Date: Mon, 9 Sep 2002 22:08:44 -0400 (EDT)
From: Louis Epstein
Subject: WTC Rebulding #107:Anniversary and Other Plans,News


WSKrispy took me to task after yesterday's email blasting Muschamp's
designer gallery of wacky new buildings suggested for the WTC site
and environs...he said it should be seen as a big victory for the cause
of building as tall or taller,and that its proponents were our allies.

I'm sorry,but knowing the contempt with which some other pro-rebuilders
hold Muschamp,having read some past pronouncements of his,and seeing
the designs that his favored architects came up with,I can't see it
that way.The emptiness,the buildings designed to look like twisted
wreckage...this is not an act of resilience.And the towers enough of
his architects wanted that he let them put in a vague diagram...
"roughly the height of their predecessors,though thinner and torqued
to suggest resilience--as if they were made of material that,if bumped,
would simply absorb the shock.Would these towers be a new World Trade
Center?Not necessarily.In addition to office space,they could house a
mixture of cultural,retail,and housing units.Another conception would
accomodate today's heightened safety concerns:the towers could stand
simply as monuments,empty but for a museum on the ground floor."

Sounds like an expensive,trivial folly.If one is going to step up
to the challenge of producing a design to put 9.5 million or more
square feet of office space into two towers better than Minoru Yamasaki
did,then DO THAT and do not engage in make-believe.People don't want
a building that's designed to LOOK LIKE it's resistant to impacts,
they want a building that IS stronger than ever before.These buildings
being thinner would mean they would have to be even taller than the
old Towers to have the same volume...not "roughly the same height".
And it is broader floor plans,with additional structural support,
that would be the most stable,not thinner ones.

I'm not as hostile to mixed use towers as Joe Wright indicated he
was at the post-hearing dinner in response to a question from Jon
Hakala...but neither do I think 40-50 small stories of condos and
luxury rentals on top of 80-85 large stories of offices are what
we should aim for,as suggested by Jason Fane.A setback on top means
no column-free spaces on the stories below...while my design concepts
have offered one ring of interior structural supports,in some versions,
with the four stairwell cores at the corners of the ring,that is the
most compromise I see as called for on Yamasaki's column-free design.
(The walls should be at least as strong as before,preferably stronger;
this is redundancy,not load diversion).And the sheer size of the
elevator core for a very large tower means that the ability to have
small floors on top is limited,especially given the large express
elevators taking people up to the very top.

Someone will always want to rent the highest office floors available,
and will pay extra for that...the proposal I saw on a message board
that the higher you go the cheaper it gets would be pointless unless
the topmost office floors were exempt from it.The developer would be
throwing away money.And I think over the long term there would be demand
to fill the towers entirely with offices,desirable as such residences
would be!(The Woolworth Building is almost 90 years old and over 90%
rented,a 21st century building maybe twice the height would be much
more of a draw).We can think about multi-use towers,but neither make
them our goal nor reject them out of hand.(Subsidized low-income housing
I WOULD reject).

I'll mention again the importance of doing research.Some sites I've
read have said the Hudson Terminal Buildings were the first buildings
torn down to build the WTC,before the Radio Row structures between
them and the river;some say they had just finished,others that they
were nearly done with,a multi-million-dollar renovation when demolished.

However,the Times Magazine with the Muschamp follies has three pictures
of WTC construction...on page 39,the North Tower is just at ground level;
on page 33,the North Tower is up maybe 40 stories and the South Tower
hidden from view;on the cover,the North Tower is close to 100 stories,
the South Tower maybe 40,and the two northern plaza buildings are rising
as One Liberty (US Steel) goes up across Church Street.

In all three of these,the site has been cleared around them EXCEPT for
the southern Hudson Terminal Building between Cortlandt and Dey Streets
(I believe this was 30 Church Street,the one between Dey and Fulton being
50 Church...the skyscrapers.com site has this reversed,but it also calls
the old Coliseum on Columbus Circle residential!).

I note that though the HTBs were twins,even opened on the same day,
they were Siamese(skybridge crossing over Dey Street) but not quite
identical.Same height,same H layout,same construction and ornamentation,
each filled a block along Church Street and went back the same depth...
but the Cortlandt-to-Dey block was larger,so the southern one was bigger.
Viewed from the river,one saw the word HUDSON on the northern one's roof
and TERMINAL on the southern.

