http://www.nypost.com/seven/01032008...wer_456087.htm
FALTERING TOWER
SLOW GO ON ANTENNA, RENTS
January 3, 2008 -- IT'S good news the Port Authority finished most of the bathtub job at ground zero on time, and that Larry Silverstein will be able to start construction on towers 3 and 4 within a few weeks.
But the 1,776-foot tall Freedom Tower has been largely forgotten in the news blitz. The PA wants us to believe the project is sailing along.
But, the tower's crowning broadcast antenna seems lost in the clouds, with the PA nowhere near a deal on lease terms with TV stations which will transmit from it.
And neither of the ballyhooed office leases with government agencies for 1 million square feet of the project's 2.6 million feet, announced way back in June 2006, has yet been completed.
The good news is that the PA, which owns the $2.9 billion Freedom Tower, and architects Skidmore Owings & Merrill agree on what the antenna will look like. The shaft will constitute the project's top 408 feet.
That design, shown up-close on this page, looks a lot like the one first unveiled in the summer of 2005, when architect David Childs had to redesign the building because of security concerns.
It was suggested at the time that the final antenna design would be more "sculptural" than the original image, and later sketches and models sported various curlicued motifs.
But
Childs says those ideas, which exposed the actual antenna to the air, were impractical. "A broadcast antenna is a very technical piece of equipment - it's like designing a hospital operating room," Childs said.
The more open designs would cause "rain to turn to ice, which would break and fall," and also make the antenna impossible to maintain at such a height.
So it was back to the original notion, which called for a top-to-bottom hood enclosing the actual broadcast spire.
The current design, done in consultation with sculptor Ken Snelson, shrouds the antenna in a synthetic material called Ray-dome - "very hard and permanent, but invisible to the broadcast rays that pierce through it," Childs said.
But PA Executive Director Anthony Shorris, asked where negotiations stood with the Metropolitan Broadcast Alliance, a consortium of 13 TV stations, said, "I don't have any news."
In fact,
the talks are really bogged down, both over how much rent the stations are willing to pay the PA and by disagreements among the broadcasters themselves.
The negotiations "are complicated because the stations are competitors," Shorris said. "I don't want to diminish how complicated."
Pat Smith, a rep for the TV consortium, said only, "The members remain committed to broadcasting from the top of the Freedom Tower."
Meanwhile, Shorris said a lease for 600,000 square feet with the Federal General Service Administration "is not done. We're still negotiating the long-term escalations over the later years of the lease."
And while a deal with the state Office of General Services for 400,000 feet is signed, "it needs to get final approval in Albany," Shorris said. Meanwhile, the PA has imposed a gag order on Cushman & Wakefield heavy-hitter Tara Stacom and her colleagues who are marketing the rest of the office space.
The PA says steel will begin rising above street level by June. But with construction and material costs escalating almost by the hour, it's unclear whether the job can be completed over five years within budget with out employing "value engineering" to cheapen the materials and detailing.
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