Planes Trains & Automobiles

She's the spokesman and a rider. (Amtrak)

Rosario Dawson Rails on Moynihan Station: She’s Amtrak’s Biggest Fan Since Joe Biden

“My oldest memory of riding the train? I don’t know, that’s hard,” Rosario Dawson told The Observer last Tuesday night. “I was born in Coney Island, but grew up on the Lower East Side, so we spent a lot of time on the F-Train, going to the beach. My dad used to wear his little shorts, and the knee-high socks. He was the most handsome guy on the entire boardwalk.”

And thus the country’s most beautiful railroad buff was born.

Ms. Dawson was standing inside a post office in Midtown, there for a four-course dinner at which she was the guest of honor. She wore a form-fitting black pant suit, ruffled black shirt and black pumps that had to be nine-inches long and sharper than a railroad tie.

This was no ordinary post office, to be fair, but the Corinthian temple on Eighth Avenue known as the James Farley building, once Manhattan’s central post office, and certainly its grandest. From a staff of thousands, there is now a skeleton crew of about a hundred, which has freed up acres of space in the building for Moynihan Station. A dream since the early 1990s of the former New York senator for whom it is named, it will allow for the expansion of Penn Station across the avenue and out of the hell it has resided in for the past six decades, since Robert Moses destroyed the original Penn in 1963. Read More

Machers

Would you live here? (Bing Maps)

Silverstein Beats Vornado to the Port Authority Punch Again, Proposes New Bus Terminal on West 39th Street

Correction: A reader points out that this is simply a bus garage, not a bus station, and the Port Authority Bus Terminal would remain in operation. The Observer regrets the error.

The Port Authority has been desperate to replace its eponymous bus terminal near Times Square for at least a decade now. Vornado Realty was supposed to build a new office tower atop the terminal, which it would rebuild in the process, but after years of planning, that proposal collapsed.

Now, it turns out Larry Silverstein has quietly floated a plan to build a new terminal on West 39th Street, according to Crain’s, near the mouth of the Lincoln Tunnel, atop which Mr. Silversterin would build a new residential building. Read More

The Neverending Story

WTC's own arts maven. (NY Social Diary)

World Trade Center Gets an Arts Expert, May Lose an Arts Center

Art, once seen as a central piece of the World Trade Center redevelopment, has become much of an afterthought at this point. Even the giant mall planned for the site is a bigger priority, though that makes some sense, since the one destroyed on 9/11 was one of the most popular on the planet at the time. That and it will actually help generate revenue for the Port Authority, an increasingly important issue as the cost of the complex continues to grow. The surprisingly serene memorial may qualify as culture, but otherwise the site is almost all commerce at this point.

The Port is taking a step toward enlivening things by tapping Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel as a public art consultant for the World Trade Center. Part of her job will be to figure out exactly what art would be appropriate for the site, and where, but the exact aspects of the consultation is still being worked out. Read More

The Neverending Story

pic_view-1

World Trade Center Redevelopment Now 35 Percent More Expensive

The Port Authority has just released  the preliminary findings of its agency-wide review, the biggest, if least surprising, news of which is that the cost of redeveloping the World Trade Center continues to sky rocket. The price has risen from the $11 billion estimated in 2008 to a current estimate of $14.8 billion. That is almost twice as expensive as the project was initially expected to cost when first announced in 2006, with a price tag of $8 billion. Read More

Planes Trains & Automobiles

4 Photos

Abu Dhabi International Airport

This Is What a Nice, New Airport Looks Like

Last week, The Observer looked at the sorry state of New York City’s three major airports. Once the exemplars in the world, JFK, LaGuardia and Newark have fallen behind the times. The Port Authority is working to improve them all—plans for a new terminal at LaGuardia are coming along quite nicely, in fact—but still, these will be ho-hum operations, beholden to the challenges of modern American infrastructure, with our limited funds and ambition.

For a look at a truly grand airport, then, consider the work of local firm KPF, which just won the commission to design a new terminal for that mecca of Middle Eastern mega-development, Abu Dhabi. Read More

lease beat

Picture 2

More Green Shoots at 1 World Trade Center: Law Firm Chadbourne Eying Upper Floors

The law firm Chadbourne & Parke is rumored to be checking out space at 1 World Trade Center. A report in The New York Times today hinted that a deal is close, but brokers familiar with the firm pointed out that a lease was far from done.

The Times wasn’t the first to reveal that Chadbourne has been looking at the 2.6 million-square-foot skyscraper being developed by the Port Authority. Last year, the New York Post‘s ace real estate columnist Steve Cuozzo pointed out that the firm was one among a handful of law firms considering the building. Read More

Planes Trains & Automobiles

Terminal 3 today has seen better days.

Terminal Condition: How New York’s Airports Crashed and Burned—Can They Soar Again?

Terminal 3 at JFK International Airport is incontinent. At 52, such problems are understandable. Still, they are nonetheless embarrassing, especially for one of the main international entry points for still (arguably, hopefully) the capital of the world.

Hanging from Terminal 3’s massive flying saucer roof are two dozen diapers, the actual technical term for the no-longer white tarps, 10-by-10 or larger, affixed to the concrete ceiling by steel cables. Running out the middle of each is a clear garden hose. Why not something opaque is a mystery as baffling as the fact that this terminal, with its crumbling roof, still stands. At least a dark hose would hide the effluent passing through the cracks of time, the drippings of decades of decay and neglect, where none of it would be exposed for all the world to see.

Hello Istanbul, greetings Sao Paolo, cheerio London. Welcome to New York. Hope your 12-hour flight was O.K. Please ignore the colostomy bags hanging overhead. Read More

The Neverending Story

Not giving up, going up. (Getty Images)

Silverstein: Gimme Two Years and I’ll Have My 3 WTC Tenant

So maybe it wasn’t a bombshell after all, the “news” yesterday that Larry Silverstein might not be able to finish 3 World Trade Center all the way, leaving it instead as a seven-story retail and mechanical stump for the time being. In a statement, the downtown don insists he will find a tenant, and he has about two years to do it before he must truly pull the trigger and decide to cap the tower or to keep building. Read More

The Neverending Story

Slowing down? (Joe Woolhead/WTC Progress)

Shadows Return to Ground Zero: Infighting and Stalled Projects Are Back—Is the Media to Blame?

Was last year magical for the World Trade Center site, or was it merely a mirage? The Observer has heard more than once of a sort of media blackout—promises of cooperation so as not to taint the 10th anniversary of 9/11 with the same backbiting, political infighting and constituent-driven trench warfare that had reigned almost since the towers fell.

Instead, there were celebratory milestones. One World Trade Center was finally skyrocketing toward heaven, putting up nearly a floor per week. Condé Nast signed its game-changing lease for half of said tower. Governor Andrew Cuomo announced an agreement with the long-suffering Greek Orthodox Church. And of course, the 9/11 Memorial opened on time, and quite a bit further along than originally hoped. The city was triumphant.

Was that real progress, though, or simply a one-year reprieve out of respect for the dead? With the exception of last week’s news that Condé would be taking additional space at 1 WTC, the bad news has been piling up all year. Read More