President Biden blows off NYC 9/11 ceremony

 

 NY Daily News

We like round numbers: 20th anniversary, 30th anniversary, the Golden Jubilee.

But the 22nd anniversary of an evil terrorist attack on New York City and the rest of the nation is no less of a reason for the president of the United States to visit the World Trade Center and lay a wreath or something.

President Biden, it turns out, is in the midst of a nasty — and petty — feud with city and state officials over the city’s growing migrant crisis.

Instead, Biden will attend a 9/11 commemoration ceremony with military families on a patch of soil that seems about as far away from New York City as one can get — Anchorage, Alaska.

The president will be returning from a previously planned state visit to Vietnam on Sunday, which means he won’t attend the solemn event in Lower Manhattan for the second straight year.

That also means the tough-talking leader of the free world will avoid the awkward photo op with Mayor Adams and Gov. Hochul, who have been feuding with the president and each other over a migrant crisis that, to use Adams’ words, “will destroy New York City.”

And, Biden could have done more to make sure he wasn’t in Alaska, of all places, on one of the most solemn days in New York City.

Vice President Kamala Harris and Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff are expected at the Ground Zero event on Monday marking the 22nd anniversary of the deadliest terror attack on American soil, which killed nearly 3,000 people.

Planes hijacked that day also struck the Pentagon and a remote field in Shanksville, Pa.

Although it’s not a round number commemoration, the anniversary does mark a milestone moment.

The number of firefighters who have died from 9/11-related illnesses is now eerily close to the number of firefighter heroes, 343, who perished during the initial attack. To date, 342 FDNY members have died of World Trade Center-related illnesses.

“As we approach the 22nd anniversary of 9/11, the FDNY continues to feel the impact of that day. Each year, this memorial wall grows as we honor those who gave their lives in service of others,” said Fire Commissioner Laura Kavanagh.

“These brave men and women showed up that day, and in the days and months following the attacks to participate in the rescue and recovery efforts at the World Trade Center site. We will never forget them.”

 

Caption our dear leader

 

 

 

"It's not about freedom or personal choice. COME ON MAN!!!"

WTC rescue effort has happy ending

From the NY Times:

New York City firefighters on Wednesday afternoon rescued two window washers who became suspended 69 stories above the street while working at the newly completed 1 World Trade Center.

The workers, who were harnessed to the scaffolding of the window-washing equipment, were uninjured, the authorities said.

Shortly before 2 p.m., firefighters could be seen cutting a hole through a window near the platform, assembling inside and pulling the workers to safety.

Fire Commissioner Daniel A. Nigro was succinct in summing up the efforts made during the day: “The results today — two men are going to go home tonight.”

Mayor Bill de Blasio, speaking at a news conference in Lower Manhattan, called the rescue “an extraordinary effort by the F.D.N.Y.”

Port Authority as real estate speculators

From the NY Times:

The developer and philanthropist Larry A. Silverstein has cut a striking figure in New York City. He owns the H.M.S. Bounty-size yacht favored by his peers and has dominated the rebuilding of ground zero for a decade.

Along the way, he has internalized a developer’s rule of thumb in New York: Only a rube puts much of his own money at risk.

Billions of dollars in Liberty bonds, insurance money, developer fees: Year after year, Mr. Silverstein has shaken the public tree and benefits have fallen to the ground.

Construction of 4 World Trade Center is completed and it stands about half empty, with commitments from just two tenants: New York City and State. Now Mr. Silverstein wants to complete his 70-something-story 3 World Trade Center. He has found just one prospective tenant for it.

City and state officials, ever helpful, agreed to give that company, GroupM, a $15 million cash subsidy and tax breaks worth about $75 million.

Now Mr. Silverstein wants to shake the tree again. In March, as Charles V. Bagli reported in The New York Times, he asked the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to guarantee up to $1.2 billion of his construction loans. The authority’s board could vote on the proposal this month.

As chutzpah, this was impressive. As public policy, it was less salutary.

Kenneth Lipper is a board member of the Port Authority, a former deputy mayor under Edward I. Koch, an investment banker and a novelist with a keen eye for currents of power, municipal and financial.

In an interview on Monday, he described how the board had signed off this winter on a capital plan, carefully assigning priority to rebuilt bridges, a new terminal at La Guardia Airport and — Mr. Lipper’s personal favorite — the rebuilding of that corroding pile of metal and concrete that is the Port Authority bus station in Midtown.

Then Mr. Lipper saw the request from Mr. Silverstein.

“Am I in ‘Alice in Wonderland’?” he recalled thinking. “I wanted to get a modern bus terminal built and we’re talking about putting $1.2 billion into a private developer, in which he gets the gain and we take the hit?

