New York News 1 reports that Larry Silverstein, the builder of the Freedom Tower, the tallest building in New York, now wants to turn his deadly hand to building the tallest residential tower in lower New York, with room for over a thousand apartments space, malls and funeral parlors, just in case you’re not familiar with his work on the World Trade Center’s Building 7.
According to the New York Post, “With more floors and more units than any building in New York, the skyscraper would dominate Manhattan’s West Side and appease affordable-housing advocates.
“Although Larry Silverstein’s legacy is already cemented with his 1 World Trade Center signature tower, the developer would build on it with a city record-setting 106 floors and 1,400 apartments.
“According to a draft environmental-impact statement, Silverstein’s square, glass-draped tower at 520 W. 41st St. would stand 1,100 feet tall.”
It was also built by him, and taken down in an internal demolition as reported by Richard Gage, an architect of large buildings for 25 years, and founder of 911architects and engineers who have also vouched “internal demolition” as the cause of Tower 7’s demise—true as the broken sky that day, thanks to Larry, yet affording him an additional $500 million chunk of insurance money to rebuild the tower, taller, wider, the first and only completely rebuilt tower.
What’s more, in a 2004 Public TV documentary, Rebuilding America, he said, “There had been so much pain and suffering that day that he told the world and (the fire department), to ‘pull it,’ the unforgettable term for an internal demolition). In fact, one of the foremost experts on internal demolitions, Danny Jowenko, on seeing the free-fall in five or six seconds’ footage said immediately it was an internal demolition.
A couple of months later, Danny Jowenko was killed in an automobile crash. So that is the thumbnail bio of this demon . . . to have the two tallest towers on New York City’s lower West Side. This way we can have a new cycle of mass murder, a new 9/11, only worse. I’m not a religious person, but I believe this man to be the devil incarnate. Why?
Originally, the price tag for One World Trade Center, the signature skyscraper under construction at Ground Zero in New York, rose to more than $3.8 billion, making it by far the world’s most expensive new office tower, according to people familiar with the matter.
The new figure, up $700 million from the latest public estimate, marks another twist in the rebuilding of the site of the Sept. 11, 2001, so-called “terrorist attacks.” The process has been marked by thorny political challenges and ever-lengthening construction delays.
The price tag for One World Trade Center, the signature Ground Zero skyscraper in New York, has risen to more than $3.8 billion, making it by far the world’s most expensive new office tower.
One World Trade Center was built by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the regional transportation agency that owns the 16-acre World Trade Center site. A series of cost increases at the site, totaling billions over the years, has been reverberating in the area’s economy in the form of higher bridge and tunnel tolls and reduced spending on transportation infrastructure.
Continuing delays also have caused the site in the middle of Lower Manhattan to be boarded up for more than 10 years.
Driving the latest increase have been construction-cost overruns and a decision by the Port Authority to now include leasing expenses in its public estimates. Those leasing costs are higher than the Port Authority had privately anticipated, those familiar with the matter said. The higher number is expected to be released as early as this week in an audit by the agency.
One World Trade Center’s construction is vastly more expensive than a traditional office tower, in large part due to security costs associated with building the tallest building in North America on a site that has been the target of two separate terrorist attacks (the site was also bombed in 1993). Once known as the Freedom Tower, the 1,776-foot skyscraper sits atop a heavily reinforced, windowless podium. It also has a thick core of concrete and steel around its elevator shafts.
By comparison, other-high profile buildings around the world have been far less expensive. The developer of the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest tower, in Dubai, has put its cost at $1.5 billion.
The Port Authority long ago gave up hope that One World Trade would be a profitable investment in the short- or mid-term. In 2010, when the agency sold a minority stake in the tower to the Durst Organization, a major developer in New York, the agency pegged the tower’s value at $2 billion.
While political wars have mired the redevelopment of the World Trade Center site for most of the past decade, construction there has proceeded. And that is exactly what Silverstein has in mind again. My feeling is to unambiguously deny and defy this new residential tower’s construction. Predictably, cost overruns will raise the cost to the sky—and most notably—given the mood of geo-politics in late 2014, from the Ukraine to Iraq, Syria and Kiev, and the hitherto unseen levels of random violence and killing of innocents (just like those 2900 victims in the WTC on 9/11/2001), this new Tower may be seen as a prompt to more violence on American soil, and using to call for a new castration of our resources.
