What does a billion — excuse me, make that $1.4 billion, but, really, who is counting? — get you downtown? Nothing, apparently. This week’s theater of the absurd downtown featured a scuffle about Liberty Bonds. Set to expire in just about four years (roughly the same amount of time that has elapsed since the attacks, if you want to measure progress), the $3.35 billion in government funds can buy a lot of something, provided that something is agreed upon, designed and built. Or it can buy more of the $1.4 rabbit hole built so far — currently filling that are “pay[ing] off the mortgage on the complex and on rent and legal and development fees”.
So we know at least one thing got built downtown with this money: Libeskind’s TriBeCa loft, from which he looks woefully downtown and laments the tattered remnants of his master ‘plan’ reduced now to a shopping mall, replete with a galleria, a train station filled with three levels of shopping, one tower that is clad in large part with opaque stone, and a memorial that, even as more and more elements are removed, gets more expensive every passing month.
Even as everyone is maneuvering for the scratch, no one is really ponying up with hard numbers (what do these people do all day?). There are no solid estimates for infrastructure development (what part of site prep the PANYNJ will pick up, how much is covered by the PATH station, who will pay for the bus garage), the memorial (RFP for construction management released this week, only what, two years after design was complete?), the Freedom Tower or the shopping mall. The most recent budget scrambler was the decision to eliminate the plan for a single chiller (which would provide the cooled water necessary to run air conditioning systems) for the entire site. In a fit of 1970’s planning, the PANJNY went ahead and designed it (remember the discussion about the holes in the PATH station and the Freedom/Drawing Center? They were for the chiller.), then someone found out it was going to pulverize large numbers of Hudson River fish (that we gave up Westway to protect) and now everyone is scrambling to redesign HVAC systems.
About $6 billion is available, between insurance funds and Liberty Bonds. Silverstein’s position is he should get all of it, since, based on the lease he signed, building buildings wasn’t part of his expense, so he should get the money (which isn’t even enough, by most measures) to return to the site the amount of office space square footage lost (absurdly, the lease he has is still in effect). Everyone else, upon hearing this argument, looks meaningfully at 7 WTC, which has made the news [sic] only once in the past few months, and that was because the Architect’s Newspaper had a party there (and it wasn’t to celebrate signing an anchor tenant). Given that the PANYNJ seems to have the authority to build their godawful mall regardless of what Silverstein says, the 200+ feet of fortified cladding on the Freedom Tower, and the general confusion about the site, none of the five towers proposed for the site proper will be very attractive as rental properties (for towers two thorugh five, it’s not even clear where the lobbies would be). This means 7WTC, also very nearing completion, should be the easiest to rent. And we’ve seen how that has gone.
There isn’t much in the way of a counter-proposal, beyond a request that Silverstein cough up the lots where the mall would sit (interesting how that got designed in such a transparent way, huh?), and let the PANYNJ do their retail thing, with towers to follow when the market rebounds. Which is another way of saying never. But don’t give any props to that move, since it presumes that after memorializing, the most significant activity that should occur on the site is shopping. The argument that the previous retail was so successful ignores the 50,000 people who worked there, perhaps another 20,000 who passed through on their commute, and another pile of tourists who didn’t arrive on site to honor the dead. By planting basically a suburban New Jersey mall at the start of everyone’s evening commute was a stroke of retailing genius, but that isn’t a condition that can be recreated — nor should it.
Silverstein claims he is ready to go on everything, provided he gets the money. A passel of state pols are in support of this, but mostly because it is an expedient political position: far better to foist a boondoggle on New York that won’t be proved as such until they all secure their next term rather than appear like they can’t get anything done. The silver lining is Chuck Schumer, who said moneys should be contingent on renting something. Silverstein also thinks this eagerness should be rewarded with a cool $100 million in development ‘fees’, an idea no one likes.
So we have a bunch of unrentable buildings, some of which seem unlikely ever exist except as chances for more insurance and federal funds to be whittled away by various fees, a bad mall, and an expensive memorial. What about those cultural buildings? Well, no one is holding their breath, but some folks still want to talk about the process, and that all the energy spent in thinking about how culture at the site might still have a valid role. On Monday, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council will gather Tom Bernstein (head of the Freedom Center, which was disinvited from the site recently by Pataki), Thelma Golden (Director and Chief Curator at The Studio Museum in Harlem), Hans Haacke (renegade artist turned developer courtesy his frenemy Giuliani), Mike Wallace (author of Gotham: A History of New York City), and Robert Yaro (voice of reason extraordinaire from the Regional Planning Association) at the New School to wrestle with these issues (7:30pm at The Theresa Lang Community and Student Center, The New School for Insipid Branding, 55 West 13th Street).
