NY Times
What a View to Behold, and It’s Really Something
In a view facing north at the construction site, steel columns of the Freedom Tower’s south perimeter are visible, having risen almost to street level.
By DAVID W. DUNLAP
January 25, 2007
YOU can see the progress of construction at the Freedom Tower.
To put it more emphatically, you can see the progress of construction at the Freedom Tower. Today.
Stand on Vesey Street, between Greenwich and Washington Streets. Look through the chain-link fences and over the Jersey barriers. The tops of six columns of the tower’s south perimeter are now visible, sprouting from the depths of ground zero. A seventh column, standing alone nearby, is where the Freedom Tower’s east plaza will be.
You no longer need a pass. Or an invitation. Or a hard hat. Instead, that venerable tradition of sidewalk superintendence, in which passers-by get to gawk and kibitz as buildings rise, can now begin in earnest at the World Trade Center site.
For the last five years, except for the temporary PATH terminal, construction at the site occurred entirely out of pedestrians’ view, 70 feet below street level. On the sidewalk, you could hear the activity and sometimes feel it. Crane booms could be spotted. But you had to take the word of government officials or reporters that anything was actually being built down there.
Now you can see for yourself.
“I think people will be surprised,” said David M. Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the architects of the tower. “Steel goes so quickly. It’s all fabricated off-site, so you never see that work. By the time you get it to the site, it goes up like an Erector Set.”
Anthony E. Shorris, whom Gov. Eliot Spitzer has named to be executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, said the trade center project is “moving from the theoretical and conceptual into the real, tangible and visible.”
“The momentum is powerful in terms of construction, in terms of the marketplace, in terms of perception,” he said. “Those are all momentums we would slow at our peril.”
But wasn’t it Mr. Shorris who cast a small cloud of doubt last month when he said the new Spitzer administration would take a “fresh look” at the Freedom Tower?
“There are lots of aspects to the Freedom Tower beyond the physical, a lot of questions one can pose that don’t have anything to do with columns,” he said this week. By that, he meant who will occupy the building and how it will be financed, now that the Port Authority has taken over the project from Larry A. Silverstein, the original developer.
For his part, Mr. Silverstein said, “It’s comforting to look out of my office here at 7 World Trade Center and know that we are getting closer to the day when the entire World Trade Center site will be fully built.”
MEANWHILE, for sidewalk superintendents without his privileged vantage, here is a brief guide:
Looking south from Vesey Street, you can see the tops of seven columns. They are visible from the sidewalk now because a second tier of steel has been added to each column, bringing them up to about 8 feet below street level, or 62 feet from the concrete slab at the base of the building’s foundation. Installation of the first tier began Dec. 19 with the ceremonial setting of a column, technically designated G7.3, bearing American flags and the words “Freedom Tower.”
The cluster of six columns delineates all but the western and eastern edges of the tower’s southern perimeter. The slender column near the middle of the cluster does not have to bear as much load as its brawnier companions because the entryway to the Freedom Tower will be directly above. That means this particular column line will extend only as far as the ground floor.
“It looks like a dwarf in a forest of sequoias,” Mr. Childs said.
The next spectacle for passers-by will be the erection by the end of February of two tower cranes. More perimeter columns will emerge and, gradually, the building’s massive concrete core will rise to street level.
That should satisfy one concern that was on the minds of Michael and Nancy Shoup of Brenham, Tex., and Bill and Hilda Atkinson of Bryan, Tex., as they looked over the site from Vesey Street this week.
“If those columns are all that’s going to hold up a 1,776-foot tower, I’m not going up in it,” Mr. Shoup said, with a smile that suggested he knew there was more to come
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