Renderings of what the cavernous 9/11 Museum will look like — but when it will be completed is very much up in the air after hundreds of millions in cost overruns and agency bickering.
Renderings of what the cavernous 9/11 Museum will look like — but when it will be completed is very much up in the air after hundreds of millions in cost overruns and agency bickering.
One World Trade Center and the North and South Pools (Reuters)
In 2006, when architect Michael Arad redesigned the National 9/11 Memorial, he envisioned friends and family members touching the 2,981 names of the victims and heroes of the Sept. 11 attacks, which would be carved into bronze parapets surrounding waterfalls.
When attorneys at the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. reviewed the same plans, they saw a lawsuit in the making.
Their fear, multiple sources said, was that the bronze would retain heat during the summer and burn someone’s hand. In the winter, it might give frostbite to an un-gloved finger.
So the nonprofit 9/11 Memorial budgeted an extra $3.5 million for a heating and cooling system — copper pipes to run behind the rows of names that would keep the metal comfortable to the touch year-round.
But as with everything surrounding the remaking of Ground Zero, even that questionable cost ballooned. Because of “design changes unforeseen at the time the contract was awarded,” another $812,500 was allocated to retrofit the pipes in March 2011. Nine months later, $168,000 more was thrown at the problem.
Because what’s another million or so for a project of nearly unprecedented scale and ambition? How much is too much to heal a city’s wound?
Today, the price of the memorial is pegged at $700 million — more than it took to build the Empire State Building, which cost about $611 million adjusted for inflation (and took a little more than 13 months to erect).
The 348,480 square-foot site occupies 50% of the 16-acre World Trade Center footprint — more than double the size of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC.
The underground museum will be a cavernous 110,000 square feet, a mammoth exhibition space telling the story of the attacks and giving visitors a view of the preserved foundations of the towers.
Because of the sheer size of the project, every bill is a large one.
The memorial spent $3.9 million alone for soil and planting next to the two 1-acre pools in the footprints where the towers once stood. That cost didn’t include the $2 million needed for the “tree care and transplant” of the 400 swamp white oak trees in the plaza.
The glass-curtain wall around the museum pavilion clocked in at $21.5 million.
And the price for keeping bronze cool? It was finished, finally, for $4.3 million — not counting maintenance.
These costs might have faded from memory were it not for the fact that, more than 10 years after the attacks and hundreds of millions later, there’s still no 9/11 Museum. There’s not even a date that it might open.
All work has been at a standstill for months because of a financial dispute between the Port Authority, which is building the museum, and the nonprofit that operates the site.
“A lot of families are disappointed that the museum is not opening this year as promised,” said Bill Doyle, who lost his son, Joseph, in the terrorist attacks and serves as a spokesman for families of the victims. “Most families are concerned that it’s taken all this time and it’s still not opening, and it’s all about the money.”
After the Sept. 11 attacks, anger and sadness overwhelmed rational planning for Ground Zero. Nothing was considered over-the-top. At one point, then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani wanted the entire World Trade Center site — where 1 WTC is rising and four other towers are planned — to become a memorial to the dead.
“There was no one looking at engineering costs and how to limit costs,” said a source familiar with the original plans. “Under [former Gov. George] Pataki, it was a free-for-all.”
Part of the high cost was inevitable. Real-estate experts said getting the pit of rubble left behind “above grade,” i.e., at ground level, was at least $300 million regardless of design plans. Safety concerns also drove up costs.
But the way decisions were made also was fraught.
“The process was allowing everyone to have a say, and I think you had to do that at the time because it was so emotionally charged,” said a source involved at the time. “Everyone involved with the site only wanted to answer the terrorist attacks in the swiftest way possible.”
The disorganization at the site reminded planners of the old saying: A camel is a horse designed by committee.
In 2005, the cost of the planned memorial was approaching a ridiculous $1 billion — almost as much as it cost to build the World Trade Center towers in the 1970s.
A year later, with the project still stalled, Mayor Bloomberg took the reins as chairman of the memorial’s board. He made a $10 million donation to the site and announced the goal of chopping the unwieldly price tag in half.
“There’s just not an unlimited amount of money that we can spend on a memorial,” Bloomberg said at the time. “Any figure higher than $500 million would be inappropriate.”
