[After several notorious false starts, a skyscraper has finally taken form at ground zero. At first, its twin cranes could be detected creeping over the jumbled tops of nearby towers. Then, at the rate of a new floor every week, it began reshaping the Manhattan skyline as seen from New Jersey. By late last fall, it could be spotted from the control tower at La Guardia Airport, eight and a half miles away.]
By David W. Dunlap
If the winds are
forgiving enough over Lower Manhattan — up where workers can see the whole
outline of the island’s tip — a steel column will be hoisted into place Monday
afternoon atop the exoskeleton of 1 World
Trade Center and New York
will have a new tallest building.
More important,
downtown will have reclaimed its pole star.
Poking into the sky,
the first column of the 100th floor of 1 World Trade Center will bring the
tower to a height of 1,271 feet, making it 21 feet higher than the Empire State
Building.
After several
notorious false starts, a skyscraper has finally taken form at ground zero. At
first, its twin cranes could be detected creeping over the jumbled tops of
nearby towers. Then, at the rate of a new floor every week, it began reshaping
the Manhattan skyline as seen from New Jersey. By late last fall, it could be
spotted from the control tower at La Guardia Airport, eight and a half miles
away.
A tower has again
become an inescapable presence at the southern end of Manhattan.
The author Neal
Bascomb, who drives into New York every few weeks from Philadelphia, where he
lives, recalled a growing awareness that 1 World Trade Center was visible from
the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge and that it was ratcheting perceptibly taller on
each visit. “You know, I was happy to see it,” he said. “I thought,
‘Wonderful.’ ”
From a construction
point of view, the completion of the framework, known as the topping out, will
be a more significant milestone. That is to occur in a couple of months, when 1
World Trade Center reaches 1,368 feet at its rooftop parapet, identical in
height to the first 1 World Trade Center, which was destroyed, with the rest of
the complex, in the terrorist attack of Sept. 11, 2001. The ultimate topping
out will be the completion next year of an antenna that will bring the
structure’s overall height to 1,776 feet.
Yet there is an
excitement to this moment that was conveyed by Patrick J. Foye, executive
director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which is one of the
developers of 1 World Trade Center.
“You’ve got
floor-to-ceiling views in every direction,” he said in an interview last week.
“If you strain your neck and look carefully enough, to the west you can see
Alaska.”
Not Russia? “Not
quite yet,” he said. “Maybe when we get to the observation deck.”
This is the second
time a skyscraper called 1 World Trade Center has edged over the Empire State
Building. The first was on Oct. 19, 1970, when a section of steel framework
elevated the north tower of the trade center to 1,254 feet, four feet above
Empire State’s 1,250-foot benchmark.
The first trade
center was seen as a threat to the real estate market. Owners and builders
fought it fiercely. Their ranks included Lawrence A. Wien, who controlled the
Empire State Building, and Seymour Durst, who headed the Durst Organization and
whose son Douglas is developing 1 World Trade Center. On May 2, 1968, a committee
headed by Mr. Wien took out a full-page advertisement in The New York Times
showing the silhouette of a jetliner headed straight for the upper floors of 1
World Trade Center. The problem, the ad averred, was air traffic, not
terrorists. But, it said presciently, “The total potential hazard is
staggering.”
By contrast, the
current management of the Empire State Building released this statement about
the new 1 World Trade Center: “The world’s most famous office building, the
ancestor of all super-tall towers, welcomes our newer, taller cousin to the
skyline. We’ve watched you grow, and now we salute you.” What they are really thinking at Fifth Avenue and 34th
Street is impossible to discern since the building’s public relations firm,
Edelman, declined to answer questions and ruled out interviews with Peter L.
Malkin and Anthony E. Malkin, the key owners.
Mr. Bascomb’s 2003
book, “Higher: A Historic Race to the Sky and the Making of a City,” chronicled
the contest in 1929 between the Chrysler Building and 40 Wall Street to be the
tallest building in the world, a contest Chrysler won, only to be quickly
overshadowed by the Empire State Building. There is no exhilarating race now,
he said.
“This is not really a
victory of any sort or even necessarily something to be celebrated,” Mr.
Bascomb said about 1 World Trade Center overtopping the Empire State Building.
“It’s kind of like competing against a ghost.”
Of course, the stakes
are much different than they were in 1929. Unlike its predecessor, the new 1
World Trade Center is not the tallest building in the world. The Burj Khalifa
in Dubai holds that title. It is not even the tallest in the United States.