“Is it the role of an agency representing taxpayers and toll payers to speculate in real estate?”

Look out below!

From DNA Info:

After chunks of ice began plummeting from One World Trade Center last week, the Port Authority is building a protective shed to keep pedestrians safe.

The shed will cover the area outside the World Trade Center PATH station entrance on Vesey Street, which has been shut down during morning rush hour twice in the past week because of the falling ice. Last Friday, the Port Authority was forced to temporarily halt PATH service to the station altogether, because of the bottleneck of commuters all trying to leave through the one remaining open exit.

Falling ice also shuttered the Vesey Street entrance Tuesday morning.

Port Authority spokesman Anthony Hayes said the agency was building the shed “to ensure public safety against the ice fall.”

Workers were busy Wednesday afternoon constructing the metal and wood barrier in the blustery cold.

When asked whether the cover would be enough to protect against the fall of ice blocks, a worker, who asked that his name not be used, replied: “Well, look, you never know where the wind blows.”

WTC sphere is staying

From the NY Times:

Rededicated in Battery Park in Lower Manhattan on March 11, 2002, as New York City’s interim memorial, the “Sphere” has been sitting for months behind a construction fence while the park is renovated. No one in a position to know what might happen to the 25-foot-tall bronze globe, which still bears the scars of Sept. 11, 2001, would disclose anything publicly about where it might end up. Or when.

So when a work crew arrived on Wednesday and began dismantling the sculpture, placing one hemisphere on the back of a flatbed truck, and a crew member said that he could not divulge where the “Sphere” was headed, it seemed as if the cloak of secrecy was about to swallow the sculpture whole.

To make matters even more puzzling, officials of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the sculpture, and those of the National September 11 Memorial, which is frequently mentioned as a possible final setting for the “Sphere,” said they knew nothing about the move.

The parks department did know about it, however. On Wednesday evening, Arthur Pincus, an assistant commissioner of the agency, said the “Sphere” was simply being moved about 550 feet within the park, to a spot much closer to Castle Clinton, to accommodate the renovations.

Originally they were going to remove the statue.

PA won't put WTC sphere in storage

Cost overruns at WTC

From NY1:

Costs for the new World Trade Center have skyrocketed.

An audit from Navigant Consulting found the project is now estimated to cost nearly $15 billion.

That's 35 percent more than the $11 billion estimate in 2008.

Governor Andrew Cuomo and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie ordered the review after the Port Authority voted to raise bridge and tunnel tolls in August.

The Port Authority owns the World Trade Center site.

The auditors called the Port Authority “a challenged and dysfunctional organization suffering from a lack of consistent leadership."

The agency said it's taking steps to bring costs under control.

There have been several problems with rebuilding the World Trade Center site, including design mistakes and delays for the opening of the September 11th museum.

3 WTC may not rise that high

From the Daily News:

A soaring skyscraper planned for the World Trade Center site may shrink to a measley seven stories.

Developer Larry Silverstein’s 3 World Trade Center office tower was supposed to rise to 80 stories — but he’s planning to turn the tower into a teeny low-rise if he can’t find a big-time tenant, Crain’s New York reported.

The building is under construction and was supposed to be done by 2015, but Silverstein has had no luck landing a major company to fill the office space — and tweaks have already been made to allow the tower to be capped by the end of the year at less than a tenth of its intended size.

The stunted tower would be filled up with retail stores, according to Crain’s.

New Yorkers around the site Sunday said it would be an embarrassment if the site couldn’t support a building of suitable stature.

9/11 couldn't kill tree

From 1010WINS:

Horizontal pathways of light-gray granite and cobblestone lead to the south reflecting pool and a single Callery Pear tree.

Daniels said the tree, known as the “survivor tree,” was found 95 percent destroyed on 9/11. It was also struck by lightning in 2010 even after being nursed to health in the Bronx.

“It’s a symbol of this country that was struck by lightning, the events of 9/11 — we’re still here, we’re still surviving,” Daniels said.

WTC assignment taking cops out of high crime areas

From the Daily News:

The NYPD'S vaunted Operation Impact is losing about 600 cops so police can staff the new World Trade Center command and add cops to other precincts, the Daily News has learned.

The personnel shuffling was panned in neighborhoods most likely to be affected.

The move comes amid concerns that the decreasing size of the force - compounded by a drop in response times - could lead to a summer crime surge.

Sources said the number of cops assigned to Operation Impact is being trimmed to 1,200 - with almost 300 heading to the WTC command. The rest are being reassigned to other precincts desperate for a manpower boost.

