THE Deutsche Bank building – tall, dark, forbidding and, in the end, deadly – was a Ground Zero afterthought right from the beginning.
Shattered on 9/11, it was abandoned shortly thereafter and soon devolved into a petri dish of molds, poisons, chemicals and heavy metals. In an age when folks fret themselves into a frenzy over a whiff of diesel exhaust at a Midtown bus stop, the building became the real deal: a 41-story toxic waste dump in the heart of Downtown.
To say that it defied the best remediation efforts of Albany and City Hall would be only technically accurate: Neither George Pataki nor Mayor Bloomberg demonstrated any urgency in dealing with the problem.
And now that Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau has effectively declared the hulk a crime scene, nobody else is going to be doing anything about it for some time to come.
But the building’s not totally devoid of utility. Think of it as a monument to what might have been.
Think of it as a trapped-in-amber specimen of what Ground Zero would be like today – close on to six years after the towers fell – had not then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani moved with alacrity and fortitude to clear the pile of rubble left in the wake of the attacks.
That’s what they called it: The Pile – a seething cauldron of toxicity distilled from what had been two modern, 110-story office buildings and all that they contained.
It had to go. And it went.
Giuliani, of course, has been catching a fair amount of flak of late for an alleged insensitivity to the long-term health concerns of both those who labored to clear the wreckage and those who lived nearby.
It stands to reason that The Pile posed a health risk – although, to be perfectly frank, there is scant direct evidence connecting specific illnesses to Ground Zero work.
And some of the folks complaining the loudest have agendas – tort lawyers, for example, and researchers growing prosperous on worst-case-scenario federal grants.
Still, no reasonable person would argue that The Pile should have been left in situ.
Just as no one today would argue against the need to demolish the Deutsche Bank building – and for essentially the same reasons.
But The Pile is long gone, and the building isn’t. It remains because nobody took initial responsibility for it, and presently it went into the custody of city, state and federal bureaucrats – all well-meaning, but utterly devoid of any sense of urgency.
The environmental-protection folks, in particular, imposed protocols that may or may not have been necessary – asbestos, after all, is not plutonium, but the EPA seems to consider it as such.
The consequences?
Agency-ordered shrouds and plywood sheathings likely contributed directly to the deaths of two of New York’s Bravest last Saturday – an outcome that obviously would have been avoided had somebody put a wrecking-ball to the Deutsche Bank building 5½ years ago.
Would a “toxic cloud” have descended on Manhattan?
Yes. Briefly.
And then it would have rained, and all the nasty residue would have been washed away – to wherever it is that such things go every day in every big city in America.
Thus was Ground Zero cleansed after Giuliani ordered the shattered remains of the Twin Towers – and all they contained – to be hauled away.
That decision was controversial then and – in some quarters – even more so today.
Imagine, however, if he had just tossed a tarp over The Pile and waited for the bureaucrats to arrive.
That’s what happened at the Deutsche Bank building.
At least Ground Zero hasn’t killed anyone lately. mcmanus@nypost.com