Some may now find it hard to believe, but prior to 9/11, downtown Manhattan was a pretty fantastic place to live and work. For the past eight years, my wife and I have made our home in Battery Park City. Until last year, we both worked downtown as well. Downtown, with its own moods and rhythms, was a world away from the hustle and bustle going on uptown. In the immediate weeks after the tragedy, with the ruins still smoldering in the background, hundreds of thousands of us returned here, determined to rebuild our lives and our homes. After a year of hardship, we are starting to see through to the clear. But the much-touted plan to create a West Street tunnel threatens our neighborhood and just doesn't make sense.
HOW THINGS STARTED TO GO AWRY
Planners and critics -- notably New York Times' architectural writer Herbert Muschamp -- view rebuilding lower Manhattan as an opportunity to place their stamp on the area. They claim there is something fundamentally wrong with downtown, and that the answer is not merely to rebuild what was lost but, in Mr. Muschamp's words, to "reimagine" how it all should be. A new generation of would-be Robert Moseses, including Lower Manhattan Development Corporation officials, have answered this call.
The development corporation's target: West Street. Its goal: to spend $2-3 billion to bury the one-mile stretch of West Street from Chambers to Battery Park, in order to build a vehicle underground expressway and a tourist promenade on top. Its rationale: to spare downtown pedestrians the peril of crossing what has been termed a "dangerous highway." Never mind that West Street is neither wider nor more difficult to traverse than Houston Street or Park Avenue. And never mind that, prior to 9/11, the state had just completed a 5-year, $400 million renovation of that same road. The West Street plan, per the Times, enjoyed "near-universal agreement."
OUR COALITION
A month ago, five of us -- neighbors, yet strangers -- met on the Rector Green in Battery Park City in hopes of being heard over the din. We formed the Coalition to Save West Street, a community organization devoted to the idea that West Street and Lower Manhattan are largely OK. We started a petition drive, spoke at community events, launched a web site, and leafleted the neighborhood. Today, we number over 200.
So who are we, and why are we so up in arms? We are the people who use West Street every day. We walk across it, we drive on it, we live and work along side of it. In short, we are the people the development corporation never bothered to ask before deciding on this scheme. As our membership has grown broader and more diverse, the Coalition to Save West has become a true "coalition." Here is a sampling of the people involved:
TRANSPORTATION ADVOCATES
The notion of spending $2 billion to $3 billion to bury a functioning road is so outrageous, it has brought together two advocacy groups usually on the opposite sides of the debate: the American Automobile Association of New York, the voice of automobile drivers, and the Straphangers Campaign, the voice of subway riders. Both have come out in opposition to the tunnel. They understand that billions of dollars do not materialize out of thin air; they come from finite federal transit funds better spent on projects to repair roads and bridges, extend subway lines, and keep buses running.
PARENTS, STUDENTS AND TEACHERS
The State Department of Transportation is privately estimating that the tunnel will take 11to 12 years to complete. The students of PS 89 and IS 89, two of the schools on the edge of West Street, will have to cross the construction site twice a day, every day until they graduate. They will have to study over the racket of a tunnel being dug just outside their windows. The Parent-Teacher Associations of these schools have now gotten involved. The development corporation will be hearing from them soon.
ENVIRONMENTALISTS
The core of the tunnel concept is the construction of an underground expressway, which will significantly increase motor vehicle traffic in Lower Manhattan. According to the environmental advocacy group Clean Air Campaign, the carbon monoxide, diesel fumes and other pollutants generated by all those additional cars in the tunnel will have to be vented upward on to the streets of lower Manhattan. The development corporation's plans depict greenery on the site, but ignore the invisible toxins that will contaminate their new tourist promenade.
BATTERY PARK CITY RESIDENTS
West Street is Battery Park City's lifeline to the rest of the city, due to the fact that there are no subways and the neighborhood is surrounded on the other three sides by the Hudson River. Once the project is complete, we will no longer have direct access to the rest of the city traveling north on the West Side Highway or South to the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel or FDR Drive. The ambulances and fire trucks that raced down these roads to our rescue on the morning of 9/11 will no longer be able to do so. Area residents, especially school children, the elderly, the disabled and others who rely on bus transportation, will be relegated to narrow local access roads clogged with tourist traffic just to get to and from our homes. And, after the 1993 truck bomb attack on the World Trade Center, no one wants to live over a highway tunnel anymore. The continued viability of Battery Park City as one of New York City's great residential neighborhoods will be placed in doubt.
For the past month, the Coalition to Save West Street has been seeking a meeting with the development corporation's board to discuss these concerns. So far, only silence. Before the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation sends in its bulldozers, it should hear us out. Downtown can be great again, without all the digging.
John Dellaportas is chair of the Coalition to Save West Street, a community group of lower Manhattan residents, workers and others who oppose the proposed West Street tunnel.
With all the enormous public attention on rebuilding lower Manhattan, it seems inconceivable to me that anything could be missing from the debate. But something important has been overlooked thus far. The words "historic preservation" have not passed the lips of those planning the project. It is as if it was the 1960's again and the raze-and-build-anew urban renewal orthodoxy prevailed unchallenged. It is, as Yogi Berra said, "Deja vu all over again." A case in point is the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's $750 million proposal for the new Fulton Transit Center on Broadway between Fulton and John Streets. The authority's design concept envisions clearing the site of all structures, even though the improved station would be entirely below grade.
What alarms preservationists most about this proposal is that one of the historic buildings slated for demolition by the MTA is the Corbin Building, a slender, nine-story structure built in 1889, when it loomed over its neighbors and was tall enough to be called a "skyscraper." It features a rugged masonry facade hung on an iron frame (rolled steel sections were not available until 1893), with elaborate terra-cotta details.
