By Julie Shapiro
Wall St.’s financial tailspin will not jeopardize the World Trade Center rebuilding, Port Authority leaders promised Tuesday.
“We will remain the financial center of the world and Lower Manhattan will be that home,” Chris Ward, the Port’s executive director, told reporters. “Someone will fill those buildings.”
Ward was referring to the five office towers that will rise on the World Trade Center site, restoring the 10 million square feet of office space lost on 9/11.
The Port still plans to build that office space and “Nothing that has happened in the economy has changed that,” said Anthony Coscia, the Port’s chairperson.
Coscia acknowledged that the slowdown is diminishing demand for office space — “It would be naïve to think otherwise,” he said — but he cautioned against looking at just the small picture of this week’s crisis or the downturn of the past several months. It would be premature to switch the Trade Center’s focus away from financial firms, he said.
The Port itself is in a strong position because the bi-state agency relied on a conservative financial program, steering clear of the “esoteric” and “exotic” financial products that are now causing trouble, Coscia said.
Still, Wall St.’s struggles could prevent firms from investing millions in new headquarters. Silverstein Properties plans to build Towers 2 and 3 with trading floors to attract financial firms.
The markets have already affected the only two potential deals made public so far to bring financial companies to the rebuilt Trade Center. JPMorgan Chase was supposed to build its new headquarters, complete with trading floors, at Tower 5, but after Chase acquired the failing Bear Stearns (along with Stearns’ Midtown headquarters and trading floors), the firm has soured on the non-binding agreement to build trading floors at the W.T.C.
And at Tower 3, Merrill Lynch was in talks with Silverstein Properties over building headquarters on the site, but Merrill backed out this summer after the Port announced that all Trade Center projects were over budget and behind schedule. Then Bank of America acquired Merrill Lynch this week, throwing into question what will happen to the more than 2 million square feet Merrill leases in the World Financial Center. That lease does not expire until 2013.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg addressed the financial tumult Monday, saying the city “is as well positioned as it’s ever been to handle turmoil on Wall St.”
Despite the downturn, Manhattan’s office vacancy rate is only 5.4 percent, less than half the national average, Bloomberg said.
The mayor mentioned the questions that remain about A.I.G., a company with more than 7,000 employees in New York City, many of them in Lower Manhattan.
“A.I.G. is a company with many strengths, and I expect it will survive,” Bloomberg said.
For a concrete image of survival, New Yorkers can look west of the World Trade Center where Goldman Sachs’ new headquarters is under construction in Battery Park City. The building topped out this summer and is expected to open next year. Of the city’s large investment banks, Goldman, so far, has seemed to have done the best avoiding the pitfalls that have toppled some of the other giants.
It will be years before any of the Trade Center projects are complete, and Ward, the Port’s executive director, is scheduled to release his updated report on the deadlines and budgets for the site Sept. 29. During a Port Authority board meeting Tuesday he gave few hints about what the report would reveal, and at times he sounded daunted by the task of finding answers to the 15 issues he promised to resolve by the 29th.
“Perhaps we set an overly ambitious deadline of Sept. 29,” Ward told the board. “We are literally working around the clock to bring this analysis to conclusion to meet that date…. There are still many final decisions to make.”
Ward later added that the Sept. 29 report “will not be the end of the process.”
Ward listed several priorities, including the PATH redesign, the vehicle screening center and the Greenwich St. corridor, which he called an “essential spine of transportation.”
Neither Ward nor Coscia promised to get the memorial, with the forest of trees and pools in the tower footprints, open by the 10-year anniversary of 9/11.
“We fully expect we will do everything in our power…to deliver something on the 10th anniversary that will allow for some level of dedication to that event,” Coscia said after the board meeting. “How far along that project is is a work in progress.”
Ward said the Port has not decided whether to redesign the belowground PATH mezzanine to make it easier to construct. Doing so would help the memorial open by 9/11/11.
At the board meeting, Steven Plate, director of W.T.C. construction for the Port, detailed progress on the PATH hub, where workers have finished installing 44 arches for the east-west passageway. The arches, made in Spain, are the first part of Santiago Calatrava’s design for the train station to take shape at the site, and Port Authority board members were curious how it went, especially since the rest of Calatrava’s station looks too complicated and expensive to construct.
“It went without any hitches,” Plate said. “It went rather well.”
All the budgets came in at or below the engineers’ estimates, he said.
Gov. David Paterson listed the PATH station as an important priority for the site in a speech last Friday, second only to the memorial.
Coscia, the Port chairperson, opened Tuesday’s meeting with a moment of silence for the recent seventh anniversary of 9/11. The board then approved several new contracts for the memorial and Freedom Tower.
Tuesday marked the first meeting of the World Trade Center Redevelopment Subcommittee, formed to focus the Port’s attention on the rebuilding. Rather than meeting in the Port’s headquarters on Park Ave S., the subcommittee met on Broadway near the Trade Center site, where Port employees focusing on the Trade Center are based. Working close to the site helps Port employees understand what happens there on a day-to-day basis, Coscia said.
“There is a certain amount of symbolism to us actually conducting our business here,” Coscia said at the meeting. “But it is not purely symbolism.”
Julie@DowntownExpress.com
