With a Steel Column, a Tower Will Reclaim the Manhattan Sky
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
The first column of the 100th floor of 1 World Trade Center is
expected to be put into place on Monday afternoon.
By DAVID W. DUNLAP
If the winds are forgiving enough over Lower Manhattan — up where
workers can see the whole outline of the island's tip — a steel column
will be hoisted into place Monday afternoon atop the exoskeleton of 1
World Trade Center and New York will have a new tallest building.
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1 World Trade Center will soon overtake the Empire State Building as
the city's tallest building.
More important, downtown will have reclaimed its pole star.
Poking into the sky, the first column of the 100th floor of 1 World
Trade Center will bring the tower to a height of 1,271 feet, making it
21 feet higher than the Empire State Building.
After several notorious false starts, a skyscraper has finally taken
form at ground zero. At first, its twin cranes could be detected
creeping over the jumbled tops of nearby towers. Then, at the rate of
a new floor every week, it began reshaping the Manhattan skyline as
seen from New Jersey. By late last fall, it could be spotted from the
control tower at La Guardia Airport, eight and a half miles away.
A tower has again become an inescapable presence at the southern end
of Manhattan.
The author Neal Bascomb, who drives into New York every few weeks from
Philadelphia, where he lives, recalled a growing awareness that 1
World Trade Center was visible from the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge and
that it was ratcheting perceptibly taller on each visit. "You know, I
was happy to see it," he said. "I thought, 'Wonderful.' "
From a construction point of view, the completion of the framework,
known as the topping out, will be a more significant milestone. That
is to occur in a couple of months, when 1 World Trade Center reaches
1,368 feet at its rooftop parapet, identical in height to the first 1
World Trade Center, which was destroyed, with the rest of the complex,
in the terrorist attack of Sept. 11, 2001. The ultimate topping out
will be the completion next year of an antenna that will bring the
structure's overall height to 1,776 feet.
Yet there is an excitement to this moment that was conveyed by Patrick
J. Foye, executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New
Jersey, which is one of the developers of 1 World Trade Center.
"You've got floor-to-ceiling views in every direction," he said in an
interview last week. "If you strain your neck and look carefully
enough, to the west you can see Alaska."
Not Russia? "Not quite yet," he said. "Maybe when we get to the
observation deck."
This is the second time a skyscraper called 1 World Trade Center has
edged over the Empire State Building. The first was on Oct. 19, 1970,
when a section of steel framework elevated the north tower of the
trade center to 1,254 feet, four feet above Empire State's 1,250-foot
benchmark.
The first trade center was seen as a threat to the real estate market.
Owners and builders fought it fiercely. Their ranks included Lawrence
A. Wien, who controlled the Empire State Building, and Seymour Durst,
who headed the Durst Organization and whose son Douglas is developing
1 World Trade Center. On May 2, 1968, a committee headed by Mr. Wien
took out a full-page advertisement in The New York Times showing the
silhouette of a jetliner headed straight for the upper floors of 1
World Trade Center. The problem, the ad averred, was air traffic, not
terrorists. But the it said presciently, "The total potential hazard
is staggering."
By contrast, the current management of the Empire State Building
released this statement about the new 1 World Trade Center: "The
world's most famous office building, the ancestor of all super-tall
towers, welcomes our newer, taller cousin to the skyline. We've
watched you grow, and now we salute you." What they are really
thinking at Fifth Avenue and 34th Street is impossible to discern
since the building's public relations firm, Edelman, declined to
answer questions and ruled out interviews with Peter L. Malkin and
Anthony E. Malkin, the key owners.
Mr. Bascomb's 2003 book, "Higher: A Historic Race to the Sky and the
Making of a City," chronicled the contest in 1929 between the Chrysler
Building and 40 Wall Street to be the tallest building in the world, a
contest Chrysler won, only to be quickly overshadowed by the Empire
State Building. There is no exhilarating race now, he said.
"This is not really a victory of any sort or even necessarily
something to be celebrated," Mr. Bascomb said about 1 World Trade
Center overtopping the Empire State Building. "It's kind of like
competing against a ghost."
Of course, the stakes are much different than they were in 1929.
Unlike its predecessor, the new 1 World Trade Center is not the
tallest building in the world. The Burj Khalifa in Dubai holds that
title. It is not even the tallest in the United States. That would be
the Willis Tower in Chicago, once known as Sears Tower. One World
Trade Center is, however, the tallest building between Vesey, Liberty,
West and Church Streets. That may be what matters most.
Enlarge This Image
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
The tower has been growing at the rate of a new floor every week.
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"It's the marker for the memorial," said David M. Childs, the
architect who led the design team at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, where
he is now a consulting partner. "If you're coming in from Newark
Airport, this is the one you'll look to. Somebody will say: 'You see
that tall building? That's ground zero.' "
Mr. Childs said the tower would also play the necessary civic role of
being the "answering spire" to the skyscrapers of Midtown. "In a way,"
he said, "it ties together Manhattan, which lost something because of
that emptiness in the sky."
Carol Willis, the founder, director and curator of the Skyscraper
Museum in Battery Park City, said 1 World Trade Center also helped
knit together the neighborhood itself.
"I'm very pleased that downtown has an axis around which the rest of
the buildings can revolve; to use a Jungian term, the axis mundi," she
said. "Downtown desperately needed it and now it's got it back."
Her words come with particular grace, since Ms. Willis acknowledges
that the Empire State Building is her favorite. So does Prof. Mark
Kingwell of Trinity College at the University of Toronto, who wrote
"Nearest Thing to Heaven: The Empire State Building and American
Dreams" (2006).
"I like the renewed visibility it has enjoyed during the last decade
as, once again, the city's tallest," he said last week. "But the
origin of that visibility was political darkness, and anyway the
Empire State Building has nothing to prove. Say what you like about
the symbolism of tall buildings, they do express civic pride. It's
high time for a tower to scrape the sky again in Lower Manhattan."
More:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/30/nyregion/1-world-trade-center-will-reclaim-the-sky-in-lower-manhattan.html?pagewanted=2&hp
--
Together, we can change the world, one mind at a time.
Have a great day,
Tommy
--
Together, we can change the world, one mind at a time.
Have a great day,
Tommy
--
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