Dispatch from Ground Zero
Five years is enough time for builders to construct a small city in China. In lower Manhattan, it’s only the first chapter for the big pit at Ground Zero. But finally it has begun to stir, with leaders coming together and construction starting for real.
Travel hundreds of feet down the long paved ramp into the construction zone, and the towers of Lower Manhattan seem twice as tall. There’s nothing natural about this canyon: To your left you glimpse the well known “slurry wall” of concrete and steel tie-backs, which keeps the Hudson River’s waters at bay. On this route downward you also pass directly over the Twin Towers’ impressive footprints. Teams have placed plywood boards over their outlines, and this construction zone remains still, except for the PATH train that zooms over part of the former south tower.
Not so at the northwest corner of the site, directly in front of the ramp, where a small team of about 20 construction workers is excavating down to bedrock and driving footings for the Freedom Tower. Workers are also taking down what’s left of the Twin Towers’ old parking garage, whose remains include rows of spiky rebar and cross-like column remnants; removing old sewer pipes to be sold for scrap; relocating utilities located between PATH tracks to allow room for more footings; preparing large woven metal blankets to place over blasting sites; dumping dirt, metal, and concrete into loading trucks.
Much of the ground is muddy, since groundwater continually seeps into the site and has to be pumped out. The outline of the future 1,776-foot-tall tower is marked with dumpsters and with piled dirt around the site’s edges.
Construction is banging, wheezing, and beeping away here and at the nearby permanent PATH station construction zone. But this is nothing compared to what the site will soon be. Ground Zero will be hosting $11.8 billion worth of construction in the next six years, according to the Lower Manhattan Construction Command Center, which oversees construction on the site. This includes super-tall World Trade Center towers 1 through 5, the memorial and museum, the new PATH station, Frank Gehry’s Performing Arts Center, and Snøhetta’s visitors’ center. Meanwhile, the five-block radius around Ground Zero will see more than $20 billion in construction by 2020. Most of it is residential, but also includes projects like the Fulton Street Transit Hub and the Goldman Sachs tower.
Merely organizing all of this construction will be a nightmare. For one, there will be immense traffic coming in and out of the site delivering workers, steel, cranes, newly mixed concrete, and so on. The Command Center and construction management firm Liro Group have developed a master timetable and 3D model of the development process to help time it all. They meet with all the construction teams—not to mention developer Larry Silverstein, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the Battery Park City Authority, New York State and City Departments of Transportation, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority—on a monthly basis.
“This kind of concentration of work is unprecedented,” says command center director Charles Maikish.
Of course all of this work could come to a stop. The insurance money being used to build many of the five office towers might be lost in court cases. Tenants for these buildings may not materialize. Politics, as usual, can still get in the way. After all, the cornerstone for the Freedom Tower, meant to signal the start of construction, was laid two years ago. But for now the banging and wheezing will get much louder, and Manhattan’s great void will be filled again. Hopefully.
Sam Lubell
Architectural Record : August 10, 2006