The Battle For Ground Zero, Part 90

Steve Cuozzo thinks that Mayor Bloomberg's broadsides against Larry Silverstein was seriously misplaced. I agree.

The Mayor has overlooked Lower Manhattan's dire straits for much of the past four years and only took up the issue in the weeks before the November elections. Bloomberg continues agitating towards pushing Silverstein to the sidelines on redeveloping the entire site.

Meanwhile, Fiterman Hall (a CUNY building seriously damaged on 9/11) remains a vacant hulk that must be disposed of. Where Bloomberg can act, he has fallen short of responding with vigor. Instead, Bloomberg pushes his opinion where he has the least chance of asserting his power. But all isn't well with Silverstein either:

In other words, Silverstein is now publicly surrounded and outnumbered in his quest to rebuild all 10 million square feet of lost office space on his own. Pataki, Bloomberg and the PA think they have him cornered, and they're using every bit of muscle they can leverage to break his monopoly.

There are plausible reasons to worry about Silverstein's ability to see through the whole project on his own, and no one — despite endlessly publicized construction schedules — should take the Freedom Tower for granted until structural steel begins to rise by early 2008.

The developer can sound so cranky, difficult and bottom-line obsessed that it obscures his underlying decency and charitableness. Sympathy he widely enjoyed after 9/11 has given way to resentment and outright hostility; many of his fellow real-estate players now snarl when his name comes up.

But, whatever Silverstein's faults, it was hard not to wince at Bloomberg's characterization of his role at Ground Zero.

* "We need to put aside individual financial interests . . . it's time to pick up the pace of commercial construction" — as if Silverstein alone were to blame for the fact that Ground Zero remains an empty pit.

But above-ground construction can't start until a new eastern slurry wall gets built — and that's the PA's responsibility, not Silverstein's. The job's barely begun, will take up to two years to finish.

The underlying infrastructure has to be completed before the site development can begin. Bloomberg's statements only hit at Silverstein whereas site development can't proceed in earnest until the Port Authority gets itself in gear.