Don't rock the boat or the skyline. (WTCProgress/Twitter)

In a subtle reminder of the connection between New Jersey and New York that undergird the Port Authority, the spire that will top the agency's 1 World Trade Center departed its berth in the Port of Newark for Lower Manhattan this morning. Once the barge carrying eight pieces of the 400-foot tower topper arrives in New York, it will be unloaded in preparation for installation atop the city's tallest building.

The remaining 10 pieces were trucked down from their foundry in Quebec, but these pieces had to be shipped from Canada last month because they were too heavy to travel on the highway.

It is interesting to have finally gotten a close up of the spire, considering there is a big debate about whether or not it is a spire at all, because an artistic covering for the skyline spear was removed at the recommendation of the Durst Organization, the tower's co-developer. If the Council on Tall Buildings, which decides who is the biggest, should find the spire lacking in integral architectural intent, the rooftop protrusion could be deemed a simple antenna, rather than an integral part of the design, knocking the building down from its symbolic height of 1776 feet (or is it 1784?) to a mere 1,386 feet, the height of the tower itself.

A good flood? (Getty)

Superstorm Sandy wreaked havoc across the city, including Lower Manhattan, where flooding into tunnels shut down both subway and vehicular traffic for weeks. In a story looking at flooding in the Hugh Carey Brooklyn-Battery tunnel, Dana Rubinstein reveals that none other than developer, macher and civic bigwig Bill Rudin actually welcomed the flooding because it protected some of his harborside buildings.

"I had one very prominent real estate builder who owns buildings in lower Manhattan—actually all over the city—thank me for allowing the Brooklyn-Battery tunnel to be used as a drainage ditch," M.T.A. chairman Joe Lhota told me recently. "I wasn’t particularly pleased with the comment.”

(Lhota confirmed during our conversation that he was referring to Bill Rudin.)

The M.T.A. has recently begun to float different ideas for protecting the system's tunnels in the future from flooding during such storms, which are expected to increase in frequency as the climate warms. Industrial balloons and flood gates are among the ideas under discussion.

But as Rudin's comments indicate, protecting the tunnels might create problems elsewhere. "The fact of the matter is, if I plug it up, we plug it up, the M.T.A. plugs it up—if God forbid this happens again, the surge is the same or even higher, the water will go elsewhere," said Lhota.

And elsewhere could include the lower floors of nearby buildings, like those owned by Rudin Management at One Battery Park Plaza and One Whitehall Street. Rudin, the scion of a storied New York real estate family and chairman of the influential Association for a Better New York, declined comment.

But even more intriguing than the revelation that a self-styled civic leader welcomed ill on the city's infrastructure is the conclusion of the article, which argues that perhaps we should all embrace such Schadenfreude.

After all, if the tunnels could be designed to serve as moats, with their mechanical systems carefully protected, and easily pumped dry, they could actually serve as yet another form of so-called soft infrastructure serving to protect the city from future disasters. Insulating some cables and installing some pumps would probably be a lot cheaper than building those giant sea gates. The same goes for what we put in the basements of our buildings. Though then there's a debate about all that unused, and often valuable space going empty. Putting the mechanicals upstairs takes up living space, and who wants a boiler in the living room?

Still, rather than trying to stop the water, is there a way we can successfully live with it inside our buildings? That may become the design challenge of 21st-century New York.

Update: Mr. Rudin shares a statement on the future of the city's flood protections.

Update 12/6:Mr. Lhota issued a statement praising Mr. Rudin.

Well, it all depends on if you're a faithful reader of The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal. We just hope that you're not both because then you're going to be really confused. In stories published just days after one another, the country's two intellectual heavyweights offer vastly different spins on the Post-Sandy market.

If you read The Times, things are kind of gloomy at the bottom of the island. A family walked away from a $17.5 million Tribeca mansion that wasn't even flooded. Prices are dropping by the millions. Chinese parents buying condos for their college freshman sons have recoiled in horror. Who even knows if they'll let their kids go to college here anymore.

