When the bladder bursts

From the NY Times:

On the last Sunday in October, with the storm on its way, railroad workers in yellow slickers unrolled a 90-foot-long rubber bladder at the gaping mouth of a tunnel on the West Side of Manhattan. They began filling it with water, 32,000 gallons. Once engorged, the bladder stood five feet high. It was a formidable plug intended to defend Pennsylvania Station against Hudson River waters surging from the west into the train yards, and from there into the station.

The bladder stood five feet high once it was filled with 32,000 gallons of water.
The plan, as a news release from the Long Island Rail Road said, was “to fight water with water.”

It looked like a good, prudent idea. Then the storm came.

The force of the rushing water simply shoved aside the bladder — approximate weight, 133 tons — and the flood moved toward Penn Station. Only the pitch of the tunnel diverted it away from the station and into another tunnel. The bladder was left in shreds.

As one railroad worker said, “There was so much water in the yards, you could have gone surfing.”

That episode came to mind on Tuesday morning at the groundbreaking for a 26-acre real estate project at, and above, those same train yards — what Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said was “one of the largest private developments ever undertaken in the country.” It is called Hudson Yards.

A hefty portion of the project’s 26 acres is within the 100-year-flood plain, just as the World Trade Center development is, farther south. At least for now, Hurricane Sandy does not seem to have slowed the momentum of history, more than two centuries of building right up to the margins of the three islands and mainland that make up New York City. Whatever shorefront once existed at the Hudson Yards site was long ago consumed, along with 300,000 other acres of tidal wetlands, as the city was hardened at its edges. The marshy land may have disappeared, but the tides have not gone anywhere.

Buy now, pay later

From the The Real Deal:

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority has approved its $1 billion deal with the Related Companies to redevelop the 26-acre former Long Island Rail Road site along the Hudson River, the Associated Press reported. Related must pay $20 million when the contract is signed and an additional $21.7 million over the next year, according to the agreement. But the developer is also allowed to delay closing until the city’s office vacancy rate drops to 11 percent and apartment prices reach $1,200 per square foot.

That's nice. The MTA needs money now, however. They always make such stupid deals.

Two Manhattan megaprojects still delayed

From the NY Observer:

For the second time in three months, and the fourth time in a year and a half, the anticipated contract for the Related Companies to develop the 26-acre West Side rail yards has been delayed. Related and the M.T.A., which owns the rail yards near the Javits Center and initially granted Related the development rights in May 2008, have agreed to extend by one month a March 31 deadline for signing the contract to develop the site. An M.T.A. spokesman confirmed the extension.

Multiple people familiar with the discussions said that the process of readying the legal documents has dragged on, taking longer than expected.

From the NY Times:

The news on Thursday that the Port Authority and the developer Larry A. Silverstein had ceased hostilities and come to a tentative agreement at ground zero was greeted with a great deal of fanfare. But judging from a blistering note the next morning from the Port Authority’s vice chairman, the next 120 days are going to be anything but peaceful.

The vice chairman, Henry R. Silverman, said in an e-mail message that the final deal allowing Mr. Silverstein to build two skyscrapers at ground zero with up to $1.6 billion in public subsidies cannot leave the developer flush with cash and the authority at financial risk.

“The notion that a private developer and/or his investors profit while the public sector is at risk for billions of dollars is unacceptable,” he wrote to the authority’s executive director, Christopher O. Ward, and eight fellow commissioners.

Only 17 hours earlier, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, Gov. David A. Paterson and various labor leaders lauded the announcement that the two sides would spend the next three months putting their rough outline of a deal into formal documents.

But clearly the commissioners are worried. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey is already building 1 World Trade Center, a $3 billion tower at the northwest corner of the site, which also needs tenants, as well as a $3.2 billion transit center and the national memorial.

Will the West Side Yards project ever get built?

From the NY Times:

New York City housing officials and the real estate company that plans to transform the West Side railyards into a high-rise residential and business district have agreed to preserve hundreds of apartments near the site as affordable dwellings for low- and middle-income New Yorkers.

The agreement calls for 551 apartments that are owned by the developer, the Related Companies, or will be acquired by the city, in the area surrounding the 26-acre railyards to remain at those affordable rents, many of them permanently. Rent protections at other development projects often expire.

Related and the city had already pledged to build 743 new below-market-rate apartments as part of the project — 431 out of roughly 5,000 residential units that Related plans at the railyards complex and 312 more to be developed by the city nearby.

The $15 billion railyards project will transform the largest undeveloped site left in Manhattan into a high-rise enclave with 12 million square feet of office towers, apartment buildings, a hotel, parks and retail businesses. The 26-acre railyards, owned by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, sit on both sides of 11th Avenue between 30th and 33rd Streets, near the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center.

In a $1.054 billion deal last May, Stephen M. Ross, chief executive of Related, signed an agreement with the transportation authority to develop the site.

Bloomberg guy told not to lobby; did it anyway

From the Village Voice:

A former senior member of the Bloomberg Administration who served as president of the New York City Economic Development Corporation broke the city's conflict of interest laws when he helped his private sector employer bid for a city contract to develop the West Side Rail Yards, the Conflict of Interest Board ruled today.

After working for Bloomberg's top aide, Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff, Joshua Sirefman was shipped in 2006 to the Economic Development Corporation, where he served as Interim President for six months. One responsibility of the EDC director is to sit on the boards of directors of various local development corporations, including the Hudson Yards Development Corporation. The city's charter prohibits a public servant from appearing before an city agency for a year from the date of the public servant's resignation.

Sirefman started at Brookfield in late January of 2007, less than a month after resigning from EDC. In October, he appeared at a meeting in which he lobbied members of the MTA's contract selection committee and two directors of the Hudson Yards Development Corporation on behalf of Brookfield. He wasn't a silent bystander at the meeting either: He fielded direct questions from the Hudson Yards Development Corporation's President, the Conflict of Interest Board says.

And this was six months after he had sought legal advice from the Conflict of Interest Board about how he could lobby the Hudson Yards Development Corporation. At the time, he was given specific intructions not to "communicate" with the Hudson Yards Development Corporation for a year.

Sirefman has been fined $1,500.

Is development of the West Side realistic?

From the NY Observer:

The economic crisis, of course, has obliterated any sense of imminence and removed the far West Side’s aura of inevitability as Manhattan’s next great neighborhood, certainly for the next few years.

Yet, amid the rubble, Related is still plodding away on its $15 billion plans for the rail yards, a tremendously complicated project that would be larger than the World Trade Center and that has been dubbed a 21st-century Rockefeller Center. Related is in the midst of the city’s onerous public-review process, and executives now say they expect to sign a development contract in January with the M.T.A., the site’s owner.

This puts Related, one of the city’s largest developers, in an uphill battle to transform an unproven area that the economic crisis has pushed far back to the fringes. Numerous competitors expressed deep skepticism that Related’s commitments are realistic, and the first step would be a platform atop half the rail yards costing around $1 billion, a number that demands tremendous confidence in the project’s future.