Buildings
Dispatch from Ground Zero
(archrecord.construction.com - 08/10/2006)
By Robert
Such
Five years is enough time for builders
to construct a small city in China. In lower Manhattan, it’s
only the first chapter for the big pit at Ground Zero. But
finally it has begun to stir, with leaders coming together
and construction starting for real.
Travel hundreds of feet down the long
paved ramp into the construction zone, and the towers of Lower
Manhattan seem twice as tall. There’s nothing natural
about this canyon: To your left you glimpse the well known
“slurry wall” of concrete and steel tie-backs, which
keeps the Hudson River’s waters at bay. On this route
downward you also pass directly over the Twin Towers’
impressive footprints. Teams have placed plywood boards over
their outlines, and this construction zone remains still,
except for the PATH train that zooms over part of the former
south tower.
Not so at the northwest corner of the
site, directly in front of the ramp, where a small team of
about 20 construction workers is excavating down to bedrock
and driving footings for the Freedom Tower. Workers are also
taking down what’s left of the Twin Towers’ old
parking garage, whose remains include rows of spiky rebar
and cross-like column remnants; removing old sewer pipes to
be sold for scrap; relocating utilities located between PATH
tracks to allow room for more footings; preparing large woven
metal blankets to place over blasting sites; dumping dirt,
metal, and concrete into loading trucks.
Much of the ground is muddy, since groundwater
continually seeps into the site and has to be pumped out.
The outline of the future 1,776-foot-tall tower is marked
with dumpsters and with piled dirt around the site’s
edges.
Construction is banging, wheezing, and
beeping away here and at the nearby permanent PATH station
construction zone. But this is nothing compared to what the
site will soon be. Ground Zero will be hosting $11.8 billion
worth of construction in the next six years, according to
the Lower Manhattan Construction Command Center, which oversees
construction on the site. This includes super-tall World Trade
Center towers 1 through 5, the memorial and museum, the new
PATH station, Frank Gehry’s Performing Arts Center, and
Snøhetta’s visitors’ center. Meanwhile, the
five-block radius around Ground Zero will see more than $20
billion in construction by 2020. Most of it is residential,
but also includes projects like the Fulton Street Transit
Hub and the Goldman Sachs tower.
Merely organizing all of this construction
will be a nightmare. For one, there will be immense traffic
coming in and out of the site delivering workers, steel, cranes,
newly mixed concrete, and so on. The Command Center and construction
management firm Liro Group have developed a master timetable
and 3D model of the development process to help time it all.
They meet with all the construction teams—not to mention
developer Larry Silverstein, the Port Authority of New York
and New Jersey, the Battery Park City Authority, New York
State and City Departments of Transportation, the Metropolitan
Transportation Authority—on a monthly basis.
“This kind of concentration of
work is unprecedented,” says command center director
Charles Maikish.
Of course all of this work could
come to a stop. The insurance money being used to build many
of the five office towers might be lost in court cases. Tenants
for these buildings may not materialize. Politics, as usual,
can still get in the way. After all, the cornerstone for the
Freedom Tower, meant to signal the start of construction,
was laid two years ago. But for now the banging and wheezing
will get much louder, and Manhattan’s great void will
be filled again. Hopefully.
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