The goal was a leaner memorial that would open to the public on Sept. 11, 2009.
To cut expenses, the number of exhibition galleries underground was reduced. The original plan for the memorial had the names of the people who died on Sept. 11 and in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center underground in the museum. Moving the names above ground was a cost-saving measure that shaved $65 million off the hefty price tag, according to sources involved in the decision. Having names on display at street-level cut security costs and the expense of construction for a larger underground cavern.
In the summer of 2006, the Port Authority was hired to oversee construction of the memorial with the goal of trimming costs at the site — a sentence that seems humorous today, given the bi-state agency’s billion-dollar cost overruns on almost every project at the World Trade Center site.
The Authority was expected to pick up the $150 million tab for infrastructure costs, while the memorial would oversee fundraising and design aspects of the site. The Lower Manhattan Development Corp. also allocated $250 million of state and federal funds to the project.
The Port Authority and the LMDC each put $45 million into a reserve fund to cover cost overruns.
Through an international fundraising campaign — and help from blue-ribbon board members like Walt Disney president Robert Iger, billionaire Pete Peterson and former AIG chairman Hank Greenberg — the nonprofit that runs the site raised more than $420 million in donations, a spokesman said.
While the memorial spent lavishly on aspects of the design, like a parapet-cooler, it also sought to cut design costs in unlikely places.
In the original plans, the bottom of the two reflecting pools — the largest manmade waterfalls in the country — was supposed to be made of Jet Mist, a pricey black granite stone produced in the United States. Those floors have been replaced with concrete, a cost-cutting measure that some think “dumbs down” the experience, according to sources briefed on the memorial plans. A spokesman for the memorial said the concrete was also chosen in the end because it’s easier to clean.
On Sept. 11 of last year, the memorial finally debuted. The solemnity of the day and the generally positive reviews of the design were a coup for Bloomberg and the non-profit. The fact that the memorial was suppose to open two years previously was forgotten.
But it was hardly the end of the story.
Delays and design changes have increased the original half-billion dollar budget to $700 million, a memorial spokesman said — and the Port Authority is claiming they’re still an additional $300 million short of finishing the job.
To cover the estimated $55 million of annual operating costs, officials have floated the idea of charging a $20 admission fee to the still-unfinished museum. They’re also fighting for $20 million a year in federal funding for the site, which is being blocked in Washington by Senator Tom Coburn, a Republican from Oklahoma.
But the issue of an admission fee is moot until there’s even a museum to visit.
In December, Mayor Bloomberg said all construction at the site was at a standstill and the museum opening delayed indefinitely because of a fight about who is responsible for paying millions in alleged cost overruns.
Memorial officials said the PA’s $195 million contribution doesn’t factor in three years of delays on the project’s completion and that they owe an additional $156 million toward infrastructure costs. The PA countered, claiming it has fulfilled its financial contribution to the site.
Negotiations have deteriorated so badly that some memorial officials want a court battle — no matter how embarrassing it might be for the city.
“The memorial is so frustrated by the delay they would like for this to blow up,” said a source.
But it’s Mayor Bloomberg who has been holding them back.
“The mayor is looking at the big picture and reasonably saying, ‘We’re not going to have a public throw down on this,’ ” the source said. “It’s an indication that the mayor and the governor [who controls the Port Authority] are trying to maintain good relations.”
The PA is arguing they were forced to spend at least $60 million to speed up work to finish plaza before the 10th anniversary of the attacks, a source said.
What’s perhaps most shocking is that no one much seems to care. Though it costs money each day work is stopped, planners said the delay of the museum’s opening is not that important.
Politically, the most significant date was turning on the waterfalls and unveiling the names on the 10th anniversary of the attacks. The rest is icing.
“While it’s unfortunate, it’s not a showstopper,” said a source.
Even without the museum, the memorial attracted 1 million visitors within three months of opening. In terms of the redevelopment of downtown, a museum that opens in 2014 or even in 2015 has no ricochet effect for developer Larry Silverstein’s World Trade Center buildings and 1 WTC, which is owned by the Durst Organization and the Port Authority.
So the museum remains as it has been for years — a very expensive hole in the ground.