Are you feeling a little depressed brokers? Well, we suggest you turn to The Journal, which would like to assure you that buyers are persisting come hell or high water. Buyers are demanding showings in buildings that have yet to regain power, like Superior Ink. Prices are rising as inventory disappears (a lot of listings in badly flooded buildings are off-the-market until repair work finishes) and banks are so eager to drink the milk of the downtown cash cow that they're easing restrictions on inspections, with many taking exterior photographs rather than making real inspections.

The Observer has also made its own predictions about the Lower Manhattan real estate market, in which we pronounced it hale and hearty despite everything, but that was a whole three weeks ago.

What's the truth? The answer is no one really knows. Some buyers have been more cautious since Sandy, a few have walked away and a lot of others couldn't care less. And most likely, the Lower Manhattan market will reach an equilibrium, possibly with some some relatively modest price reductions. We won't see any real sea changes if, and unless, Lower Manhattan gets hit with another hurricane.

kvelsey@observer.com

Senator Schumer (far left) and Congressman Nadler (far right) at the mouth of a flooded Brooklyn Battery Tunnel—the kind of damage both hope to prevent. (Jay Fine/MTA)

There has been a big debate in (local) government about how best to respond to Hurricane Sandy going forward. There is the governor's camp, which argues for redesigning great swaths of the city and state's built environment; and the mayor's camp, which both before the storm and after, argued that the city could never really protect itself from these kinds of disasters, so it was up to citizenry to protect themselves. The city would help with evacuations and the like, but really, don't build near the sea or count of some fancy new sea gates to protect you, the mayor insisted.

During the recovery, The Observer would ask major officials into which camp they fell. Both Senator Charles Schumer and Congressman Jerry Nadler (who represents much of the formerly flooded downtown Manhattan) put themselves in the camp of doing more, building more, protecting more.

"For the future, we have to look into it," Senator Schumer said.

He stressed that if anything, the storm serves as a wake-up call to action for investments and practices the city should have been undertaking already anyway because of sea rise due to climate change. "We were going to have look into it anyway, with the waters rising and climate change," the senator said. If anything, Sandy may have saved us from something far worse in the future, the quiet, creeping tides that go largely unnoticed.

The senator did not have any specific ideas on what might be good measures to undertake, but he seemed eager to get into the discussion. "We’re just at the beginning of thinking about it," the senator said, saying that the clean-up efforts would have to come first. He did say he would work to wrangle money from the federal government to help pay for any solutions the city comes up with. After all, if the Army Corps and the treasury help keep up the flood protections surrounding New Orleans and the rest of the Mississippi Delta, why not do the same for new York Harbor?

Congressman Nadler, on the other hand, had plenty of recommendations. He is a bit of a waterfront infrastructure wonk, after all, having called for trans-harbor freight rail and other interesting investments in the past.

"Certainly Lower Manhattan, we should have much higher seawalls," Mr. Nadler said. "We had a 14-foot surge. Why couldn’t you have a wall around Lower Manhattan that went up 14 feet? I don’t know how much it would cost, but it would be a heck of a lot cheaper than the cost of a flood." He said the gates could even be retractable, but something like them seemed prudent.

Utilities were another major concern. "The Con Ed station at 14th Street, that cut off a quarter of a million people," the congressman said. "That, and other facilities like it, should be waterproof. They should not be flood-able. You could insulate them. They could be made like fortresses. Given how valuable they are, how crucial they are to lives and fortunes, they should be."

Mr. Nadler also echoed a now-familiar recommendation, to build some serious infrastructure around the harbor to help protect from other storms. "To me, we should consider to protect the city through the kinds of storm gates that Rotterdam and London have," he said. The congressman even rattled of what should be built where, such as gates and sluices at Perth Amboy, Hell's Gate and the Verrazano Narrows, thus cutting off much of the harbor from a storm surge.

