We all know just how cutthroat New York Real Estate is, but in case you were looking for some hard numbers, the Times serves them up cold: if it comes down to your life or rentable square feet, well, don’t ask a question you don’t want to know the answer to. Commercial property owners, which successfully lobbied in 1968 — a good 57 years after the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire — to effectively halve the number of required exits for tall buildings, are fighting any revisions to codes that might expand their responsibilities.
The Times peice is some pretty muddly analysis, noting that ‘5 of 6’ firestairs in the WTC were unusable during the 9/11 attacks, but that number refers to the strike zones and above (which the Times fails to note). The 9/11 commission concluded that almost 99% of those located below the strike zones were successfully evacuated (though it should be noted that this was due to more sophisticated command and control systems put in place by major tenants after the 1993 bombing, and the active insurrection of most workers who ignored fire command instructions to stay put). Allowing that the stairs would be evenly dispersed, doubling the number of exits would have only added one functional staircase. But unlike the standard canard of real estate, location isn’t everything here. If the stairs that were in place were more fire resitant — one recommendation is for a 4-inch concrete liner that may have been adequate to withstand even the 2,000 degree fire at the WTC for a short while, provided the entries were airlocked — this may have made a difference without taking away as many precious square feet. But even this is too much for the landlords.
But the line should be drawn somewhere, and this is a key point since the escape statistic noted above presents the ugly logic for future potential terrorists to try and strike the lowest possible floor (tactically the easiest option as well). So quality of escape route is as crucial as the number, but unfortunately no one is seeing the light on this point either. But don’t worry, your boss really is worried about you. Quoth the Times:
One major financial company, while building a new headquarters, used a computer model to study how many of its employees would able to evacuate if three bombs were exploded inside 20 minutes on different floors, according to Ms. Lancaster. The plans showed that many employees would still be able to escape.
Many. Not most, but many. That makes you feel all warm inside doesn’t it? Oh, wait, that’s probably the fire nipping at your nose.
And just when you thought real estate agents weren’t vampires.
There’s a nominal amount of activity going on at 6 Hubert Street, formerly the site of Vinyl/Arc. The building seems to have changed hands (or at least plans) in May, which necessitated the closing of the club. Sinvin was listing the property (at $18 or $26 million, I can’t remember, and their listing is gone). It was being marketed as a potential residential conversion. The property information looks like hieroglyphs to us (there are others way better at interpreting them), but from what we can discern, it is an exercise in tax obfuscation without peer (anyone who runs an entity under the name ‘Last Gasp Realty’ can’t be taken real seriously). This is confirmed by the building register on the Hudson Street (157) entrance, which lists about 15 tenants for a building that looks by and large abandoned.
It all seems a little shady because of the current activity. The doors on Hubert and Collister have been graced with a new coat of black paint (erasing the simple graphic that denoted the entrance to Arc), and the basement, previously filled with construction debris, is fairly clean, with a very interesting exception: a very precise hole is being dug just under the Hubert Street entrance. With the excavated dirt lining the hole, and its dimensions, it pretty much looks like a grave site. Now, there’s plenty of reasons for such a project, though we can’t name any really good ones right now (tip on Jimmy Hoffa?), but given the air of decrepitude of the building, and the hazy ownership record, the bare bulb throwing a garish light on the crispy hewn orifice some three feet by eight, in a basement no less, makes it just a little creepy.