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Responses To The Enviromental Impact Statement


Jenna Orkin of 9/11 Environmental Action doesn't think much of what's happening at Ground Zero. "This is a rush job," she said. "The reasons have to do with image and politics."

Patricia Noonan of the Partnership for New York City reached the opposite conclusion, praising the plan for its "balanced approach."

On the stage, officials from the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation sat and listened politely to the two of them, and dozens more -- each required to say their piece in three minutes or less.

The occasion was the public hearing for a 2000-page technical document issued by the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation: The Draft Generic Environmental Impact Statement for the World Trade Center site. Just as in the public hearings in January 2003, anyone who wanted to could sign up to speak. Since then, those who spoke - and those who couldn't make it - have been refining written comments that the corporation will accept until March 15.

Responses were not limited specifically to issues of the environment; the environmental impact statement process is the major remaining chance for the public to respond to the plan for Ground Zero. The cooperation of public and private interests working on the site, the historic significance of the site, and the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation itself were all subject to critique.

Business As Usual -- Sort Of

Environmental impact statements are a required part of any proposed building in the city, and comment periods for these statements present a major opportunity for members of the public to voice concerns or offer suggestions. Writing the statement, holding public hearings, and accepting comments are business as usual for developers.

The Draft Generic Environmental Impact Statement for Ground Zero is different mainly because of its scope. The document is referred to as a generic statement because it discusses buildings that have not yet been designed, and covers a large area that will be built over many years. This will release the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation from having to have a similar process for each building that goes up. Also, since the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation is exempt from the city's land use review process, the environmental impact statement is the only officially required avenue for public response on the Ground Zero project as a whole.

Despite its size, the environmental impact statement process for Ground Zero is proceeding on a tight timeline. The draft statement was made public on January 22, the hearings were held about a month later, and public comments are being accepted for about another month, until March 15.

All of these comments will be incorporated into the final environmental impact statement, according to the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation. Below are excerpts of comments that have been submitted so far:

Keep The Process Moving -- Patricia Noonan
Slow Down -- Caroline Martin
Tell The Whole Story -- Ernest Hutton
Skimming Over Environmental Concerns -- Jenna Orkin
Define the Footprints -- Anthony Gardner
This Is A Collaboration, So Work Together -- Jordan Gruzen
Don't Miss The Opportunity To Build Green
There Is An Alternative - Rebuild The Towers -- Alexander Butziger
Decide What Is Historic In Order To Preserve The Past, Not To Clear The Way For The Future -- Robert Kornfield, Jr.
Don't Bury West Street -- John Dellaportas
Environmental Impact Extends Beyond Ground Zero
--Catherine McVay Hughes
Miscalculating Open Space -- Diane Dreyfus

Keep The Process Going To Keep Businesses Downtown
The business community commends the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation and its partners in the EIS. They have set forth a balanced approach to expedite construction while minimizing the impacts on businesses, residents and workers in Lower Manhattan. A host of major Lower Manhattan businesses will soon be faced with renewing leases; they will be making location decisions within the decade. In order to remain in Lower Manhattan, they must be confident about its future.

If they decide not to stay in Lower Manhattan , there is no guarantee they will stay in the city at all. Once they begin evaluating alternative locations, it is possible that they will choose to locate elsewhere. Some place where rents are lower and labor costs less. Neither Lower Manhattan nor the city at large can afford to let these firms relocate

The business community believes that it is important to expedite the rebuilding process of the commercial sites in order to maintain the commercial character of Lower Manhattan and keep this important business district, which is the third largest CBD in the country.

The same sense of urgency and focus that drove the clean up of the World Trade Center site -- which took 9 months rather than one year and cost $750 million, not the projected $2.5 billion -- must continue to drive the rebuilding process.
-- Patricia Noonan, Partnership for New York City

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Slow Down
In the Catskills an Environmental Impact Statement is being prepared, and due to public pressure the time for comment is being extended an additional two months. I formally request that the public comment period for this draft EIS be extended from the current minimum of 45 days by an additional 2 months e.g. until May 15.