"It's big, but you could do it," Mr. Nadler said. He also acknowledged the considerable, but worthwhile costs of such an investment. "The cost estimate for that is 10, 12 billion dollars, but to two or three of these storms, even one of them, is more than that," he said. Indeed, Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli calculated an $18 million cost to the city as a result of the storm, but that includes the entire five boroughs, much of which would not be protected by these fancy new sea gates.

This is a problem Mr. Nadler fully acknowledges. "The problem is it wouldn’t protect Coney Island, Sea Gate or Jamaica Bay," he said. "It would protect downtown, Brooklyn, Hoboken and Jersey, but it’s not the answer to everything. It’s something to consider seriously, but unfortunately, given the geography of the city, there’s no way you do a storm gate that would give you broader protection.

But he still thinks it would be worth pursuing. "I don’t think it’s right to dismiss these proposals off hand," Mr. Nadler said. "They should be studied carefully, and a lot of them should be done. Maybe the storm gates, maybe not, but certainly Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn would be much better protected. And our electrical facilities. Also our subways." By protecting these critical pieces of infrastructure through a large project like sea gates, it might save the government money on other, smaller investments that would then not be necessary.

Whatever winds up being the appropriate solution, big or small, Mr. Nadler agreed with Mr. Schumer that something must be done.

"People say the worst case scenario could happen—it just did, almost," the congressman said. "It could have been a little worse. But people after Irene said, oh, all the hype, it didn’t happen. It just did. Now you have to look at all these proposals and realize these kinds of things can happen, especially with climate changes, the seas are getting warmer, it means there’s more energy for these, there’s going to be higher waves, harsher storms, more often.

:We have to protect ourselves. Things that weren’t practical in terms of the investment, now they will be."

The MTA has been saying it would have the subways up and running within two hours of getting the power back, but they're not there yet, apparently. Though the subways were supposed to be a priority, power above ground does not necessarily mean power below. "We're not expecting anything right now, but I also wouldn't count it out," an MTA spokesman said. So the subway wait continues.

At his press briefing this evening, Gov. Cuomo made a surprise announcement, actually in the middle of talking about what dismal shape the PATH train is in—there appear to be some five miles worth of flooding, the length the line under the Hudson from New York to New Jersey, so that is one thing that will probably be submerged for some time to come. But a place that will not be is the World Trade Center, which, after flooding a good 15 to 20 feet across the site only three days ago, is now dry and in working order.

"Work will recommence at the Ground Zero site tonight," Gov. Cuomo declared. I was just congratulating some of the workers; there was tremendous flooding at the Ground Zero site. We went from seeing the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel turned into a flume, we walked up the World Trade Center site, where water was cascading into the site from every imaginable angle, at such a decibel level it was disorienting. The entire site was flooded."

But through an almost miraculous, and certainly Herculean, pumping and recovery effort, led in part by the Army Corps of Engineers, the site has been cleared in a fraction of the time anticipated. "They originally anticipated it would be two to three weeks before they could get back to work," the governor said. "But instead of two to three weeks, they've gotten it done in three or four days, and the work will recommence tonight on the site, and you'll see light on again at the site."

And indeed we did on the way home, along with a few other buildings way downtown, including the Goldman Sachs headquarters, the American International Building with its red spire and 7 World Trade, with its roof lit up bright as a candle. It just so happens that earlier in the day, The Observer spotted a construction lift in operation on Larry Silverstein's World Trade Center tower 4, but it was not clear if it was an inspection or construction work.

While it could still be days, if not longer, before downtown finally gets all its lights back, it is nice to see these buildings back up, especially given their symbolic nature. "The Ground Zero site will be illuminated once again," Gov. Cuomo said. "New York goes back to work."

A position of strength and weakness. (MTA/Flickr)

Standing at the mouth of the Hugh L. Carey/Brooklyn Batter Tunnel in Lower Manhattan earlier this afternoon, following a tour of the flooding within, Governor Andrew Cuomo gave yet another one of his rousing speeches on the trials of New York under pressures, particularly how it is that the physical infrastructure that makes this city tick can also bring it to its knees if a disaster occurs.

