From sacred space to fiasco: how the World Trade Center site became a monument to incompetence
Beijing may be getting all the attention of the world’s architectural groupies in 2008, but that’s understandable: it also has the Olympics.
Beijing may be getting all the attention of the world’s architectural groupies in 2008, but that’s understandable: it also has the Olympics. New York was the focus in 2007, officially opening not only the long-awaited World Trade Center memorial and museum but also Santiago Cala-trava’s soaring transit centre next door, and – of course – the magnificent Daniel Libeskind Freedom Tower, soaring 1,776 feet into the air and featuring breathtaking vertical gardens at its peak.
Or at least that was the plan announced to great fanfare by Libeskind in 2003. The reality, as anyone who’s been to Lower Manhattan recently can see, is that bugger all has happened at the World Trade Center site over the past five years.
We’re assured there’s been important work done below ground, but everything was meant to be finished by now, seven years after the attacks. Instead the hole still gapes, the fingers still point, and Merrill Lynch staff still run a gauntlet of makeshift bridges and dirty paths to get to work in the morning.
The WTC site has gone through several incarnations since the end of 2001: first it was a sacred space, then it was a blank canvas on to which New Yorkers could project their hopes and aspirations. For a while after that it was a political football and then a 16-acre reminder of public-sector incompetence. At this point it’s a fully fledged fiasco, and George Marlin, former executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey which owns the site, has gone so far as to suggest that errors at the site amount to a criminal breach of the Port Authority’s fiduciary responsibility to its bondholders.
As for Wall Street’s investment banks, the endless delays at the WTC site constitute an extremely frustrating obstacle to the nirvana of large trading floors, great public transportation links and a world-beating location in what is still known as the Financial District. While many banks – foremost among them Goldman Sachs – have always made their home here, others have deserted it over the years for midtown. The area around Grand Central Terminal is much more convenient for commuters from the Upper East Side, Westchester and points north; it’s better for shops, hotels, bars and restaurants; and views over Central Park are more highly rated than those of the Statue of Liberty.
Mergers and acquisitions did their bit, too. Following the merger of JPMorgan and Chase Manhattan – both downtown giants – the headquarters of the combined company ended up on Park Avenue, while JPMorgan’s magnificent former headquarters on Wall Street were sold to Deutsche Bank. But JPMorgan ended up losing the huge purpose-built trading floors that all banks covet, and so found the WTC site too tempting to resist. It drew up plans for its own tower on the southern edge of the site – but woke one morning in possession of the brand-new midtown Bear Stearns building, so plans to move downtown were scrapped.
Another company with big hopes for the WTC site was Merrill Lynch, which considers its current home, the World Financial Center, out of the way and too small. It was interested from the start in moving into one of the new towers around the periphery of the WTC – towers being specifically designed with the needs of investment banks in mind. But then Merrill changed its mind and decided instead to move to midtown, to a new skyscraper on the site of the old Hotel Pennsylvania on Seventh Avenue. Midtown is much pricier than the most expensive towers in the financial district, but Merrill was rich – until it started writing off billions of dollars of mortgage-backed debt instruments. But once chief executive Stan O’Neal was kicked out, dreams of moving to midtown were scrapped and Merrill reverted to Plan A, the World Trade Center. It had the enthusiastic backing of the city and state of New York, which agreed to push back deadlines on the Richard Rogers tower to accommodate changes Merrill wanted.
The result was predictable, given the cursed nature of the site: nothing happened. The tower’s owner, Larry Silverstein, couldn’t agree the price with Merrill, and the bank at this point is likely to simply renew its lease at the World Financial Center in 2013 – probably just as well, since the chances of the WTC tower being in move-in condition by then seem increasingly remote.
Indeed, all stories at the WTC seem to have similar endings. The Freedom Tower: designed by committee – still a hole in the ground. The museum and cultural centre: so far there isn’t even an architect, let alone a plan. The glorious transit hub: massively over budget even before construction has really started, it’s now been shorn of its retractable roof and isn’t expected to be finished before 2014. And the centrepiece, the memorial? After a global competition with more than 5,000 submissions, a winner – Michael Arad – was announced, only to see his plan emasculated by a jury that clearly knew what it wanted all along.
As for Libeskind, he’s pretty much been forgotten. His ideas for the memorial were unceremoniously dumped and he hasn’t been given a single building to design at the site; essentially, nothing of his initial plan remains.
A couple of buildings have managed to rise outside the WTC site proper. Larry Silverstein’s 7 World Trade Center is finished and filling up, while the new $2.4 billion Goldman Sachs headquarters on West Street is more or less on track. Not that Goldman isn’t spitting mad: there were promises, backed by cash, that the rest of the WTC project would be finished by the time they were. Now there’s zero chance of that happening and the company is due $320 million in penalties. But Goldman would much prefer a vibrant urban context for its new building, rather than a dusty building site.
There’s still a chance the WTC site will, eventually, become a great urban centre. But in the minds of many on Wall Street and beyond, it will also live in memory as an indication that where the Chinese do magnificent architecture on time and on budget, the Americans are better at delays and recriminations.
Felix Salmon blogs for Portfolio.com and Spectator Business