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Originally Posted by BStyles
With this render(it blew me out of my shoes) with the amount of space they have there, it looks like they're extending the Winter Garden, while maintaining the view.
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The plan is to remove the stairway. Basically what you would have is an elargeded area for pedestrian circulation - not exaclty the Wintergarden we have today which holds many public events (the stairway serving as a sort of amphitheater).
http://tribecatrib.com/news/2010/oct...novations.html
Community Board Gets First Look at Winter Garden Renovations
By Matt Dunning
UPDATED Oct. 05
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Until this week, it had been difficult to visualize the World Financial Center’s soaring Winter Garden atrium without its signature marble staircase.
No more, as the building’s owners, Brookfield Properties, finally revealed their vision for a drastic renovation of the Winter Garden to a Community Board 1 committee Monday night; work that needs to be done to accommodate the western end of the Port Authority’s underground pedestrian walkway linking Battery Park City to the new World Trade Center. Their plans include a glimmering, two-story glass pavilion for the tunnel’s entryway, a sprawling food court overlooking the Hudson River and, indeed, the demolition of the grand staircase.
The semicircular staircase was rebuilt with exquisite care after it was crushed on Sept. 11, 2001.
“This is the first opportunity we’ve had to really open the [Winter Garden’s] doors to Lower Manhattan,” Brookfield’s Vice President of leasing, Daniel Cheikin, said of the glass entryway during a meeting with CB1’s World Trade Center Redevelopment Committee. Within the planned pavilion, six escalators rise from the western edge of the connector tunnel to meet a gaping proscenium where the grand staircase and a wide, east-facing viewing area is now located.
The elimination of the stairs would provide an unobstructed view towards the Hudson, an experience lost in the destruction of the footbridge that once connected the atrium and the World Trade Center. New escalators would be installed near the center of the atrium to account for the loss of access to the second level.
Cheikin said that Brookfield has spent more than two years and “several million dollars” developing its proposal.
“The idea is to create complete visual transparency between the center of the Trade Center site and the Hudson River,” he said.
But Cheikin said the reason the stairs must go is not an aesthetic but a practical one—to allow for the crush of pedestrian traffic that will set upon the Winter Garden once the connector tunnel is open in 2013.
More than 45,000 workers commute from Lower Manhattan to Battery Park City each day, and two-thirds of them are destined for the World Financial Center. Today, most of those workers use the temporary footbridge at Vesey Street to reach their offices. When the new pedestrian tunnel opens, Brookfield estimates it will see peak usage of more than 13,000 people per hour during morning and evening rush hours.
“This is the problem we’re trying to solve,” Cheikin said, adding that Brookfield initially believed leaving the stairs in place and adding escalators along the north and south walls of the atrium would have been the most logical solution. But, he said, traffic engineers hired by the company revealed that the 88-foot-wide, 15-foot-high wall supporting the staircase would have only served to choke pedestrian traffic if left in place.
“Their estimation was that on Day One, we would have a failed pedestrian system,” Cheikin said at the Oct. 4 meeting.
Members of CB1’s Battery Park City Committee, which was scheduled to receive the same presentation the following night, have already expressed opposition to the loss of the stairs.
“A lot of people there are very upset about the idea of losing those stairs,” said CB1 member and Battery Park City resident Bill Love at the Oct. 4 meeting. “I understand the problem with the traffic flow, but...those stairs are an iconic structure, they’re a great benefit to the community and I’d really hate to see them go.”
“We like those stairs, too,” Brookfield’s Executive Vice President Lawrence Graham responded. “We looked at solutions that [would have saved the stairs], and those solutions, believe it or not, were worse than the one we have.”
In a letter to Brookfield, city Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden was firmly critical of the plan to eliminate the staircase, noting that it would “create a significant void” in the Winter Garden given both their physical dominance of the space and their practical worth to atrium visitors.
It was believed by some that Brookfield’s plan to reconfigure the Winter Garden was driven by a desire to expand the retail space available in the atrium. Brookfield’s Vice President of Design and Construction, Sabrina Kanner, said that the stairs’ removal will increase the atrium’s public space by roughly 30 percent, but would have no significant effect on its retail space.
“There’s no real, appreciable increase to the amount of retail space we’ll have at the Winter Garden with this,” said. “This doesn’t even get us back to the amount of retail we had prior to Sept. 11.”
“Even though I love the stairs, and my kids learned to walk downstairs on them, we have to move on,” committee member Elizabeth Williams said. “I, for one, think it’s a terrific plan.”
Beyond the changes to the Winter Garden’s atrium, Cheikin said the company is also planning to install a 714-seat food court on the second floor—space currently occupied by retail spaces and the Grill Room restaurant—overlooking the North Cove, replete with take-away counters and test kitchens run by “local restaurateurs.” Below it, Brookfield hopes to erect a fresh-food marketplace.
“We really believe that we can take this from a 5-day-a-week retail center to a 7-day-a-week retail center,” Cheikin said. “We think we can support a lot of the demand that’s pent up in Battery Park City today.”
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i hate if when people still say "ground zero", i always tell them it's the WTC (site, complex, ...)! btw love the trees. 
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