So let’s follow the advice of the young psychopathic president in 2000, George Bush, errr . . .”Once burned, twice you can’t fool me.” But the conflating Silverstein can fool whoever takes his words for reality. Remember this is the man, who every morning would make an appearance in the Windows on the World except on 9/11, when he was said to be at his doctor or dentist’s office, nowhere to be found.
What’s more, we have the collateral damage: Building 7 occupied a block to the north of the World Trade Center Plaza. Its 23rd floor held Mayor Giuliani’s Emergency Command Center. This floor had bullet- and bomb-resistant windows, an independent air and water supply, and an unobstructed view of the north faces of both towers.
The other government agencies with offices in the building were the IRS, the EEOC, the US Secret Service, the SEC, and the CIA.
The private tenants were Salomon Smith Barney, American Express Bank International, Standard Chartered Bank, Provident Financial Management, ITT Hartford Insurance Group, First State Management Group, Inc., Federal Home Loan Bank, and NAIC Securities.
According to 9/11 Review, “Large numbers of case files for ongoing investigations by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) were reportedly destroyed in the collapse. The Los Angeles Times reported that “substantial files were destroyed” for 3000 to 4000 of the SEC’s cases. The EEOC reported that documents for 45 active cases were destroyed. Before the attack, SEC investigations of corporate fraud by companies such as Enron and Worldcom were the subject of many news reports — reports that virtually vanished in the wake of the attack.”
So there you have it. Do we collectively as the American people, as New Yorkers, as residents of the earth, want to go through pillage like this again? I for one do not and do not wish it on anybody but Silverstein, demonically smiling at us all as if we were idiots. We are not. We will keep this Fourth of July free from the evil schemes political conmen.
Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer, life-long resident of New York City. An EBook version of his book of poems “State Of Shock,” on 9/11 and its after effects is now available at Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com.He has also written hundreds of articles on politics and government as Associate Editor oftheintrepidreport.com(formerly Online Journal). Reach him at gvmaz@verizon.net.
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Big, bigger and dumber
Posted on July 7, 2014 by Jerry Mazza
New York News 1 reports that Larry Silverstein, the builder of the Freedom Tower, the tallest building in New York, now wants to turn his deadly hand to building the tallest residential tower in lower New York, with room for over a thousand apartments space, malls and funeral parlors, just in case you’re not familiar with his work on the World Trade Center’s Building 7.
According to the New York Post, “With more floors and more units than any building in New York, the skyscraper would dominate Manhattan’s West Side and appease affordable-housing advocates.
“Although Larry Silverstein’s legacy is already cemented with his 1 World Trade Center signature tower, the developer would build on it with a city record-setting 106 floors and 1,400 apartments.
“According to a draft environmental-impact statement, Silverstein’s square, glass-draped tower at 520 W. 41st St. would stand 1,100 feet tall.”
It was also built by him, and taken down in an internal demolition as reported by Richard Gage, an architect of large buildings for 25 years, and founder of 911architects and engineers who have also vouched “internal demolition” as the cause of Tower 7’s demise—true as the broken sky that day, thanks to Larry, yet affording him an additional $500 million chunk of insurance money to rebuild the tower, taller, wider, the first and only completely rebuilt tower.
What’s more, in a 2004 Public TV documentary, Rebuilding America, he said, “There had been so much pain and suffering that day that he told the world and (the fire department), to ‘pull it,’ the unforgettable term for an internal demolition). In fact, one of the foremost experts on internal demolitions, Danny Jowenko, on seeing the free-fall in five or six seconds’ footage said immediately it was an internal demolition.
A couple of months later, Danny Jowenko was killed in an automobile crash. So that is the thumbnail bio of this demon . . . to have the two tallest towers on New York City’s lower West Side. This way we can have a new cycle of mass murder, a new 9/11, only worse. I’m not a religious person, but I believe this man to be the devil incarnate. Why?
Originally, the price tag for One World Trade Center, the signature skyscraper under construction at Ground Zero in New York, rose to more than $3.8 billion, making it by far the world’s most expensive new office tower, according to people familiar with the matter.