But before we get to that, what exactly is the status of the tunnel, one of the city's busiest, with a daily traffic of some 50,000 vehicles? MTA Chairman and CEO Joe Lhota began by relating of the story he told earlier this week, of meeting the governor at the mouth of the tunnel by happenstance on Monday night, where they took in the hellish scene.

"Where you are all standing right now, there were raging, white rapids," Mr. Lhota said. "The Hudson River crested and came roaring down into our tunnels, both tubes of our tunnels are filled, they’re fulled with 43 m galls of water, each one is filled with 43 m gall of water. It stretches 6,000 feet, over a mile, about a mile and a quarter of nothing but water."

"I will tell you what I saw was so extraordinary, I actually thought it was capable of providing hydro power, it was coming in with such great speed and with a roaring noise that you just couldn’t possibly imagine. Also try to imagine, it was pitch black, the power was out downtown, and this was all we saw."

It was this scene that had the governor ruminating on the resilience, but also the vulnerability, of the city.

"They say sometimes that when it comes to personalities, your greatest strength can be your greatest weakness," the Governor said. "In some ways, that is true for this city, also. What made this city and made this state was our proximity to the water, it was our port, it was the Hudson River, the Erie Canal, that’s what made us. What made Manhattan was the engineering marvel of being able to build not just above ground but below ground. How do you get so much done on this slim island? Because we build high and we build deep. That is our great strength. That becomes a great liability in the face of a storm, and that is what we have seen, in a way we haven’t seen in decades, if ever."

The governor then shared his recollections of Monday night's flooding. "The story that Joe tells about Monday night still gives me chills. We were standing up on that over pass, the water coming through here was three, four, five feet deep. The Huson River came right across the West Side Highway, the East River was coming down from that side, and the only question was, When does it end? Has the river crested? Because at one point you just feared that you would have just submerged all of the Battery."

If only this was our only problem, but at least the worst is over. "As massive as the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel is, you have to times that by six, seven, eight, nine, ten times. You have the Holland Tunnel, you have the Midtown Tunnel, you have subway tunnels that are still flooded, you have Con Ed vaults that are still flooded. This is an engineering feet that we have never undertaken before. So we do need the help, but the good news is the help is coming."

Mr. Chakrabarti previously served as director of the Department of City Planning's Manhattan office, so he was around when much of the waterfront planning by the Bloomberg administration, and the thousands of condos that came with it, were taking shape. Mayor Bloomberg, at least before the storm hit, was fine with things proceeding as they were on the waterfront, with little investment in new protections and infrastructure, while former deputy mayor Dan Doctoroff, who helped hatch many of these plans, wants more of both.

Mr. Chakrabarti has taken a more urgent stance. "The thing we as a city have to understand is, we've been promoting all this waterfront development, and most of that waterfront development is happening in the zone that is getting evacuated right now," he said in a telephone interview. "We're talking about thousands and thousands of housing units. It's fine for that housing to be there, but we have to figure out a way to protect it all."

But Mr. Chakrabarti also has a simple solution. Well, if the world's largest floodgates would qualify as simple.

It just so happens Mr. Chakrabarti was in Rotterdam when we reached him Monday morning. He had just gotten in on a trip with his students to study the Dutch city's reclamation of its waterfront after years of industrial semi-neglect (sound familiar?). The idea was to translate the Dutch practices into a model for a new Long Island City, buoyed by the arrival of Cornell's tech campus. "Rotterdam has some new, extraordinary examples of these new live-work environments, including urban manufacturing, housing and office space all mixed together right on the waterfront," Mr. Chakrabarti said.

But that was not the near-divine inspiration he had experienced being in the Netherlands' second-largest city, which also happens to be home to the world's largest port—one that can ill-afford to shut down, even for the foulest of storms.

