Port Authority Confessional: Audit Reveals Dysfunction
An early model for Frank Gehry's WTC performing arts center. (Courtesy Gehry Partners)
The long-expected audit of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey is available, and—apart from the opaque bureaucratese—it reads just like the dysfunctional family memoir you might expect. In fact, the word dysfunctional is at the top of the summary letter sent to Governors Chris Christie of NJ and Andrew Cuomo of NY. To wit, the Navigant Consulting assessment concluded that the PA is “a challenged and dysfunctional organization suffering from lack of consistent leadership, a siloed underlying bureaucracy, poorly coordinated capital planning processes, insufficient cost controls, and a lack of transparent and effective oversight of the World Trade Center program.”
Slideshow> WTC Update: Compare and Contrast, Then and Now
One World Trade in January of last year (left) and today.
It’s been one year since we began walking the circumference of the World Trade Center site and taking photos of the progress. A lot can happen in a year. The city and state are in a tussle over the Memorial Museum bringing construction there to a halt. Larry Silverstein has threatened to cap Tower Three at at seven stories instead of 80 if he doesn’t get a lead tenant by the end of the year. Pat Foye, the new head of the Port Authority has called the PA’s Trade Center focus a “mission drift” and ordered a special committee to audit the years overseen by his predecessor, Chris Ward. And now The New York Post reports that the underground loading dock for One World Trade won’t be completed by the time the first tenants move in.
News from the last couple of months has been so bad that we thought we’d sift through some of our old photos to focus on the work that was completed over the past year. And while One World Trade continues its march upward (it’s nearing the 1,776 feet), other projects on or near the site are almost complete or are on schedule to be finished in the next couple of years. Brookfield‘s renovations of the World Financial Center have begun. Work at Fulton Street Transit Station by Grimshaw continues to chug forward. CUNY’s Fiterman Hall by Pei Cobb Freed was recently capped. And a new visitors center for the memorial opened on West Street.
Port Authority Threatens to Sue 9/11 Museum for $300 Million
The pools at the 9/11 Memorial. (AN / Tom Stoelker)
In the days immediately following the show of solidarity on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, the Port Authority and Governor Cuomo retreated to one corner and Mayor Bloomberg and the Sept 11 Memorial and Museum Foundation to another over accusations of $300 million in cost overruns that neither party has agreed to pay. Construction of the museum has ground to a halt decreasing the likelihood that the Museum will open next year as promised.
Quick Clicks> Glass, Steel, Foam, Reel
The living area of the 1928 Maison de Verre in Paris, with its modular shelving and ivory rubberized floor. (Courtesy WSJ Magazine. Photo: Todd Eberle.)
Glass wear. Alistair Gordon visits the entrancingly translucent Maison de Verre in Paris, Pierre Chareau‘s 1928 house of glass blocks, and speaks with current owner Robert M. Rubin about his ongoing restoration of the early modernist icon. Here’s a preview of Gordon’s feature that will appear in the next WSJ Magazine.
Steely resolve. The Calatrava-designed PATH hub for the World Trade Center is now over budget to the tune of $180 million, reports DNA. The stratospheric overrun is due in large part to the decision to use extra steel to “harden” the building for security reasons. The Port Authority Board passed the revised budget on Thursday morning, promising to bankroll the extra costs with a contingency fund.
Featuring…foamcore! San Francisco’s Museum of Craft commandeers a space near the Moscone Center for a pop-up installation that presents architectural model-making as a form of craft. The show offers a glimpse into the process of 20 notable SF-area architecture firms, writes the San Francisco Chronicle.
Awards go immaterial. Producers Bruce Cohen and Don Mischer talk to the Hollywood Reporter about the set design for this year’s Oscars (airing this Sunday), revealing that they’ll rely on projections to create a constantly changing, animated environment within the Kodak Theater. Architect David Rockwell, who designed the sets in 2009 and 2010 (and snagged an Emmy in the process), this year passed the torch to production designer Steve Bass.
The Future Future of JFK Terminal 4
JFK Terminal 4, with 30 additional gates, as planned for some time in the future. (CLICK TO ZOOM)
If this rendering of Terminal 4 at JFK looks familiar, good. That means you’re reading, as it, or something very much like it, was in our story last week about the Port Authority and Delta’s plans for expanding the terminal. What is different, though, if you look closely, is the number of gates. This rendering was released by Delta last week, though it initially confounded us because the talk had been of nine new gates, not the 30 we counted when we compared it to the terminal’s current layout, which you can see and compare after the jump. It turns out, the wrong rendering had been released, and this is in fact the ultimate plans for the future development of Terminal 4, with 10 new gates on Concourse A (right) and 11 more added to Delta’s nine on Concourse B (left). That makes for a total of 46 gates—larger than some mid-sized airports—up from a current 16. No wonder they have to tear down Terminal 3 to make room for more plane parking. But not before Hal Hayes has something to say about it. Read More
Calatrava PATH Station Takes Flight
It’ll be at least 4 years before Santiago Calatrava’s scaled-back, over-budget World Trade Center PATH station is completed (though as our upcoming feature on Lower Manhattan showcases, everything’s been a long time coming, but it seems to have finally arrived). Still, from the start of the interminable process, we’ve had some of the flashiest renderings around to tuck us in at night. Now comes an illustrated video courtesy the Journal‘s Metropolis blog that gives us our clearest view yet of just what’s planned, as well as what Calatrava meant when he told the New Yorker a while back that he was striving for something akin to Grand Central—a truly great room where the interiors, not the exteriors, would be what truly matters. If this video is any indication, despite all the cutbacks, he’s succeeded grandly.
