Excitement surrounding Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava's soaring, skeletal, perpetually delayed World Trade Center Hub has faded considerably since the early aughts. So much so, that it's hard to bat an eye at new reports that the future Westfield World Trade Center Mall is leaking.
According to the NY Times, a "persistent leak" has further delayed the opening of the mall— which, if you asked developers two years ago, would already be open by now—to the first half of 2016. Westfield broke the news of the delay to its investors in August, without mention of the leak.
A spokesperson for the Port Authority told the paper that water has been dripping from adjacent 3 World Trade Center, a new office building that went into construction over the summer. Construction workers have been spraying the site with hoses "constantly" to settle dust on the site, and water is dripping though the ground-level ceiling of the transit hub into the 70-foot underground maze of PATH platforms and future mall stores.
World Trade Center construction director Steven Plate said that the leaks had only penetrated four future stores. Still, Westfield says they won't occupy any of the stores until all of them are watertight. Anxiously waiting to open the doors to high-end tenants like Stuart Weitzman and Kate Spade, mall owners described the Hub as an "enormously complex and unique project" in a statement (hardly the "building with the power to shape the future of New York" that Times architecture critic Herbert Muschamp crowed about in 2004).
Back in December, it came to light that the estimated cost of the One World Trade Center transportation hub was creeping toward $4 billion—almost twice the estimate announced when Oculus plans were first revealed a decade previous.
Today, Plate said that his hope is to stick to the lower end of his budget—somewhere between $3.74 billion and $3.995 billion.
For all those craving their Calatrava fix: We refer you, for the time being, to this hallway.
