http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/31/ar...er=rss&emc=rss
Ground Zero Arts Center: Time Is Not on Its Side
Deutsche Bank's site, at 130 Liberty Street, has been proposed as an alternative for the arts center.
A computer rendering of a preliminary design by Gehry Partners for a performing arts center at ground zero
By ROBIN POGREBIN
October 30, 2009
If preparations are not made — and funds are not provided — to lay the foundation for the performing arts center at ground zero within the next four months, the project will not happen.
That at least was the message that Kate D. Levin, the cultural affairs commissioner, delivered in urgent tones at a City Council hearing last week. “There is such a narrow window of opportunity to ensure that the site remains viable,” Ms. Levin told the Committee on Lower Manhattan Redevelopment on Oct. 21. “If we don’t take advantage of this opportunity, we believe it will be lost.”
After years of taking a back seat to other long-delayed development projects at ground zero, the performing arts center has suddenly come to the fore, as both a focus of discussion and a bone of contention. The underground work now being done by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the World Trade Center site, is expected to reach the location planned for the arts center in about four months.
When it does, if money is not in place to build structural underpinnings suitable for the large-scale project, construction is expected to bypass the site.
The issue is contributing to long-simmering tensions over ground zero between the city and the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, widely considered a state agency because it is a subsidiary of the Empire State Development Corporation, though its board is composed of both city and state appointees. In the first years after 9/11, Gov. George E. Pataki became the most visible public figure involved in the development of the World Trade Center site, and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg deferred to him. Recently, though, the city has taken a more assertive role, suggesting that divisions between the city and the corporation — along with other stakeholders, like the Port Authority and the developer Larry A. Silverstein — are likely to escalate.
In this case
the city, represented by Ms. Levin, is arguing forcefully for the importance of respecting the original master plan for ground zero, which calls for a performing arts center — the architect Frank Gehry was selected in 2004 to design it — in the area bounded by Fulton, Greenwich, Vesey and Washington Streets. Locating the arts center on the ground zero site “is key to the urbanism of that whole district,” Ms. Levin said at the hearing, and essential to “sewing together the revitalization of this entire area.”
The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, meanwhile, has been actively pursuing an alternate place for the arts center, south of ground zero: the Deutsche Bank building site at 130 Liberty Street, which the corporation owns and where it believes the arts center can be built much faster and more cheaply.
The work that Ms. Levin is so concerned about — the construction of footings and foundations for the arts center on the Trade Center site — is expected to cost about $40 million, according to the Port Authority, and the authority and the city are depending on about half of that to come from some $50 million over which the corporation has control. That money has yet to be released.
The corporation is now completing a feasibility study that it says will point up many advantages of the Liberty Street site. For one thing, it would provide an existing foundation — that of the Deutsche Bank building — and would mean that the center would not have to be built over a complex grid of train tracks and an emergency car exit ramp.
More important, perhaps, because the temporary World Trade Center PATH station now sits on the planned site for the performing arts center at ground zero, construction at that location could not start until the architect Santiago Calatrava’s permanent station to the south is completed. That will happen sometime in or after 2013, the Port Authority estimates, though others predict that the permanent station won’t be finished until 2016 or later.
Work at 130 Liberty, on the other hand, could begin as soon as 2011, according to the corporation, which recently announced that the much-delayed demolition of the Deutsche Bank building would begin next month and be completed by the end of 2010.
Various downtown officials — like John E. Zuccotti, a board member of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation and the chairman of Brookfield Properties Corporation, which owns buildings around the Trade Center site — support the idea of moving the arts center.
“I favor the other site,” he said in an interview, speaking of 130 Liberty. “It will ensure that the performing arts center is built and built quickly.”
According to early results of the feasibility study, cost estimates for the project came in at about $300 million for 130 Liberty Street and nearly twice that for the Trade Center site, largely because of the expected escalation in construction costs in coming years.
But
city officials say the development corporation has underestimated the complexity and cost of building at the Deutsche Bank site and the time it would take to start construction. “There is a lot of uncertainty about the schedule and cost for the 130 Liberty site, and a number of factors may very well make the site problematic,” Ms. Levin said on Friday. “Major access and design issues haven’t been resolved — the kinds of questions that can’t be answered without significant design time and additional costs.”
Meanwhile,
drawings for a foundation at the Trade Center site are 90 percent complete, said Andrew Winters, the director of the Mayor’s Office of Capital Project Development, speaking at the hearing. “The next step is construction.”
Complicating matters, a 2006 “memo of understanding” now in effect led to a swap in which the Port Authority agreed to give the development corporation the performing arts center site at ground zero in exchange for the Deutsche Bank site, which it planned to develop as commercial space.
Before the arts center could be switched to 130 Liberty, the Port Authority would have to agree to such a swap, which Ms. Levin testified would require that the authority give up 1.3 million square feet of development rights that could not be replicated at the ground zero location.
Christopher O. Ward, the authority’s executive director, said last week that his agency was moving forward under original plans for the arts center and that “any discussion of alternatives is preliminary.”
In a question-and-answer session with reporters after the Port Authority’s board meeting on Oct. 22, Mr. Ward said: “This is the city’s project, and they’re obviously clearly resolving that issue of should it be moved and where should it be moved to. Our efforts will marry up with their long-term plans.”
At the City Council hearing, the development corporation testified that it was “committed to supporting” the foundation work for the arts center at the Trade Center site. “We will provide the funds necessary to make sure” the site continues to be available to the performing arts center, David Emil, the corporation’s president, said.
What those “necessary” funds are, however, may be a matter of dispute; the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation is expected to challenge the Port Authority’s estimate that $40 million will be needed for underground structural work for the arts center.
At the hearing Mr. Emil also emphasized the limits of the ground zero location. “Construction can’t begin until the Calatrava PATH hub is complete and the temporary station is no longer required,” he said. “The critical thing for us is to make sure that we end up with a real site.”
Hovering over all of this debate are further huge questions, including who will raise money for the arts center’s construction and operation and who will ultimately oversee it.
City Councilman Alan J. Gerson summed up the confusion at the hearing of the Lower Manhattan committee, of which he is chairman. “Who’s in charge?” he asked: “Is it the L.M.D.C., is it the City of New York, is it the Port Authority? What agency or level of government has the responsibility for advancing the performing arts center, for making it happen?”
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Glad to hear that; the proposal never struck my fancy.
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