"It's extraordinary to be here, because Rotterdam, in the 1990s, they built sea gates twice the size of the Eiffel Tower at the mouth of the Rhine to protect the city from storm surges," Mr. Chakrabarti explained. "I think we seriously have to think about doing this in three places probably --at the Verrazano, at Perth Amboy and at Hells Gate--to really protect the city."

The advantage of such an approach is it allows easy passage for ships while protecting the harbor during the worst incidents. After the storm surge passes, the gates reopen and life can get back to normal. No flooded basements and, especially, no flooded subways.

The costs are obviously astronomical. It was $4 billion to build the sea gate, known as Maeslantkering, or the Maelstrom Barrier, which was completed in 1997. While twice the size of the Eiffel Tower sounds big, the Verrazano Narrows is more than three times as wide as the Rhine span, and that leaves two other gates to be constructed. The cost could easily surpass $10 billion, likely making the kind of damming gates Mr. Chakrabarti is proposing the most expensive infrastructure project ever undertaken.

This is not simply a Dutch tradition. Following the North Sea Flood of 1953, the British built a flood barrier in the Thames. It did not open until 1984,  at a cost of £534 million, which would be £1.4 billion today, or $2.25 billion. So again, not cheap, but also important enough that some of our global coastal rivals have undertaken the investment.

In light of the projections of $20 billion in damages and lost productivity resulting from Superstorm Sandy, it makes more and more sense. Whether this is simply a "storm of the century"-type event or the new normal in an age of global warming can be debated, but even protecting the city from one more storm could make the investment worthwhile.

"Climate change is here, and we clearly have to acknowledge that these unusual weather events are going to become more and more frequent, and we're going to have to do something about it because we could lose much more than we're going to save if we don't invest in the right infrastructure," Mr. Chakrabarti said.

And he has an ingenious idea to help protect the city while at the same time paying for the infrastructure to protect it. In addition to the sea gates, barrier islands would help protect the city from flooding and storm surges. But rather than building small, disaggregate land masses, Mr. Chakrabarti proposes large islands and peninsulas that can accommodate new development on them. The investment in these new spaces would generate millions, even billions of dollars in tax revenues that would help pay for the critical waterfront infrastructure the city needs.

Specifically, Mr. Chakrabarti came up with a proposal known as LoLo, a 20-acre stetch of in-fill created using dredgings from the harbor—a job the Army Corps already has to do on a regular basis, so why not put that earth to a productive use? Over time, LoLo would be built up around Lower Manhattan, eventually connecting it to Governors Island, which would also become a more vibrant place as it would no longer require a ferry to get to.

"I think we just have to think of this in different terms," Mr. Chakrabarti said. "And a proposition like LoLo, it could pay for itself. It would be interesting to see if people think twice about that kind of action because we're going to need to generate the revenue to invest in that kind of infrastructure, and that could do it."

This is nothing new, either, as Lower Manhattan has spread and spread over the years, most recently with Battery Park City. While that area has become a flood zone because it was not built for these kinds of floods, LoLo could help mitigate the poor planning of the past. And it would help get us back in touch with our Dutch roots!

"They really don't treat the water in this kind of eggshell kind of way that they do in the United States," Mr. Chakrabarti said. "They reclaim the land, use dredging material, do a whole variety of things to reshape the shoreline, like we first did when we were New Amsterdam. The Dutch have unrivaled experience in dealing with flooding. They really know how to shape the water's edge, and I think we really have to rethink the way we deal with the water's edge, given what's happened with Sandy."

And the city, or at least the state, may finally be prepared to do that. Moments ago, Governor Cuomo said during a press briefing he believed something had to be done. "We have to take into consideration reforming, modifying our built environment, our infrastructure. This city, this region is very susceptible to coastal flooding. It's not something we had to deal with with any frequency whatsoever. So we're not built in a way that has the built in protections.

"I think it's a longer conversation, but I think part of learning from this is that climate change is a reality, extreme weather is a reality, it is a reality that we are vulnerable, and if we are going to do our job as elected officials, we are going to have to think about how to redesign as we go forward so we don't incur this type of damage as we go forward."