The new figure, up $700 million from the latest public estimate, marks another twist in the rebuilding of the site of the Sept. 11, 2001, so-called “terrorist attacks.” The process has been marked by thorny political challenges and ever-lengthening construction delays.
The price tag for One World Trade Center, the signature Ground Zero skyscraper in New York, has risen to more than $3.8 billion, making it by far the world’s most expensive new office tower.
One World Trade Center was built by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the regional transportation agency that owns the 16-acre World Trade Center site. A series of cost increases at the site, totaling billions over the years, has been reverberating in the area’s economy in the form of higher bridge and tunnel tolls and reduced spending on transportation infrastructure.
Continuing delays also have caused the site in the middle of Lower Manhattan to be boarded up for more than 10 years.
Driving the latest increase have been construction-cost overruns and a decision by the Port Authority to now include leasing expenses in its public estimates. Those leasing costs are higher than the Port Authority had privately anticipated, those familiar with the matter said. The higher number is expected to be released as early as this week in an audit by the agency.
One World Trade Center’s construction is vastly more expensive than a traditional office tower, in large part due to security costs associated with building the tallest building in North America on a site that has been the target of two separate terrorist attacks (the site was also bombed in 1993). Once known as the Freedom Tower, the 1,776-foot skyscraper sits atop a heavily reinforced, windowless podium. It also has a thick core of concrete and steel around its elevator shafts.
By comparison, other-high profile buildings around the world have been far less expensive. The developer of the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest tower, in Dubai, has put its cost at $1.5 billion.
The Port Authority long ago gave up hope that One World Trade would be a profitable investment in the short- or mid-term. In 2010, when the agency sold a minority stake in the tower to the Durst Organization, a major developer in New York, the agency pegged the tower’s value at $2 billion.
While political wars have mired the redevelopment of the World Trade Center site for most of the past decade, construction there has proceeded. And that is exactly what Silverstein has in mind again. My feeling is to unambiguously deny and defy this new residential tower’s construction. Predictably, cost overruns will raise the cost to the sky—and most notably—given the mood of geo-politics in late 2014, from the Ukraine to Iraq, Syria and Kiev, and the hitherto unseen levels of random violence and killing of innocents (just like those 2900 victims in the WTC on 9/11/2001), this new Tower may be seen as a prompt to more violence on American soil, and using to call for a new castration of our resources.
So let’s follow the advice of the young psychopathic president in 2000, George Bush, errr . . .”Once burned, twice you can’t fool me.” But the conflating Silverstein can fool whoever takes his words for reality. Remember this is the man, who every morning would make an appearance in the Windows on the World except on 9/11, when he was said to be at his doctor or dentist’s office, nowhere to be found.
What’s more, we have the collateral damage: Building 7 occupied a block to the north of the World Trade Center Plaza. Its 23rd floor held Mayor Giuliani’s Emergency Command Center. This floor had bullet- and bomb-resistant windows, an independent air and water supply, and an unobstructed view of the north faces of both towers.
The other government agencies with offices in the building were the IRS, the EEOC, the US Secret Service, the SEC, and the CIA.
The private tenants were Salomon Smith Barney, American Express Bank International, Standard Chartered Bank, Provident Financial Management, ITT Hartford Insurance Group, First State Management Group, Inc., Federal Home Loan Bank, and NAIC Securities.
According to 9/11 Review, “Large numbers of case files for ongoing investigations by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) were reportedly destroyed in the collapse. The Los Angeles Times reported that “substantial files were destroyed” for 3000 to 4000 of the SEC’s cases. The EEOC reported that documents for 45 active cases were destroyed. Before the attack, SEC investigations of corporate fraud by companies such as Enron and Worldcom were the subject of many news reports — reports that virtually vanished in the wake of the attack.”
So there you have it. Do we collectively as the American people, as New Yorkers, as residents of the earth, want to go through pillage like this again? I for one do not and do not wish it on anybody but Silverstein, demonically smiling at us all as if we were idiots. We are not. We will keep this Fourth of July free from the evil schemes political conmen.
Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer, life-long resident of New York City. An EBook version of his book of poems “State Of Shock,” on 9/11 and its after effects is now available at Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com. He has also written hundreds of articles on politics and government as Associate Editor of theintrepidreport.com(formerly Online Journal). Reach him at gvmaz@verizon.net.