If you have made comments on the Draft EIS, you are entitled to a copy of the Final EIS under NEPA rules - no mention of it only being available electronically, or having to pay for the privilege. I would like to go on record as stating that I want a free hard copy on the day the Final EIS is made available to the public, and I want to be affirmatively informed when that date is, and where I can pick up my copy.
-- Caroline Martin, Family Association of Tribeca East

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Tell The Whole Story
The World Trade Center Draft Generic Environmental Impact Statement before us may fulfill the legal and administrative requirements as set forth in federal, state and city regulations, but its scope is limited to the areas required by environmental law. The Draft Generic Environmental Impact Statement can't and doesn't look at the full planning context of the proposed site plan, nor of that plan's relationship to the many other planned improvements within Lower Manhattan.
-- Ernest Hutton, New York New Visions

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Skimming Over Environmental Concerns This is a rush job. Although the rebuilding of Ground Zero will be one of the largest construction projects in the world, the usual three year EIS process has been condensed to one for reasons that have nothing to do with the environment or public health. Once again, the reasons have to do with image and politics. In this respect as in others, the rebuilding process shows signs of repeating the reckless behavior of the cleanup operation...

The Draft Environment Impact Statement consists in large part of sanguine projections into the future and assurances that where there are problems they'll be handled appropriately "when practical." Who determines what's practical? Who defines it and according to what criteria? During the cleanup it was often found to be impractical to wet down dust during the winter for fear the water would freeze. Is that going to happen again? Will other actions protective of human health be considered impractical because they require too much time or money? Will it be considered impractical to enforce the rules against truck and bus idling? And how will those rules be enforced?
-- Jenna Orkin, Steering committee, 9/11 Environmental Action

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Define the Footprints The Draft Environmental Impact Statement does not define what it means by the term "footprints." Although this has been a matter of discussion for more than two years, LMDC continues to refuse to acknowledge that the "footprints" are the outlines of the Twin Towers perfectly delineated by the remains of the exterior support box-beam columns presently visible at the lowest exposed level of the site-not some mythical void suspended in mid-air.
-- Anthony Gardner, Coalition of 9/11 Families

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This Is A Collaboration, So Work Together
Each part of the plan is being developed by a separate group of design professionals, each working for a different client, whether it be Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, the Port Authority, Metropolitan Transportation Authority, New York State Department Of Transportation, or Silverstein. In examining these plans we have observed a weakness in the continuity between adjacent elements. There also may be a difference of opinion between groups about how these land use and circulation issues should be resolved. This is not surprising since these ideas are now just emerging in physical form and can now be measured and evaluated when seen in the light of the overall master plan. This master plan, broadly conceived by Daniel Libeskind, has had many evolutionary changes since its introduction but still remains the dominant concept. New York New Visions has been supportive of this overriding vision. We encourage Lower Manhattan Development Corporation and the other controlling authorities to work more closely together so that we do not end up with powerfully expressive individual solutions to the parts without the connectivity that makes for an integrated urban fabric.
-- Jordan Gruzen, New York New Visions

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Don't Miss The Opportunity To Build Green
We appreciate the effort that has been made to incorporate guidelines for sustainability. While recognizing that this is a work in progress, it is important to note that what has been proposed is focused primarily on the individual development projects and makes no call for a comprehensive master plan for sustainability. What is needed, as part of the design guidelines and incorporated into the standards established for the Generic Environmental Impact Statement, is a study of the entire site and its environs that sets forth sustainability measures that will be common to all projects -- and allocates responsibility for those measures. While the guidelines presented are at the leading edge of the norm for large-scale developments, they generally do not seize the unprecedented opportunity afforded here to set new benchmarks that will advance state-of-the-art of sustainability practices and technologies. The fact that tenants, the occupants of 80-85 percent of the above-grade floor space, are not mandated to comply with the guidelines suggests business as usual.
-- Ethel Sheffer, New York New Visions, Metro Chapter of American Planning Association

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There Is An Alternative - Rebuild The Towers If you choose to replace the Twin Towers with the Libeskind World Trade Center, the other office towers besides Freedom Tower should be super tall (taller than 1,000 feet) too. After all, we did not lose just one "skyline element" (as you like to call it) on September 11, 2001, but two. How can the two lost Towers be replaced by just one building? - Given the mediocrity of all aspects of the Libeskind plan and its buildings, I am glad that you recognize that "The Proposed Action is not, however, the only option considered by or open to LMDC." The only truly worthwhile way of rebuilding is the Restoration Alternative. The new WTC should conform more to that what was taken from us on September 11, 2001, than to Mr. Libeskind's plan. It is obvious that you do not evaluate the Restoration Alternative fairly, but try to denigrate it as best you can, to whitewash the Proposed Action.
-- Alexander Butziger, World Trade Center Restoration Movement

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Decide What Is Historic In Order To Preserve The Past, Not To Clear The Way For The Future
The risk of having developers perform their own historic assessment is obviously that their historic consultants may act as advocates of the proposed plans rather than impartial experts. This Determination does not attempt to identify the historic resources that exist on the site thoroughly and accurately, or to recognize their integrity and significance. Rather, it appears that the purpose of the Determination is to insure that the redevelopment can proceed without finding any adverse effect, and without the obligation to mitigate any adverse effects.