Union strike may grind building to a halt

From Crains:

With a contract deadline a week away, a survey of developers has found that a work stoppage by operating engineers could silence construction on private-sector projects worth nearly $10 billion and temporarily idle more than 11,300 workers.

With the operating engineers' union contracts set to expire June 30, the Real Estate Board of New York survey shows that work could stop on commercial and retail projects spanning more than 13 million square feet and on residential sites totaling more than 6,300 units.

Projects that could be halted include Forest City Ratner's Barclays Center in Brooklyn, which employs 1,000 construction workers; Silverstein Properties' World Trade Center Tower 4, which employs 800; and Extell Development Co.'s International Gem Tower in midtown, which employs 500.

WTC costs a lot more than expected

From the NY Post:

Developer Larry Silverstein has exercised an option negotiated five years ago requiring the city to rent 582,000 square feet in the second tower going up at the World Trade Center site, The Post has learned.

That's put the Bloomberg Administration in a funny position.

It's now got to make plans to occupy what will be some of the priciest real estate in Lower Manhattan, while it downsizes the government and gets rid of 400,000 square feet of unused office space elsewhere.

Under the deal struck in 2006, the city will pay Silverstein $56.50 a square foot when the building known as Tower 4 is ready for occupancy in late 2013.

From the NY Post:

The chronically over-budget transportation hub that's part of the massive Ground Zero rebuild will eat into even more taxpayer dollars than expected -- for the second time.

Port Authority officials yesterday hiked the cost of the ornate transit center -- which will house stations for PATH trains, 13 MTA subway lines, and a proposed JFK rail link -- by a staggering $180 million.

The change will bring the overall cost to $3.44 billion.

In 2006, officials put an estimate for the Santiago Calatrava-designed site, which would be the third-largest transportation hub in the city, at about $2.2 billion.

In 2008, that price tag went up to $3.26 billion.

Ship from 1700s found at WTC site

From the NY Times:

On Tuesday morning, workers excavating the site of the underground vehicle security center for the future World Trade Center hit a row of sturdy, upright wood timbers, regularly spaced, sticking out of a briny gray muck flecked with oyster shells.

Obviously, these were more than just remnants of the wooden cribbing used in the late 18th and early 19th centuries to extend the shoreline of Manhattan Island ever farther into the Hudson River. (Lower Manhattan real estate was a precious commodity even then.)

“They were so perfectly contoured that they were clearly part of a ship,” said A. Michael Pappalardo, an archaeologist with the firm AKRF, which is working for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to document historical material uncovered during construction.

By Wednesday, the outlines made it plain: a 30-foot length of a wood-hulled vessel had been discovered about 20 to 30 feet below street level on the World Trade Center site, the first such large-scale archaeological find along the Manhattan waterfront since 1982, when an 18th-century cargo ship came to light at 175 Water Street.

The area under excavation, between Liberty and Cedar Streets, had not been dug out for the original trade center. The vessel, presumably dating from the mid- to late 1700s, was evidently undisturbed more than 200 years.

Historic seawall uncovered at WTC

From DNA Info:

Workers rebuilding the World Trade Center have just uncovered a historic wall that once separated the streets of lower Manhattan from the Hudson River.

The dusty granite blocks are part of Manhattan’s first seawall, which was built more than 100 years ago to allow ships to pull up to the edge of Manhattan to do business.

“It’s just really cool to uncover history,” said Clarelle DeGraffe, 48, senior program manager with the Port Authority. “It’s so well-preserved — it’s a beautiful sight.”

The wall is part of a much larger bulkhead that runs from the Battery up to 59th Street, a massive engineering project begun shortly after the Civil War that took more than 60 years to complete.

While sections of the historic wall have always been visible above Chambers Street, this piece along West Street between Liberty and Vesey streets has been hidden for decades by the landfill on which Battery Park City was built. So far, the Port Authority has exposed a section of granite blocks 19 feet long and 8 feet tall.

But the bulkhead won’t be visible for long — the Port Authority plans to demolish an 80-foot-long section of it to make way for an underground passage that will take people from the World Trade Center into Battery Park City as soon as December 2012.

Before the wall can come down, archaeologists and the State Historic Preservation Office have to finish photographing and studying it.

As workers keep digging, they expect the granite to go down another 20 feet or so, and then beneath that they should find wooden piles that go all the way down to bedrock.

LPC may step in to prevent mosque

From the NY Post:

A controversial plan to build a $100 million mosque and community center just two blocks north of Ground Zero could be undone by history.