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1,000,000,000.
What does a billion — excuse me, make that $1.4 billion, but, really, who is counting? — get you downtown? Nothing, apparently. This week’s theater of the absurd downtown featured a scuffle about Liberty Bonds. Set to expire in just about four years (roughly the same amount of time that has elapsed since the attacks, if you want to measure progress), the $3.35 billion in government funds can buy a lot of something, provided that something is agreed upon, designed and built. Or it can buy more of the $1.4 rabbit hole built so far — currently filling that are “pay[ing] off the mortgage on the complex and on rent and legal and development fees”.
So we know at least one thing got built downtown with this money: Libeskind’s TriBeCa loft, from which he looks woefully downtown and laments the tattered remnants of his master ‘plan’ reduced now to a shopping mall, replete with a galleria, a train station filled with three levels of shopping, one tower that is clad in large part with opaque stone, and a memorial that, even as more and more elements are removed, gets more expensive every passing month.
Even as everyone is maneuvering for the scratch, no one is really ponying up with hard numbers (what do these people do all day?). There are no solid estimates for infrastructure development (what part of site prep the PANYNJ will pick up, how much is covered by the PATH station, who will pay for the bus garage), the memorial (RFP for construction management released this week, only what, two years after design was complete?), the Freedom Tower or the shopping mall. The most recent budget scrambler was the decision to eliminate the plan for a single chiller (which would provide the cooled water necessary to run air conditioning systems) for the entire site. In a fit of 1970’s planning, the PANJNY went ahead and designed it (remember the discussion about the holes in the PATH station and the Freedom/Drawing Center? They were for the chiller.), then someone found out it was going to pulverize large numbers of Hudson River fish (that we gave up Westway to protect) and now everyone is scrambling to redesign HVAC systems.
About $6 billion is available, between insurance funds and Liberty Bonds. Silverstein’s position is he should get all of it, since, based on the lease he signed, building buildings wasn’t part of his expense, so he should get the money (which isn’t even enough, by most measures) to return to the site the amount of office space square footage lost (absurdly, the lease he has is still in effect). Everyone else, upon hearing this argument, looks meaningfully at 7 WTC, which has made the news [sic] only once in the past few months, and that was because the Architect’s Newspaper had a party there (and it wasn’t to celebrate signing an anchor tenant). Given that the PANYNJ seems to have the authority to build their godawful mall regardless of what Silverstein says, the 200+ feet of fortified cladding on the Freedom Tower, and the general confusion about the site, none of the five towers proposed for the site proper will be very attractive as rental properties (for towers two thorugh five, it’s not even clear where the lobbies would be). This means 7WTC, also very nearing completion, should be the easiest to rent. And we’ve seen how that has gone.
There isn’t much in the way of a counter-proposal, beyond a request that Silverstein cough up the lots where the mall would sit (interesting how that got designed in such a transparent way, huh?), and let the PANYNJ do their retail thing, with towers to follow when the market rebounds. Which is another way of saying never. But don’t give any props to that move, since it presumes that after memorializing, the most significant activity that should occur on the site is shopping. The argument that the previous retail was so successful ignores the 50,000 people who worked there, perhaps another 20,000 who passed through on their commute, and another pile of tourists who didn’t arrive on site to honor the dead. By planting basically a suburban New Jersey mall at the start of everyone’s evening commute was a stroke of retailing genius, but that isn’t a condition that can be recreated — nor should it.
Silverstein claims he is ready to go on everything, provided he gets the money. A passel of state pols are in support of this, but mostly because it is an expedient political position: far better to foist a boondoggle on New York that won’t be proved as such until they all secure their next term rather than appear like they can’t get anything done. The silver lining is Chuck Schumer, who said moneys should be contingent on renting something. Silverstein also thinks this eagerness should be rewarded with a cool $100 million in development ‘fees’, an idea no one likes.
So we have a bunch of unrentable buildings, some of which seem unlikely ever exist except as chances for more insurance and federal funds to be whittled away by various fees, a bad mall, and an expensive memorial. What about those cultural buildings? Well, no one is holding their breath, but some folks still want to talk about the process, and that all the energy spent in thinking about how culture at the site might still have a valid role. On Monday, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council will gather Tom Bernstein (head of the Freedom Center, which was disinvited from the site recently by Pataki), Thelma Golden (Director and Chief Curator at The Studio Museum in Harlem), Hans Haacke (renegade artist turned developer courtesy his frenemy Giuliani), Mike Wallace (author of Gotham: A History of New York City), and Robert Yaro (voice of reason extraordinaire from the Regional Planning Association) at the New School to wrestle with these issues (7:30pm at The Theresa Lang Community and Student Center, The New School for Insipid Branding, 55 West 13th Street).