The World Trade Center is one of the nation's most significant historic sites and it deserves a thorough and legitimate Determination. The failure to produce this would be a grave injustice, and an insult to those who lost their lives in the disaster and those who risked their safety in the aftermath. The historic resources of this site must be evaluated based on their merits, not on tactical considerations for the redevelopment.
-- Robert Kornfield, Jr, Historic Districts Council

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Don't Bury West Street
I believe the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation's three and a half year projected tunnel construction is wildly optimistic. The problem with highway tunnels is that no one knows what they will find underground until they start digging. That is why the Big Dig in Boston, which was originally projected to take only five years, has now been going on for 15 years and counting. Expect similar delays for the West Street tunnel, as anyone who has lived in NYC for any amount of time knows that these projects always run extra long.

Second, whether construction takes three years or 10, the plan to reduce West Street to four lanes during the entire construction period will be economic disaster for Battery Park City. During these years of construction, access to and from Battery Park City will be degraded to a similar extent as it was in the months after 9/11. The gridlock will not just hit West Street. The vehicle traffic will invariable try to find alternative north-south routes, which will spell lots of traffic jams for Greenwich, Broadway and Church as well.
-- John Dellaportas, Save West Street

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Environmental Impact Extends Beyond Ground Zero
Your Generic Draft Environmental Impact Statement needs to adequately address the accumulative impact beyond the immediate WTC site since more was severely damaged on September 11, 2001 and more than that remains to be damaged two and half years later. These large projects listed below must be included in the cumulative construction period analysis since they "represent a change from conditions existing prior to September 11, 2001":

- 130 Liberty Street (Deutsche Bank) "de-construction" and site "re-construct" of contaminated and exposed building which covers two city blocks
- 30 West Broadway (Borough of Manhattan Community College's Fiterman Hall) "de-construction" and site "re-construct" of contaminated and exposed building which covers one city block
- South Ferry Subway Station
- 7 World Trade Center (construction in progress)
- 90 West Street renovation and conversion to residential building (construction in progress)
- Infrastructure Repair which consists of digging up many streets to access cables, pipes, and wires

All these projects combined with your construction phasing has and will have an enormous impact on air quality from the exposed contaminated Deutsche Bank & Fiterman buildings to the truck traffic to construction machinery. These projects will include traffic beyond the estimated 176,000 truckloads calculated from the various tables listed in Appendix J.
-- Catherine McVay Hughes, downtown resident

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Miscalculating Open Space
Let's look at what passes for Open Space...Examining the original World Trade Center Plan you will notice that the side along 9A West Street did not count as open space until after 9/11. But the legend shows us that, now the road shoulder on the other side of 9A is included in the LMDC open space calculations. [The figures that Dreyfus is referring to are DGEIS figures 1.2 and 6.5] I bring this up only to indicate the acres of "open space" can include such unsavory parcels. Essentially, this quality of Open Space is as hospitable as the traffic triangle in Harold Square. Yes, there is a tree and a statue to admire and you could have a cup of coffee or meet a friend there. But would you want to?
-- Diane Dreyfus, M.S Architecture, Urban & Regional Planning

Public Hearings for Ground Zero


Testimonies From The Public Hearings

At the public hearings, people from throughout the metropolitan region testified about the rebuilding downtown. Some criticized the public process, while others reacted to the specific plans.

See what participants said below.

Every three minutes, a new person stood up at the public hearings for the new Ground Zero plans and offered his or her opinion, though rarely about the new plans themselves. The gentleman from the Audubon Society called on the planners to design "bird-friendly buildings." Laurence Russo presented his own plan for the site. Andrew Oliff stood up to say that the only buildings he could accept were the Twin Towers, rebuilt. Sally Regenhard said that the city of New York, not the Port Authority, should have control over Ground Zero.

So it went, every three minutes for four long hours. If there was one thing that absolutely everybody agreed on it was this: these public hearings were done wrong. It was almost as if, some say, officials wanted to be seen listening to public opinion rather than actually having to take the public's opinions into account.

"Three minute sound bites do not allow for substantive input," said Ron Shiffman, director of the Pratt Institute Center for Community and Environmental Development. "It was just structured the wrong way."

Engaging the public
Back in December, Bob Yaro, head of the Civic Alliance to Rebuild Downtown, and other civic leaders had predicted that the hearings, where whoever shows up gets to talk for three minutes while everyone else listens, would be much less productive than the Listening to the City town hall meeting in July, where a demographically diverse group of 5,000 people talked in small groups about specific details of the first six plans. Instead, the recent hearings looked to some like a show of public participation that the development corporation could conveniently dismiss as unfocused and unproductive.

