PA issues new WTC timetable

Real Estate Weekly, Oct 8, 2008 by Daniel Geiger

Port Authority executive director Chris Ward released his much anticipated report last week on the World Trade Center, unveiling a plan for rebuilding the site that moderately pushed back dates for construction of a number of the site's projects while pegging their cost somewhat, but not dramatically, higher than originally anticipated.

The report indicated that the World Trade Center transportation hub would cost $3.2 billion compared to an original budget of $2.5 billion and wouldn't be complete until the end of 2013 or 2014.

But the transit hub construction project includes the $633 million cost of building Greenwich Street, a street that had disappeared in the footprint of the old World Trade Center but will be part of the new redevelopment.

The Freedom Towel the most symbolic office tower on the site, appeared to be essentially on budget at $3.1 billion and behind schedule by about a year from its original scheduled completion in 2012.

Ward had forewarned in June that an overheated construction market, rising cost of commodities and the complexity of the redevelopment had driven costs up at the delay-plagued site as they have for a number of large infrastructure projects in the city. Part of his mission was not just to survey the damage to the site's plans, but to figure out ways to rein in the overruns.

With the transit hub, Ward's team, working with the station's designer, Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, cut a budget that had run almost as high as $4 billion in recent months by inserting columns in a large room in the structure's mezzanine level.

In renderings that visualize the changes included in the report, the columns appear to minimally impact the dramatic open sight lines that Calatrava had originally envisioned for the large hall while eliminating the need for complex and expensive support trusses that had been part of the previous design.

The above ground oculus, an elegant winged structure that is the station's most recognizable component, remained similar to its original design but was simplified by removing a complex mechanism that would allow a sliver of its roof to open the station to fresh air.

Greenwich Street, which Ward said had originally relied on an expensive "spaghetti" of weaving, diagonal supports was also simplified by putting vertical columns in place.

The columns planned for the transit hub not only reduced the complexity of the station but also will help the Port Authority ready the most visible portions of the World Trade Center Memorial in time for the 10th anniversary of 9/11, a deadline that the Memorial's fundraisers and the city, not to mention the public, have pressured the agency to meet.

Ward said that with the columns in place, the Memorial's tree-lined, street level plaza could be built along with the waterfall-fed reflecting pools in the Twin Towers' footprints sooner than in the previous plan. Ward described the method as turning the construction process "upside down" by building what will be the station's roof first and then proceeding with work on the hub in the hollow cavity underneath that deck.

Still, the Port Authority left the possibility in its timetable that it wouldn't have the entire Memorial complete by the anniversary, outlining both target dates for all the construction projects and also "probabilistic" dates that take into account potential delays.

For the Memorial, Ward said the authority would have 80% of the deck complete by the beginning of 2010 but that the reflecting pools may not be finished until the end of the year.

"We are also showing the probabilistic rate risk in terms of when they will be delivered," Ward said.

"We will manage against that risk, we will be accountable against that risk and it is our intent to meet these target dates."