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NEWS By Josh Rogers with Elizabeth O’Brien
Downtown Express photo by Elisabeth Robert Cars turn from West St. onto Liberty St. near where the proposed tunnel would begin. The issues of whether or not to bring the World Trade Center memorial to street level, build a parking garage underneath and an adjacent vehicular tunnel along West St. headed on a collision course last week. Disputes on all three interrelated issues intensified at various meetings. State Dept. of Transportation officials, who presented more specifics on plans to build the tunnel adjacent to the W.T.C. last Monday, said Daniel Libeskind’s site plan to place the memorial 30 feet below street level has effectively eliminated one of the options for West St. — building a deck over the roadway. They also said that they are still considering making improvements without the $860-million tunnel, the preferred option of their boss, Gov. George Pataki. Some residents and one board member of the Lower Manhattan Development Corp., Carl Weisbrod, have proposed bringing the memorial area to street level, an idea which has been discouraged by the L.M.D.C. leadership and which was attacked by several civic groups last week. John Whitehead, L.M.D.C. chairperson, left the door to raising the memorial “slightly ajar” last Thursday, but retracted his statement later in the day. Jill Pall, an advocate for 9/11 families, said when she asked the governor “what did you mean when you said the footprints would not be built on,” Pataki replied, “All the way down to the bottom — that’s what it means to me….I am not going to be the dictator of the process. The idea of a bus depot down there is awful.” Mollie Fullington, a spokesperson for Pataki who attended the private meeting last Thursday, said she could not confirm Pataki’s precise wording but the essence of the quote is true and that he definitely said a bus garage would be “awful.” “As a personal matter the governor feels the footprints go to bedrock,” Fullington said. She said the governor also made it clear that there will have to be some infrastructure under the memorial. Libeskind’s original site plan last December called for the memorial to be 70 feet below ground next to the exposed “bathtub” slurry wall, which protects the site from the Hudson River. He adjusted the design to allow for mechanical equipment, bathtub reinforcements and perhaps a garage for tour buses underneath the memorial, but the garage has been opposed by many victims’ relatives. Madelyn Wils, an L.M.D.C. board member and the chairperson of Community Board 1, has been among those who have argued for the garage so that the diesel-spewing buses bringing tourists to the memorial are out of view and don’t idle on Downtown streets. “This is outrageous,” she said after a reporter told her of Pataki’s comments about the garage. She declined to comment further. Bruce DeCell, whose son-in-law Mark Petrocelli was killed in Tower One in the Cantor Fitzgerald offices, said he was pleased when the governor said he was going to oppose the bus garage. “Everything underneath should be memorial related,” said DeCell. He said even if the garage is built under the memorial there would still be buses lined along West St. waiting to enter. “It’s going to be a nightmare for the neighborhood,” DeCell said a day after his meeting with the governor. “They had problems with buses already that they didn’t deal with.” Finding parking for commuter and tourist buses has been a persistent problem in Lower Manhattan, which is why some have seen the area under the memorial as a partial solution. Weisbrod, who also runs Lower Manhattan’s business improvement district as president of the Downtown Alliance, has argued that since the garage will accommodate buses bringing visitors to the memorial, placing it under the site is an appropriate place. DeCell said he did not object to commuter trains running over the footprints because they did so on the day of the attack. “Well you know those tracks were there when it happened,” said DeCell. “It brought people there who were killed.”
The decision to place the memorial 30 feet below ground means that it no longer makes sense to consider the option of building a pedestrian deck over West St., said Richard Schmalz, project director of the state Transportation Dept. “You wouldn’t be able to get anyplace with the deck,” Schmalz said at last Monday’s meeting before a C.B. 1 committee. “You’d go to the edge of the slurry wall and you’d stop, so it would be very ineffective with the present configuration of the Libeskind scheme ” Wils, who was not at the meeting, said the exact same logic could be used against the tunnel, unless there is some pedestrian access over the memorial area. “There’s no point creating a beautiful pedestrian area between Liberty and Fulton Sts. so [pedestrians] would hit a wall on the other side of the street,” she said. If some type of walkway is added to the memorial site, Wils thinks a tunnel would improve the situation for pedestrians who must cross eight lanes of highway traffic, but she is not sure the benefits outweigh the $860 million cost given more pressing transportation priorities. “The money being spent on the tunnel could be better spent on Long Island Rail Road [JFK] Airport access,” she said referring to the $2 billion - $4 billion proposals for the commuter-airport link. Similarly, Dep. Mayor Daniel Doctoroff said last week that he remains unconvinced that building the tunnel is the best use of the limited transportation money for Downtown. The deck option has fallen out of favor in part because D.O.T. only considered an option leading to the ground floor of the World Financial Center, which has its main lobbies on the second floor. Eli Attia, an architect who has criticized Libeskind’s design and the process that led to it, has come up with a plan which takes advantage of the high elevation of Church St. Attia says if Greenwich St. were not extended through the site — a decision which had wide support among residents — it would be easy to build a deck leading to the W.F.C.’s second floor at a cost of only $120 million. Even with Greenwich St. running through the site, Attia says it is still possible