What will it take to get this finished?
World Trade Center site faces fresh delays
Thu Oct 2, 2008 2:34pm EDT
NEW YORK (Reuters) - The Freedom Tower, centerpiece of the plan to rebuild Manhattan's World Trade Center, will not be completed until 2013(WHAT????!!!), well past the original target date of 2009, the landowning agency for the site said on Thursday.
The 1,776-foot (541-meter) tower, which is meant to symbolize the city's revival after the September 11, 2001 attacks, will cost $3.1 billion, said Christopher Ward, executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.
The Freedom Tower is the 16-acre site's most important office building, but other features will also be delayed, including the underground part of the memorial museum, a mass transit hub and part of the subway service that runs under it, said Ward, whose agency is overseeing the project.
Other parts of the memorial to the nearly 3,000 who perished -- the plaza, waterfalls, displays of victims' names and a gathering area -- will be finished by the 10th anniversary of the attacks, the agency promised.
The delays are the latest hurdles in the reconstruction of the World Trade Center, which has repeatedly stalled due to fights over insurance and wrangles between the major players -- state, city and federal agencies and developer Larry Silverstein, who leased it two months before it was destroyed.
Ward, who was appointed three months ago, was charged with issuing new and realistic cost estimates and timetables.
However, as the financial crisis grew worse this summer, many construction projects in the city and around the country were affected. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has noted that commodity prices, which had skyrocketed in recent years, have fallen and said this may help ease the cost burden.
Several major subways run through the site, in addition to the PATH trains that link Lower Manhattan with New Jersey, and these links were supposed to keep running during construction.
But now the No. 1 line will close for six weeks in the summer of 2010, and possibly also in part of 2009. PATH trains to the site will be shut some weekends from 2009 to 2011.
The hub, expected to cost $3.2 billion, will not be ready until the fourth quarter of 2013 or the second quarter of 2014. Its cost has spiraled by hundreds of millions of dollars, partly due its complexity, and it now will be simplified further by adding columns to the soaring open mezzanine envisioned by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava.
A spokesman for Silverstein, who is building three office towers on the site, had no immediate comment. The agency has already fallen behind in site preparation work for Silverstein, and paid stiff fines to the developer as a result.
One problem is the demolition of the Deutsche Bank building, just south of the site, in order to build a $633 million vehicle security center. The work was halted last summer after two firefighters died in a fire there.
The U.S. government has bowed out of the security aspect of project, which now will open in the first to third quarters of 2012, said Ward.
(Editing by James Dalgleish)
Prev
I definetly agree that this project take time and be built with the highest quality and effort. 
Linear Mode