Here's one idea for you, Mr. Governor.

I'm about to get archival on your ... (Wikimedia Commons)

Yesterday a room of sharply dressed archivists, librarians and book conservators burst into laughter at a joke about mildew. They’re a funny bunch, these keepers of our national record, excited by different things than you and I. When they mention the billions of records, of which only a sliver has been digitized, currently stored in limestone caves in Lenexa, Kan., their eyes light up like deep-sea explorers contemplating the ocean. They all have stories to tell.

Stories like the time they found a trove of Walt Whitman documents written while he was a clerk in the Attorney General's office. They were forgotten documents, which were only identified by a scholar who recognized the handwriting and made the connection. Or the photo unearthed of FDR standing beneath the newly laid keel of the USS Arizona in 1913, while the then-secretary of the navy was touring the Brooklyn Navy Yards. The same ship, of course, whose destruction in Pearl Harbor 28 years later would lead to arguably FDR’s most famous speech, and with it a declaration of war. As with any explorers, when they talk about the often serendipitous thrill of discovery, their enthusiasm is infectious.

“We guide people on the fun experience of doing research,” said Dorothy Dougherty, arching one eyebrow. The public programs director for the National Archives' New York City branch, Ms. Dougherty was guiding The Observer through a tour of the U.S. record keeper's new home downtown, inside the Alexander Hamilton Customs House on Bowling Green.

Downstairs, curators have put on an exhibit titled The World's Port, highlighting the various documents and records of New York Harbor. Among the notable pieces are manifest lists drawn up and signed by Herman Melville in 1867 when he was a clerk at the customs house. The exhibition is meant as an homage to the building that had taken in the archives as much as it is to the historical documents housed within it.

It’s easy to make any number of ill-conceived and off-the-cuff comments about youth and the digital world. That in this internet-addled age of instant gratification, an institution like the National Archives might seem archaic. An agency that can only offer excitement through the careful, and often tedious, task of sorting physical documents. Or, as we like to say now, data-mining.

But that wouldn't be true. According to a Pew Research Center poll released on Monday, nearly 60 percent of Americans between 16 to 29 frequented a library, and not just to surf the web: to conduct research, borrow prints and to read magazines and newspapers. Call it the Millennial Paradox. Somehow the more digitized our worlds become, the more we crave the physical connection to an object that exists in our hands.

It’s this connection that the National Archives only hopes to foster through its various programs. “The mission of the National Archives,” said David Ferriero, archivist of the United States, “is to ensure that the records of the country are available for the American public to hold the government accountable for their actions. To learn how decisions were made, to explore their family history and the history of the country through those documents.”

Formerly located on desolate Varick Street, the new offices of the National Archives in New York are located on the second floor of the customs house, with locals and out-of-towners bustling about outside between work and play, between the ferry, the Battery and the canyons of Wall Street. The new space just happens to be the same office where Melville worked 145 years ago, as one of the archive's researchers recently discovered.

“There’s no filter here,” said Mr. Ferriero, sitting in the newly refurbished research library, “It’s the high points and the low points of our government history. We only try to provide context whereby we can encourage the public to discover the past for themselves.”

Turns out this was not some sick joke. As is well-known (from the various signs he has hung in his windows over the years), Mr. Simmons, the rap mogul, lives across the street at 114 Liberty Street. Or rather used to—the Def Jammer is trying to sell the place for $11 million as he moves out to the West Coast for good.

As the lift made its way up the side of the lovely office tower, there he was. Not Mr. Simmons—though there was a woman sitting outside, smoking and talking on a phone—but the Buddha. And a big Buddha at that. Sitting, it looked to be about six feet tall.

This also reveals another nice amenity to the space so far underplayed: views into 4 World Trade Center, along with the rest of the 16-acre site. Though that also means the thousands of Port Authority employees who are moving in can see you, too. So much for naked sunbathing.