to slope the deck up to the second floor, a conclusion confirmed by another architect familiar with the site. One tunnel proponent, Liz Berger, who lives in the Financial District, says crossing the highway has always been difficult and unless the number of lanes is reduced on West St., other solutions to make the roadway more pedestrian-friendly will be inadequate. “I’m not sure [the tunnel is] the best solution,” she said. “I think it’s a good solution.” She said she understands the concerns from some Battery Park City residents about disruptions while the tunnel is built, but she likens it to the construction that will occur down her block when the Broadway-Nassau-Fulton subway station is rebuilt over the next few years. “The construction will make my life a living hell, but I’m for it because it’s good for Downtown,” she said. But Jean Silliman, who left last week’s meeting angry because she did not get a chance to speak, said, “I can’t imagine intentionally disturbing the flow of 9A (West St.) traffic, which is a major artery.” Bill Love, one of the leaders of the Save West Street Coalition, said even if the project weren’t costly, it still would not be worth doing because the proposed ramps to exit and enter the tunnel would create new pedestrian problems. “We think pedestrian bridges have been given short shrift,” said Love, who was also miffed that he did not have a chance to speak at the meeting. “They’ve been given a bad name because everybody assumes it will be like the one on Rector St.” Despite Pataki’s endorsement of the tunnel, the Dept. of Transportation is still considering making surface pedestrian improvements without the tunnel and will be taking comments from the public between 2 p.m. and 8 p.m., June 24, One Bowling Green. Written comments can be mailed to Richard Schmalz, State Dept. of Transportation, 21 South End Ave., New York, N.Y. 10280. A video and other information on the proposals will be available at next week’s hearing. The short tunnel would be adjacent to the W.T.C. and run from Vesey to Liberty Sts. The exit and entrance ramps would begin about a block north and south of the tunnel and would come to street level before Murray and Albany Sts. There would be four lanes for local traffic above ground and four lanes of through traffic below. D.O.T. estimates that the tunnel would reduce the number of vehicles on West St. from 60,000 to 18,000 during a heavy traffic hour. “At peak hours there are more pedestrians on West St. than there are vehicles,” said Transportation’s Tim Gilchrist. The tunnel would take two years to design and 2 1/2 years to build. Most of the work would be done underground with the roadway open and officials said they would not reduce the number of lanes during rush hour through the construction period. They also said they would consider running free shuttle buses to help pedestrians circumvent the construction. Love said he was also concerned because D.O.T. is not sure yet if residents in the south part of B.P.C. would be able turn left from Albany St. to head north on West St. The other option D.O.T. is seriously considering is rebuilding the roadway and adding traffic-calming measures and better pedestrian bridges at a cost of $200 million. That is considered close to the minimum investment needed in the roadway since it would replace the short-term temporary street that was built last year. A longer, more expensive tunnel from Chambers St. to the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel technically is still an option, but that plan has little support and Transportation officials said last week that it may be taken off the table completely by next week’s meeting. Whether the short tunnel or the at-grade improvement options are chosen, the plan is to spend $120 million for a grand boulevard on West St. south of Albany St. In some sections the east side of West St. will be widened to as much as 40 feet to allow for sidewalk cafes, plazas and more trees. D.O.T.’s Heather Sporn spoke of the previously announced plan to deck over the entrance to the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, which would add a new park and a better connection to historic Battery Park. “It creates a green swath that leads into a much grander terminus than we have had before,” Sporn said. “The door is slightly ajar,” Whitehead said at last week’s L.M.D.C. board meeting, “but not very ajar….The 30-foot [depression] and exposure of the slurry wall are an important part of the Libeskind plan. It is now up to the jury, but they recognize what I just said.” But Whitehead issued a statement later saying, “We are committed to preserving Libeskind’s vision, a hallmark of which is the recessed memorial setting, and the winning memorial design must be consistent with that vision.” On the other hand, L.M.D.C. officials and some members of the jury have said they are looking for a memorial designer who doesn’t follow all of the rules. Kevin Rampe, L.M.D.C. interim president, said two weeks ago that “the jury is going to have the final decision with respect to the memorial.” The idea of raising the memorial to street level to improve access is being vehemently opposed by several of the planning groups that formed after 9/11, including the Civic Alliance, Imagine New York and Rebuild Downtown Our Town. Bob Yaro, the head of the Civic Alliance as well as the Regional Plan Association, likened the proposed alteration to the Libeskind scheme to altering two of the holiest sites to Jews and Muslims — the Western Wall and the Dome of the Rock. “It’s like saying in Jerusalem, you have this great wall with some rubble below with this gold dome over the site, but if you didn’t have it, you could really improve connections in Downtown Jerusalem,” Yaro told reporters immediately after a press conference. Weisbrod, an L.M.D.C. board member, has asked the jury to consider street-level designs and maintains his position doesn’t contradict Whitehead, who says that the recessed plaza is a fundamental element. He thinks the jury will find the one design that answers the concerns of family members, residents, and business people. “I have a lot of faith in the jury system,” Weisbrod said. |
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