By Julie Shapiro
Only some of the 9/11 memorial plaza will open on the 10th anniversary of the attacks, and even that part will be mostly closed to the public until the fall of 2012, the Port Authority said this week.
Those who visit the memorial on 9/11/11 will see water flowing into the pools in the tower footprints, with the names of the attack victims inscribed on the parapets around the falls. Much of the plaza will be open, but the trees are not likely to be in place, and the memorial pavilion and a nearby vent shaft will still be under construction — not to mention the five office towers and train station that will be rising around the memorial.
Chris Ward, executive director of the Port Authority, envisions the 10th anniversary as a series of events and ceremonies lasting several weeks and drawing past presidents and international leaders. Afterwards, the memorial plaza would once again close to the public for another year until the fall of 2012, Ward said. The underground museum and memorial pavilion is expected to open in 2013.
“Given that it’s a construction site, I think it would be wrong to have open access,” Ward told City Councilmember Alan Gerson at a council hearing Monday. Ward hopes to work with the memorial’s foundation to provide some access, but that is subject to safety and security concerns.
Gerson asked if any part of the memorial would be open to people who do not make special arrangements through the foundation.
“During this interim period, that would be unlikely,” Ward replied.
Last week, Gov. David Paterson gave the first hint that the memorial would be open only “intermittently” after the anniversary, as Downtown Express reported online Oct. 2.
Ward testified at Gerson’s hearing several days after releasing the Port’s much-anticipated report on the World Trade Center site, which shows $1.5 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. 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.”
The Port Authority is making the memorial the top priority and will spend at least $75 million extra to get it open for the 10-year anniversary of the attacks.
Paterson and Mayor Michael Bloomberg, chairperson of the National September 11 Memorial & Museum foundation, 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 — but the governor and mayor remain disappointed that the full memorial will not open on time.
“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 last week.
Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver told Downtown Express that having the memorial open temporarily on the anniversary is “better than nothing,” but he added, “Rather than having a real and practical memorial, it’s more symbolic for it to be there for the 10th anniversary, but it won’t be there available and accessible two weeks later.”
Joe Daniels, president of the memorial foundation, also expressed his disappointment.
“Fully completing the memorial by the 10th anniversary remains our ultimate goal, and the report does not promise that,” Daniels said at Gerson’s hearing Monday. “While we were glad to see steps taken to prioritize the memorial, we’re going to keep pushing to complete its development even faster and more efficiently.”
Daniels wants to see the core and shell of the memorial pavilion and nearby vent structure complete by the anniversary, so the tree-studded plaza can be complete as well.
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.
Decking over the PATH mezzanine will cost the Port Authority the extra $75 million.
One change the Port Authority emphasized last week did not apply to a particular project but rather to the bi-state agency’s way of doing business: The Port 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 last 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 last Thursday saying he was studying the report to gauge its impact on his buildings. The Port Authority was more than three months late in giving Silverstein the site for Tower 2 and was 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, but the Port Authority said Tuesday that the excavation of Tower 2 and the Tower 4 offset is now complete.
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.”
At Gerson’s hearing Monday, Ward acknowledged that having more information about the future of the PAC would make his job easier.
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,” Bloomberg said.
PAC advocates have been saying for years that the city should allow fundraising to begin because the potential donor list was different from the memorial, and that the two projects would not compete for dollars.
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, though the Port Authority will reconfigure the temporary entrance so Greenwich St. can open in 2012, several years earlier than expected.
Paterson struck an optimistic note last week, 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