So the lonely 30 Church kept the word TERMINAL up there in its waning
days,perhaps indicating its condition...but the Port Authority,though
owning it since it took over the Hudson & Manhattan Railroad,didn't
tear it down until WTC construction was well advanced.They would
certainly have a financial incentive to do so,if they were able to
keep revenue coming in from that office building while busily spending
on the rest of the site.

Skyscrapers.com shows them as demolished at the same time,but I
think 30 Church (the southern one,not the northern one as they say)
may have come down the year after 50 Church...anyone know?

I don't have a good concordance to date photos of WTC construction,
and they apparently did more than two stories a week at times...I
would not mind if new construction were slower than that,getting
everything done solidly,as long as it went on continuously.When the
Towers rise again I will track them floor by floor!

The Guinness Book for 2003 is out,and not immune to error...there is
a picture of the Trump Tower in midtown,the AT&T/Sony Building at 550
Madison Avenue clearly visible in the background,that is identified as
the Trump World Tower on the Upper East Side.And the CN Tower's Sky Pod
is said to include a restaurant and be 1150 feet up...the restaurant is
at that level,but "Sky Pod" is the name of the observatory 315 feet
higher up.(Would be nice if the new Towers were able to snatch away its
world's-tallest-observation-deck title).The category of largest office
building is absent this time,perhaps in memory of the Twins.

However,preponderance of evidence seems to indicate they are correct
on the Petronas Towers being 1483 feet rather than 1488 to structural
tip,though I cited the latter figure recently...this would make a
difference as to whether a 15-foot-height-to-floor-ratio building would
be taller to the roof than Petronas to its spire at 100 or 99 stories,
but I'd rather we not settle for such "padded" designs.

The NYSTC is looking to be out in force gathering petition signatures
(haven't seen their text) and doing other things at the WTC site on the
9/11 anniversary itself.I wish them luck furthering our common goals,
but figure that that day with its crowd controls and conflicting agendas
will be hard to do more than be visible at...I have made no plans to go
there then.

Rally plans are proceeding,we should be applying for a permit tomorrow.
Naturally we urge everyone who can possibly make it on October 11th to
be there,we want to be on the sidewalk around City Hall Park,looking for
speakers...survivors are quite desirable,no celebrity keynote nailed down
yet!...we have to get the pro-rebuilding cause into the eyes of the media.
As I said,this should be design-agnostic,footprint-agnostic,united behind
the cause of rebuilding NOT ONE INCH SHORTER,with all factions able to
agree on that.I know there are those who specifically prefer "exactly
as it was",or "even bigger even better",or specific designs like Turner's
or Sieb's...but we need EVERYONE who won't settle for less human presence
in the skies than we had to take this Friday lunchtime period to show
that the cause will not go away (exact hours will be clear when we get the
permit).

A CNN news story today showed a Manhattan billboard rented by an asset
management firm that prefers to remain anonymous but wants to rent offices
in bigger-and-better new Twin Towers and is saying so.That's ONE ray of
visibility!

On the other hand,the positive ABC News story on the September 5th
hearing links to the site www.lowermanhattan.info that has a story on
the same hearing that somehow manages to go on at length without paying
any attention at all to the demands for tall towers!!

And Monica Iken is in today's Daily News,a column reprinted on the
NYCS message board...she likens the struggle for a big memorial to
the Apollo moon project and civil rights struggle.I think a better
analogy to those triumphs of technology and justice would be the
struggle to bring back skyscrapers of awe-inspiring scale in the face
of opposition like hers.

The Civic Alliance wanted to sample public opinion and partnered
with the Project for Public Spaces to create http://pps.org/downtownnyc/
where many of us have chimed in on the Give Your Input/World Trade Center
Site section to urge full-scale rebuilding...not that this seems to have
bent the opinions of the planning activists.Now they have opened up a
section about Greenwich Street,the thoroughfare the urban-utopians want
to slice through the WTC Plaza with and make the desired office-and-
memorial integrated site design impossible...but the only two people
to have posted comments so far have said NOT to put it back through.
What the urban-activist establishment have decided is popular,isn't
always popular.Save our superblock...add your voice for stopping
Greenwich short!

See you on the 111th floor on 9-11-11!

-=-=-
The World Trade Center towers MUST rise again,
at least as tall as before...or terror has triumphed.