The 152-year-old building at 45 Park Place that would be torn down for the mosque is under the protection of the Landmarks Preservation Commission, which has had a pending application on its books since 1989 to grant it landmark status.

A Landmarks spokeswoman said that the application had been on hold for more than two decades but that a hearing would be scheduled and a vote would follow on the designation.

The landmarking issue is a potentially big obstacle for a project that both the city and the mosque's backers had said could be built "as of right," with no interference from city land use laws.

If the commission approves landmark designation, it would be highly unlikely that the building could be torn down to make way for Cordoba House, a proposed 13-story mosque and community center.

And until a vote is taken, the building has temporary landmark protection.

Mayor Bloomberg yesterday continued to support the project, despite the latest wrinkle.

The Bloomberg business subsidy scheme

From the NY Times:

For all the giddy wealth that ran through the city before the economic crash, prized commercial real estate was often subsidized through state and city tax benefits, sometimes in special deals made behind closed doors.

And now, Condé Nast, which was granted $10.8 million in rent and tax breaks to move into a Times Square tower that was already heavily subsidized, is said to be having discussions with government officials about relocating downtown, into the tower planned as 1 World Trade Center. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey has agreed to provide $1 billion in financing for the building.

The city has not decided if it will pitch in with taxpayer money to move companies from other parts of the city into the tower, but it has “a policy goal to help Lower Manhattan rebuild, and the new World Trade Center is a critical part of that,” said David Lombino, a vice president at the city’s Economic Development Corporation.

We all know that the bill has come due for lavish spending by the city and state: swelling public pensions, huge borrowing by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority that bought next to nothing, government salaries that grew faster than inflation. There is another, off-the-book cost that is also being paid: billions in public incentives given to some of the richest companies in the world.

For more than 25 years, they have been distributed by mayors, with little oversight or control, as an exercise of their discretion when faced with threats by companies to leave town.

They were criticized as forms of corporate welfare — often by the mayors themselves — that simply shifted the burden to other, smaller taxpayers, most of them not as well-connected.

Many of the threats to leave were barely disguised feints, and sometimes not even that. Condé Nast, for instance, publishes some of the most exalted titles in the magazine business, and the chances that the company would move out of Manhattan are slim to none. Other businesses equally unlikely to leave the media capital — The New York Times Company, CBS, Reuters, NBC, News America, ABC, McGraw Hill, Viacom, Hearst — were also given public money.

Mr. Giuliani also awarded subsidies for new baseball stadiums, but those deals were canceled by Michael R. Bloomberg almost as soon as he took office in January 2002. The city had a major deficit. There wasn’t enough housing or space for schools. “It is just not practical this year to go and build stadiums,” Mr. Bloomberg said.

A few years later, Mr. Bloomberg used hundreds of millions in public money to help the Yankees and Mets build stadiums.

In 2004, Mr. Bloomberg declared that he had “ended corporate welfare as we know it, by no longer paying companies — who wouldn’t have left anyway — to stay in our great city.”

He has not. But he has cut down on the number of deals, and in some cases, has put in provisions that require the companies to pay back their subsidies if they don’t keep their promises to keep jobs in the city.

Will the taxpayers now pay to move companies from one part of the city to another?

Bye, Bob

From the NY Times:

Robert C. Lieber, the former Wall Street executive who has guided the Bloomberg administration’s economic development efforts during the recession, told his staff on Wednesday morning that he would step down as deputy mayor.

Mr. Lieber, 55, who has been in the job since January 2008, has focused on projects including the redevelopment of Coney Island, the city’s takeover of Governors Island and the rezoning of Willets Point in Queens. He also has pushed the city’s economic development strategy beyond big real estate deals to include smaller entrepreneurial initiatives and a number of growth industries.

“I told the mayor this is toughest decision I ever had to make,” Mr. Lieber said. “I love the job. “I’m most proud of having taken a lot of these projects that had been put in the oven but not baked and gotten them done, whether it’s Coney Island, Willets Point or the World Trade Center.”

He got them done? When did this happen?

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.

Mob infiltrated ground zero

NEW YORK (AP) -- Eight people linked to the Colombo organized crime family have been charged in a federal case involving bribery and extortion at the World Trade Center site.

An indictment unsealed Tuesday in Brooklyn alleges that a mob-controlled trucking company paid kickbacks to win a subcontract with a demolition company working at ground zero. Prosecutors also say the defendants threatened employees with the demolition company when it failed to pay on time.

Wiretaps captured one defendant saying the employees were "shakin' in their boots over us."

Authorities say the case is part of an aggressive campaign to bring down the Colombos. In 2007, former acting boss Alphonse Persico Jr. was convicted of murder in aid of racketeering.