On Friday, the folks over at the Port Authority were kind enough to take me on a tour of construction at the World Trade Center site, which the agency owns. I last went down there a little less than a year ago, and the most notable difference was that we spent almost all the time below street level then, as all the action was quite a few feet down. Now, the core of the Freedom Tower has risen up above the street, with a cage of steel over that. The memorial, too, has installed steel and the outlines of the signature waterfalls have taken form.
Also within the last year, delays on the public-sector-built portions of the site—the memorial, the Freedom Tower, and the Santiago Calatrava–designed PATH station—have come to the public’s attention. It will be 2015, now, before portions of the project are expected to be finished. Attention turns to the private-sector portion of the project: three planned office towers built by developer Larry Silverstein, which officially must be completed by 2014.
That timetable, however, is subject to negotiation. Much more on that here, in a story from last week’s paper.