In early January, the Municipal Art Society's project Imagine New York held roundtable discussions about the new plans. 300 participants highlighted important likes and dislikes about the designs, said co-director Holly Leicht. A report summarizing the responses is available online. During the workshop, three plans emerged as favorites: those by Daniel Libeskind, Norman Foster and Peterson/Littenberg.

These three plans were also ranked as favorites by people sending in comments to the development corporation's web site and in a New York Times poll. The top two plans for Gotham Gazette readers are by Foster and United Architects, with Libeskind's design and the THINK team's Sky Park plan tied for third.

Asking the same questions
Times reporter Ed Wyatt covered the first hearing without quoting from a single actual testimony, saying that most who spoke just repeated things that have already been said over and over.

Diane Horning, whose son was killed on September 11, responded to Wyatt's article at the second hearing, saying that people are bringing up the same questions because they haven't yet been addressed. "I suggest then that the LMDC answer those questions and address those problems so that we don't have to be so annoyingly repetitive," said Horning, who belongs to the group WTC Families for a Proper Burial. The group is calling for all of the unknown remains that were brought to the Fresh Kills landfill during the cleanup to be interred as part of the memorial.

While Horning called for assurances about the memorial, Hugh Hardy, from New York New Visions, a coalition of 21 architecture, planning and engineering organizations, suggested that the nine new plans be set aside until the agencies in charge of rebuilding resolve questions about a development strategy for the World Trade Center site. "The schemes represent a quandary. They are hampered without a realistic program and development strategy for the site, caused by a lack of clearly directed leadership," he said at the hearing. New York New Visions has a report evaluating all of the designs, which is available online (PDF format).

Shiffman, from the Pratt Institute, has also advocated for a new development plan. He said that the guidelines for rebuilding given to the architecture teams, which call for building most of the office and retail space that existed before the attacks, don't make sense for lower Manhattan today. "To adopt a 1970's program as the basis for rebuilding as is just as idiotic as rebuilding the towers the way they were," he said.


Testimonies From the 2003 Public Hearing

Reactions to the Plans

Opinions of 300
Holly Leicht, co-director of Imagine New York

The Skyline Is A Symbol Of Hopes And Dreams
Matt, city resident

The Centrality of the Memorial
Norman, lower Manhattan resident

Is This The Right Program? Is This The Right Process?
Jay Allen Zimmerman, former Lower Manhattan resident

A Virtual Declaration of War On Our Community
John Dellaportas, Coalition To Save West Street


Rebuild The Twin Towers

Don't Acknowledge Bin Laden as Your Urban Planner
Andrew Oliff, Manhattan resident


Safe Skyscapers

Do The Land Swap Deal
Sally Regenhard and Laura Weinberg, Skyscraper Safety Campaign

 

A Truly Democratic Process?

Where Has The Dialogue Been?
Michael Kuo, Municipal Art Society

Not Just One-Way Communication
Paul Epstein, Civic Alliance to Rebuild Downtown

We Have A Charter, Let's Live By It
Ron Shiffman, Pratt Institute Center for Community and Economic Development


Creating An Appropriate Memorial

Create Something Respectful, Embracing, Reverent And Life-Affirming
Nikki Stern, member of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation Families Advisory Committee

Honestly and Truthfully Report What Happened
Jack Lynch, Coalition of 9/11 Families

A Separate Space For the Rescue Workers
Bill McLoughlin, Bronx resident

Respect the Dead, Not the Deadline
Diane Horning, WTC Families for Proper Burial, and Laura Walker, Rockland County resident and widow

Who Needs Art Criticism?


When the George Street Playhouse in New Brunswick heard that the New York Times was sending a critic to a preview performance recently, the director canceled the performance rather than submit it to what he felt would be a premature review. In an unrelated incident in Vancouver, four theater critics were gagged and bound and harangued by a group of actors who accused them of crimes including "cruel analogies," "unfair comparisons," and "being mean." (The critics were willing participants in a publicity stunt that ended with their release by a sympathetic actor, who defended critics as serving a public good.)

Cultural critics rarely create such ruckuses. Anecdotally, their role has deteriorated over past decades, so that "criticism" as such—the public acts of describing, evaluating, contextualizing, and discerning—has degraded to the point where the most visible reviews are limited to a simple thumbs-up-thumbs-down vote for the weekend´s entertainment. According to "Reporting the Arts," a new study of national trends in arts coverage from Columbia´s Journalism School, fully 50 percent of arts coverage is mechanically generated listings.

