New York Magazine published an article this week on the grumbling progress of construction at Ground Zero:

Nine years into the rebuilding of ground zero, and we’re just now getting unstuck. The stakeholders are wrapping up their arguments over who controls which slices of the site, having finally settled on a schematic plan, memorial design, timetable, and financing arrangement that everyone can more or less live with. The public spent a decade being worn down by politics and arguments: Larry Silverstein versus the Port Authority. Pataki versus the NYPD. Libeskind versus David Childs. Bloomberg versus Paterson. Memorial designer Michael Arad versus the victims’ families. All around those debates swirled the question of whether, economically, this project makes any sense at all, dumping as it does 12 million square feet of office space onto a now-deflated commercial market. Even if you did believe the whole thing should happen, it has been excruciating to watch the site get caught in the old New York snarl of permit agencies and sluggish bureaucracies and every possible variety of red tape.

Those issues, at least, are not physical realities; they’re obstacles based on human nature. Yet, for a long time, they obscured the perhaps even greater problem of building on what is probably the most difficult construction site in history. The architects and engineers involved have known this all along, of course, and now that construction is roaring forward, the rest of us can see what they’ve been up against. Every bit of land at ground zero is crowded with supplies, workers, and rising steel and concrete. One World Trade Center (the skyscraper formerly known as the Freedom Tower) is 26 stories high and beginning to poke its head into the downtown skyline. Even at quarter-height, its density and bulk are evident, and you can start to grasp how jammed up against the path tracks it is. Its neighbor at Four World Trade is up to about five floors, hard by the 1 train that continually rattles through the center of the site. The two memorial pools are framed out, and underground construction is moving forward on Santiago Calatrava’s swoopy transportation hub. Foundation work for Towers 2 and 3 starts next month, and the contaminated Deutsche Bank building, looming over the southern end of the site, will come down later this year to make way for Tower 5. Libeskind’s abiding idea—five towers standing guard around a sunken memorial—is inching toward reality.

(view more….)