paterson said. “There are significant challenges that we’re going to have to face and that we’re going to have to overcome.”
Julie@DowntownExpress.com