Not a Bridge too Fair
A rendering of a proposed replacement for the Goethals Bridge. It may look different in the end, as the bridge is being developed as a public-private partnership, but the Port Authority seems committed to a strong design regardless. (Courtesy PA)
Ever since the tragic collapse of the I-35 bridge in Minneapolis in 2007, politicians and public authorities nationwide have been scrambling to get theirs up to code. New bridges, or at least proposals for them, abound, some nice, some not so much. Fortunately, the Port Authority appears committed to a high-design bridge. The authority released a request for information [PDF] this week, a precursor to an RFQ. The Observer picked up on the PA’s interest in building the thing with a public-private partnership, an approach with a mix of benefits—no upfront costs—and risks—less control or long-term revenue. But what is promising, nonetheless, is the PA’s commitment to constructing what could be called a statement bridge. Read More
The Public-Private Pit
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If you build it... Well, will ya? (D-Box/Courtesy Silverstein Properties)
The most recent deal to get the final pieces of the World Trade Center site off the ground was supposed to be, or so the players involved made it seem, the final one. No more handouts, no more delays. But as our colleague Eliot Brown over at the Observer points out, this is far from the first deal that has been brokered between the Port Authority and Silverstein Properties. It is in fact the fourth, and it quite possibly has brought the public’s total investment in the private portion of the site—to say nothing of such public expenditures as the $3.2 billion (formerly $2 billion) PATH station—to possibly $2 billion. “While the ultimate public tab may never come to be that high, what is clear is that the amount of public assistance for what is now to be two private World Trade Center towers with 4 million square feet is exceptional, and far more than ever advertised or anticipated when the rebuilding plan was sold to the public,” Brown writes. Read More
9/11 Memorial Pools Almost Framed
99.8 percent of the 9/11 memorial pools' steel framing has been erected.
Today, the Port Authority and National September 11 Memorial & Museum announced the near completion of steel framing for the design’s memorial pools. 99.8 percent of the project’s 8,151 tons of steel has been installed to date. For what it’s worth, when completed the Memorial will boast more steel than was used in the construction of the Eiffel Tower. In the coming months, workers will begin the installation of the granite panels that line the walls of the pools, which will be the largest manmade waterfalls in the country when finished, pumping 52,000 gallons of recycled water per minute. A mockup of the waterfalls was built in Brooklyn in January. Follow this link to see an AP video of memorial designer Michael Arad discussing the motivations behind the project.
Freedom At 200 Feet
Construction on One World Trade Center, formerly known as the Freedom Tower, has reached 200 feet above street level.
The Port Authority announced today that steel erection for One World Trade Center has reached the 20th floor, or 200 feet above street level. For this particular project, that means that 8,000 tons of structural steel have been installed by DCM Erectors—700 tons more than all the steel in the Eiffel Tower. Currently, ironworkers are installing 16 giant steel nodes, some as big as 175 tons, which will act as joints between the framing of the podium and the rest of the tower. From here on out construction should move much faster, and completion is expected in 2013. The first 20 floors required very complex framing, whereas the remainder of the erection will be standard office floors. You can view more images of the construction at the Port Authority’s Flickr page.
Ground Zip, Zero, Zilch
A photo of the World Trade Center site from January 12 shows progress on the memorial (center), 1 WTC (top left) and Tower 4 (bottom right) but not Tower 2 or Tower 3 (top right). (WTCProgress/Flickr)
That’s how much the Port Authority owes developer Larry Silverstein, after an arbitration panel’s ruling yesterday, which Silverstein Properties announced in a press release today. The developer had been seeking monetary damages and reduced rents because, Silverstein argued, the PA had delayed in turning over the sites of Tower 2 and Tower 3, also known as 200 and 175 Greenwich, designed, respectively, by Norman Foster and Richard Rogers. The arbitrators, who Silverstein tapped in July, found this not to be the case, though it is not entirely clear why as their decision has not been publicly released. Read More
Terminal B
The Port Authority has laid another brick in it's modernization of Newark Airport's Terminal B.
Today, The Port Authority awarded a $59.8 million contract to a New Jersey construction company to complete the next phase of work in an ongoing project to modernize Newark Airport’s Terminal B. VRH Construction Corp. of Englewood got the job of installing new check-in counters, baggage handling systems, and airline offices for domestic departures in an old baggage claim area on the lower level. The Port Authority, whose architectural office conducted the design work, is spending $324.6 million in the overall project to enlarge the terminal to make way for an increase in passengers, and expects the modernizations to be completed in 2012.
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