Results tagged “thelowermanhattandevelopmentcorporation”

The sister of the 23-year FDNY veteran who died during the Deutsche Bank building last August is suing city agencies and contractors, citing their "wanton, willful, and reckless conduct" in his death.

Yesterday morning's rain caused a recently installed sewer main to burst, flooding the basement and parking garage of a Battery Park City luxury apartment building. Water levels reached up to 20 feet. Not only were car owners greeted with news that their vehicles were either submerged or floating on top of sewer water, hundreds of tenants at 90 West Street were evacuated. Fire officials explained that, per WNBC, "rain flooded a re-routed sewer pipe,...

Did the FDNY fail to inspect the building? The Daily News says the Fire Department was supposed to conduct inspections every 15 days and that the inspections would have included looking over the standpipe system. It is, as the News calls it, a blame game. The Manhattan DA's office has opened up a criminal investigation into the fire, but yesterday Mayor Bloomberg said, "at this point, there's no reason for anybody to think in terms of criminal charges or anything else."

Continue reading "Questions and Blame in Deutsche Bank Fire"

The Deutsche Bank at 130 Liberty Street will start to be dismantled today. The 41 floor building's demolition strategy was approved in September, after many years of planning, toxin finding, and searching for human remains (the World Trade Center's south tower fell into the building). The Department of Buildings signed off on the permits this week, but the permits are only to remove the facade. The AP reports, "On Friday, workers will begin removing the glass windows and metal column covers that make up the facade of the building's top four floors. After that, the steel and concrete skeleton of those floors will come down."

The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation has approved the scaled down design for the World Trade Center Memorial . Last week, builder Frank Sciame had released plans for a revised and less costly plan that has been generally welcomed. But one thing that hasn't been resolved is how victims' names will be featured - the LMDC will have to decide on that later.

If you want to be thoroughly depressed by the rebuilding process at Ground Zero in a matter of pages, versus a matter of years, Gothamist highly recommends reading New York magazine's cover story about the WTC Memorial and its architect, Michael Arad. It's an exclusive interview where Arad spill his guts about the process, but also gets worked over as one of the many egos in cast of a million egos and billion interests. Arad seems to have clashed with all the important players - original WTC redesign architect Daniel Libeskind, the firm Davis Brody Bond which is the associate architect, the LMDC, "partner" Peter Walker (who designed the landscaping elements for the memorial), you name it. For instance:

Arad immediately started behaving as if he had a powerful public mandate, which didn’t exactly put him in the right frame of mind to negotiate with Libeskind about fitting the memorial into the master plan. Libeskind, for his part, was enraged that Arad’s design had won. It effectively obliterated his original design for the memorial, which called for the area to remain a sunken pit with an open lawn at the bottom. “I will fight this!” he yelled during his first meeting about it with the LMDC. “I am the people’s architect!”

Libeskind and Arad are friendly now, but the process just seems nutty and horrible. Arad also says he'd be willing to give up the waterfalls, which seemed to be a beautiful, dreamy component of the memorial (if potentially dangerous during the winter), since costs have been escalating. Waterfalls are only the tip of the iceberg for what's wrong with the memorial situation. Let this cover story be yet another reason why Governor Pataki cannot run for higher office.

The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation has posted an animated video of what the deconstruction of the Deutsche Bank at 130 Liberty Street will look like. It won't be demolished; rather, it will be carefully "detoxified and disassembled" because it is still extremely contaminated after September 11, 2001. The video is very cool (once you get past why it has to be deconstructed), showing that scaffolding will go up for crews to clean the building and that columns and windows will be carefully removed. There's even a simulation of the West Side Highway (or is it West Street), with cars speeding by as the building's floors are taken away.

Additionally, The architecture firm Davis Brody Bond was appointed to help with work on Michael Arad and Peter Walker's Reflecting Absence Memorial. WTC memorial jury chairman Vartan Gregorian said, "They would not do anything, in my opinion, to scuttle the vision of Arad and Walker, and they also know the ways of New York and how things are done," and the Times notes that two members of DBB's design team are black, whereas all the designers involved with the WTC rebuild so far have been white. Davis Brody Bond projects around the city, besides the Harvard Club and NYPL expansions mentioned in the papers, include the NYU dorm on East 14th (between 3rd and 4th Avenues), the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center, and that ugly Union Square Building, Zeckendorf Towers.

There is also contiuning debate about the best way to show victims' names - with or without signifying their occupation as emergency worker, etc.