The Corbin Building was designed by Francis Hatch Kimball, also the architect of the office buildings flanking the Trinity Church Burial Ground in Lower Manhattan, the Presbyterian Chapel in Riverdale, the Montauk Club and Emmanuel Baptist Church in Brooklyn, and the headquarters of the New York Architectural Terra-Cotta Company in western Queens. The building was named after Austin Corbin, a flamboyant 19th century financier who built railroads on Long Island, and in Reading, Pennsylvania, as well as hotels on Coney Island and his own game preserve in Newport, New Hampshire.
Instead of ending up in a landfill somewhere, the Corbin Building could be preserved and incorporated into a commercial building on this site. It would help anchor and enliven such a facility and could yield income and taxes to offset the cost of the Transit Center. Architecturally, it could be as exciting a new-old contrast as David Childs' design for the new Penn Station (now to be named after the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan) or Lord Norman Foster's tower atop the Hearst Building.
Robert Silman, the highly-regarded structural engineer who saved Frank Lloyd Wright's "Fallingwater" from falling into the water, has devised a way to underpin the Corbin Building's foundations so that it could be preserved and reused while a new and improved subway station is constructed beneath it. "From a structural engineering standpoint, it's entirely feasible, with proven technology, for the MTA to have its cake and eat it too - both preserving the Corbin Building and building the new Fulton Transit Center," says Silman.
Silman's client is the Lower Manhattan Emergency Preservation Fund, a consortium of five preservation groups: the World Monuments Fund, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, The Preservation League of New York State, The Municipal Art Society, and the New York Landmarks Conservancy, where I work. These groups raised funds to help preserve historic sites damaged on 9/11/01. The fund is now advocating to protect and preserve historic resources downtown.
The fund has identified three "corridors of concern" in lower Manhattan, along Fulton, Greenwich, and West Streets. In each instance, worthy historical structures are threatened by redevelopment plans that range well beyond the Ground Zero damage zone. In all, there are more than 225 historic sites in lower Manhattan that have no protection whatsoever from demolition or inappropriate alteration.
Awash in competitions, intrigue, and emotion, the planners for the MTA and the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation seem to lack a sense of historical continuity. Ground Zero may be a tabula rasa, a "field of dreams." But the rest of the downtown must not be treated as if it were Sixth Avenue. The planners must not be allowed to repeat the mistakes of the 1960's.
Lower Manhattan has been the epicenter of this nation's most significant events for nearly four centuries. It boasts a street pattern and an array of venerable buildings unmatched in other precincts of our city. It is still a pillar of world finance, one of the largest commercial office markets in America, and an emerging residential neighborhood of great potential. It houses such strange bedfellows as the New York Stock Exchange and the South Street Seaport with equanimity. It boasts the largest business improvement district in the five boroughs. It is truly a unique, vital - and historical - place.
None of this heritage should be erased in the process of rebuilding Lower Manhattan's damaged heart. The situation calls for delicate, skilful surgery - not wholesale, indiscriminate change. As a preservationist, I pray that our planners are up to the task. But as an advocate, I am remembering what Yogi had to say on the subject. Stay tuned! Watch this space!
Roger P. Lang is a preservation architect who serves as director of community programs and services at the New York Landmarks Conservancy. If you want to receive a free copy of the preservation fund's illustrated, annotated map of these sites, send an email to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
Untangling the twisted subway lines that make up the Fulton Street subway station is a problem that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority has been trying to solve since long before 9/11. But the energy for development that came in the aftermath of the attacks – and the funds to do it – allowed the agency to push forward the design of its own large-scale architectural project in the area surrounding Ground Zero.
The new Fulton Street Subway Station, which was presented to the public on May 26, will be funded with $750 million of federal rebuilding money. Construction will begin late this year, and the station will be completed in 2007. A public hearing on the design is scheduled for June 8.
The building consists of a glass cube fifty feet tall, extending along Broadway from Fulton Street to John Street. From the center of this cube a cone, also made of glass, rises to a height of 110 feet. Several buildings will have to be condemned and destroyed.
The Corbin Building -- a nine-story building considered a skyscraper when it was built in 1889 -- will be preserved. It will be used to provide entranceways and spaces for small retail stores on the south side of the structure.
Retail stores will also be included on the second floor of the station, though details are still being worked out. The project's architects also say that some of the subway connections remain unresolved
“The transit center, very much, is the tip of the iceberg,” said Andrew Whalley, who spoke for Grimshaw, the architecture firm designing the station. “It’s very much about connecting the dots.”
The dots in this case are 12 separate subway lines, spread over 1000 feet from the 2/3 station on the east to the R/W station about 1000 feet on the west. Private transit companies built these stations over a span of about 30 years in the early 1900s with no thought to a creating a coherent whole; turning the stations from competitors into collaborators has proven to be a very difficult project.
The new station leaves an opening to connect to any future 2nd Avenue Subway. It will also connect to the Ground Zero transit hub a block to the west.
Like Santiago Calatrava, the architect of the Ground Zero station, the new Fulton Street station has been designed to bring natural light to the underground track levels. Grimshaw echoed Santiago Calatrava in saying that its design attempted to use light as a construction element.
Calatrava described his station as a pair of hands releasing a bird; Whalley said the roof of the Fulton Street station was like a glass leaf, capturing light and drawing it into the subway system.
But David Dunlap of the New York Times saw another image in the station. “New Yorkers,” he wrote, “…may find it hard to resist thinking of this structure as a jeweled egg to Mr. Calatrava’s birdlike terminal.”