As the cultural capital, New York boasts the preeminent newspaper of culture, the New York Times. In October 1999, intrepid Columbia University researchers counted more then 26,000 column inches of Times arts stories, compared with just 6,700 in USA Today and 2,800 in the Wall Street Journal. Long-time readers complain, however, that the Times´ diet of serious arts coverage has become leaner over recent years, so that discussions of specific artworks are pushed aside by celebrity interviews and other P.R.-driven stories. The economist James Heilbrun found that, from the 1960s to the 1980s, the Sunday Arts and Leisure section devoted more than half its pages to theater, classical music, opera, dance, painting, sculpture, and museums. By the early 1990s, however, he found that the section devoted nearly half its coverage to what he termed the "popular" arts—movies, jazz, television, and radio—and far less to the so-called "high" arts.

This shift may be in keeping with the current intellectual climate, which eschews distinctions between art and entertainment, "high" and "low," elite and popular. In recent years, the Times fielded its first-ever chief television critic, Caryn James, who has proven that it is possible to write about such phenomena as "reality television" in ways that pay attention to the broader social implications while still judging whether or not such shows make for good television. And The Times is still way behind other national papers in terms of its devotion to movies and television (which, the Columbia report did not fail to note, fund the vast majority of arts sections through advertising). In USA Today, movies and television take up fully two-thirds of arts pages—on par with most regional papers. The more conservative Wall Street Journal, however, has taken a stand against Hollywood puff pieces. "We have basically eliminated celebrity interviews," the arts editor told Columbia researchers. "I don´t think it´s journalism. I think it´s falling in with the plan of the movie company."

In New York, as in many cities, alternative weeklies and web journals fill in the gaps left by larger or more mainstream publications. This is particularly true in coverage of a field as diverse and fragmented as the theater. For example, the Village Voice championed the downtown playwright Richard Maxwell early in his career, helping to bring him more attention.

But how do editors and critics choose among the hundreds of performances taking place in a given week? During the height of the theater season, the Voice´s theater editor, Brian Parks, receives about 12 press releases per day. "I try to suss out what´s most important and most interesting, to consider what writers are available and their particular talents, and to make sure that a broad spectrum of New York´s theater is represented," Park says of his editorial strategy.

John Chatterton, founder and editor of the off-off-Broadway Review , takes a democratic approach to covering New York´s fringe theater scene. When he arrived to the city in 1993 as an aspiring playwright, Chatterton became frustrated when no theater producers would return his phone calls. So, with the explicit goal of getting a hotline to producers, he created OOBR. He funded it by charging theaters a $60 annual fee in return for a promise to review their shows. "We´ll review anybody," Chatterton explains, "we don´t guarantee a good review, but we can guarantee coverage." Figuring that some notice is better than none, 150 members have signed up. Originally print but now web-only, the off-off Broadway Review attracts about 29,000 visitors to its site each month. In addition to serving Chatterton´s own ends (he refers to his staff writers as "talent scouts" for the Midtown International Theater Festival, which he also founded), OOBR is meant to be a guide for downtown theater aficionados: Chatterton doesn´t publish "criticism," he says, just straightforward reviews.

Jonathan Kalb, chair of the theater department at Hunter College and former theater critic for the Voice and the New York Press, feels that there is a "vacuum" left by the absence of serious theater criticism in New York. Kalb recently launched HotReview.org, or The Hunter Online Theater Review, which aims to be something more timely than an academic or special-interest publication. Unlike most journals, HotReview publishes reviews of productions that are still running, but the articles provide a depth and breadth rarely seen in, say, Time Out New York or New York magazine. HotReview, Kalb writes, is a form or "resistance to the ubiquitous blurring of the difference between objective commentary and public relations in our time."

The last couple generations of theater critics, e.g., Mary McCarthy, Richard Gilman, and Eric Bentley, wrote expansively about theater for informed and responsive audiences, but today the spaces—and perhaps the audiences—for such discussions have narrowed. Kalb has experienced this himself: after serving as theater critic for the New York Press for four years, his editor decided to suspend theater coverage, having had the revelation that "theater is boring." This may be the opinion of many New Yorkers. Theater lacks the grunge appeal of the contemporary music scene and can in no way compete with Hollywood´s glamour. But, as Kalb points out, thousands of New Yorkers fill BAM´s immense Opera House, or regularly travel to New York Theatre Workshop or St. Ann´s Warehouse in DUMBO to see cutting-edge performance. It remains to be seen if these audiences think theater criticism, or arts coverage in general, matters.



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