Sandy Weill, the chairman of Citigroup Inc, says New York should build a baseball stadium on the site of the World Trade Center.
This remarkable revelation surfaced in the New York Times, buried deep in an article about the need for the city to plan the future of lower Manhattan. There is not a lot of agreement right now on what is to take the place of the twin towers, who is to finance it, or even who is to supervise the whole thing.
Yet this much may be agreed upon. The tragedy of Sept. 11 gives New York City a singular opportunity in the way of city planning, an opportunity not to be squandered.
Now is not the time to think status quo. Now is the time for those who shape the city's future -- and we won't really know who these visionaries are until after the mayoral election next week -- to think with a little boldness and creativity, to see what may be, rather than what was.
And what may be is a city that is nicer, and friendlier and more attractive, to the people who live and work there. This would mark a real departure for New York, a city that has triumphed in spite of a gritty hostility to its own residents.
In other words, why not a ballpark? And while we're at it, it's high time for the city to build a couple of big marinas downtown, too, and a couple of streetcar lines.
The pledge to reconstruct the World Trade Center was made within days of the towers' unplanned demolition. Instead of two 110-story towers, though, the developer who leased the buildings from the Port Authority thought four 50-story towers might be just the thing. Other observers said that only rebuilding the towers bigger and better would do.
The question now is, why? Does this particular site in downtown Manhattan need to be devoted to what was there before -- over 2.5 million m2 of office space? The World Trade Center was originally envisioned by Austin Tobin, executive director of what was then known as the Port of New York Authority, as a latter-day version of the Tontine Coffee House, site of the New York Stock Exchange in the 1790s.
The coffee house was located at the corner of Wall and Water streets, and the World Trade Center very nearly was, too. Only the bi-state nature of the authority, whose board members are from New York and New Jersey, was responsible for the creation of the World Trade Center complex as we knew it. The Port Authority got to build its Trade Center in exchange for taking over the Hudson & Manhattan Railroad, the so-called tubes between New Jersey and Manhattan.
Who now needs a new World Trade Center? For much of its life, the Trade Center was a magnificent white elephant. Wall Street long ago moved to midtown, and many of the office towers along Wall and Broad streets are residential rather than commercial. The city's office vacancy rate stands at 8.4 percent and the stock of new office space grows almost daily.
Robert Yaro is executive director of the Regional Plan Association, and he says the group is taking a "broader look" at the site in terms of the economy and the region, not just now, but a decade from now, which is probably how long it will take before lower Manhattan returns to normal.
"Sandy Weill is a smart man, and we'll put the stadium on the list," said Yaro. He added that stadiums are "not tremendous wealth generators," as the Trade Center undoubtedly was. The key here is the use of the past tense.
Perhaps an even larger question to be answered by New Yorkers is whether the Port Authority will have a role in all this. Former executive director George J. Marlin thinks not. That's a column for another day.
AIR SUPPORT: The Ministry of National Defense thanked the US for the delivery, adding that it was an indicator of the White House’s commitment to the Taiwan Relations Act Deputy Minister of National Defense Po Horng-huei (柏鴻輝) and Representative to the US Alexander Yui on Friday attended a delivery ceremony for the first of Taiwan’s long-awaited 66 F-16C/D Block 70 jets at a Lockheed Martin Corp factory in Greenville, South Carolina. “We are so proud to be the global home of the F-16 and to support Taiwan’s air defense capabilities,” US Representative William Timmons wrote on X, alongside a photograph of Taiwanese and US officials at the event. The F-16C/D Block 70 jets Taiwan ordered have the same capabilities as aircraft that had been upgraded to F-16Vs. The batch of Lockheed Martin
GRIDLOCK: The National Fire Agency’s Special Search and Rescue team is on standby to travel to the countries to help out with the rescue effort A powerful earthquake rocked Myanmar and neighboring Thailand yesterday, killing at least three people in Bangkok and burying dozens when a high-rise building under construction collapsed. Footage shared on social media from Myanmar’s second-largest city showed widespread destruction, raising fears that many were trapped under the rubble or killed. The magnitude 7.7 earthquake, with an epicenter near Mandalay in Myanmar, struck at midday and was followed by a strong magnitude 6.4 aftershock. The extent of death, injury and destruction — especially in Myanmar, which is embroiled in a civil war and where information is tightly controlled at the best of times —
Taiwan was ranked the fourth-safest country in the world with a score of 82.9, trailing only Andorra, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar in Numbeo’s Safety Index by Country report. Taiwan’s score improved by 0.1 points compared with last year’s mid-year report, which had Taiwan fourth with a score of 82.8. However, both scores were lower than in last year’s first review, when Taiwan scored 83.3, and are a long way from when Taiwan was named the second-safest country in the world in 2021, scoring 84.8. Taiwan ranked higher than Singapore in ninth with a score of 77.4 and Japan in 10th with
China's military today said it began joint army, navy and rocket force exercises around Taiwan to "serve as a stern warning and powerful deterrent against Taiwanese independence," calling President William Lai (賴清德) a "parasite." The exercises come after Lai called Beijing a "foreign hostile force" last month. More than 10 Chinese military ships approached close to Taiwan's 24 nautical mile (44.4km) contiguous zone this morning and Taiwan sent its own warships to respond, two senior Taiwanese officials said. Taiwan has not yet detected any live fire by the Chinese military so far, one of the officials said. The drills took place after US Secretary