That would be the Willis Tower in Chicago, once known as Sears Tower. One World
Trade Center is, however, the tallest building between Vesey, Liberty, West and
Church Streets. That may be what matters most.
“It’s the marker for
the memorial,” said David M. Childs, the architect who led the design team at
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, where he is now a consulting partner. “If
you’re coming in from Newark Airport, this is the one you’ll look to. Somebody
will say: ‘You see that tall building? That’s ground zero.’ ”
Mr. Childs said the
tower would also play the necessary civic role of being the “answering spire”
to the skyscrapers of Midtown. “In a way,” he said, “it ties together
Manhattan, which lost something because of that emptiness in the sky.”
Carol Willis, the
founder, director and curator of the Skyscraper Museum in Battery Park City,
said 1 World Trade Center also helped knit together the neighborhood itself.
“I’m very pleased
that downtown has an axis around which the rest of the buildings can revolve;
to use a Jungian term, the axis mundi,” she said. “Downtown desperately needed
it and now it’s got it back.”
Her words come with
particular grace, since Ms. Willis acknowledges that the Empire State Building
is her favorite. So does Prof. Mark Kingwell of Trinity College at the
University of Toronto, who wrote “Nearest Thing to Heaven: The Empire State
Building and American Dreams” (2006).
“I like the renewed
visibility it has enjoyed during the last decade as, once again, the
city’s tallest,” he said last week. “But the origin of that visibility was
political darkness, and anyway the Empire State Building has nothing to
prove. Say what you like about the symbolism of tall buildings, they do
express civic pride. It’s high time for a tower to scrape the sky
again in Lower Manhattan.”
@ The New York Times
THE ECONOMY DOWNSHIFTS
THE ECONOMY DOWNSHIFTS
[So there is no getting around that slower growth means bigger challenges for ordinary Americans, for policy makers and, not least, for President Obama and Mitt Romney. Unfortunately, with election-year partisanship only intensifying Washington’s gridlock, concerted action to support the economy will have to wait until after the election, and no one knows which direction policy will take.]
First-quarter
growth was not far off the recent average pace and conditions are certainly
worse elsewhere, with many European nations in recession. But that’s false
comfort. To make up the damage the Great Recession did to jobs, income, wealth
and confidence, the economy needs consistent above-average growth. Europe’s
problems will only exacerbate America’s own, by shaving growth from exports or,
in a worst case, by destabilizing banks that are linked to the European financial
system.
So
there is no getting around that slower growth means bigger challenges for
ordinary Americans, for policy makers and, not least, for President Obama and
Mitt Romney. Unfortunately, with election-year partisanship only intensifying
Washington’s gridlock, concerted action to support the economy will have to
wait until after the election, and no one knows which direction policy will
take.
There
are bright spots: consumer spending and housing construction were both up in
the latest growth figures. But there is little to indicate that the upturns are
sustainable. Spending, for example, was stronger despite weak wage growth,
suggesting that most of the bolstered consumption is from relatively wealthy
consumers. That can make for good numbers, but it does not signal broad
prosperity. Similarly, corporate profits have been healthy, but business
investment has waned, indicating that businesses remain cautious and unlikely
to increase hiring or raise pay. That, too, suggests greater inequality, since growth
will flow more to profits than to pay.
At
the same time, cutbacks in government spending — which are scheduled to deepen
next year in keeping with last year’s federal budget deal, and which
Republicans want to make even deeper — will eat into growth. In the latest
figures, government spending cuts shaved 0.6 of a percentage point from growth;
deeper cuts mean more damage, as has been amply demonstrated by self-destructive
austerity in Europe.
A
stark divide is developing on the campaign trail. President Obama is centering
his agenda on policies to address economic inequality — including more manufacturing
jobs and educational opportunities. Mitt Romney is focused on tax cuts for the
rich, budget cuts for the poor, and on blaming Mr. Obama for the economic
shambles created in the Bush years.
For
now, the default policy is to slog on until the end of the year, when lawmakers
will be forced to confront the looming federal budget cuts and the simultaneous
expiration of the Bush tax cuts, the temporary payroll tax cut and federal
unemployment benefits.
The
fledgling recovery, beset by lopsided growth, will not be helped by a
continuation of high-end Bush tax cuts, nor can the weak economy withstand
severe budget cutbacks. Meanwhile, the uncertainty over future policy is yet
another harbinger of continued slow growth.