The Battle For Ground Zero, Part 150

Larry Silverstein and the Port Authority are going to court again. Not against each other, but to ensure the insurance companies pay the proceeds from the insurance settlements.

The lawsuit, filed yesterday in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, said seven of the two dozen insurers at the World Trade Center, including Allianz, Royal Indemnity and Travelers, "have persistently sought to shirk their contractual obligations to pay insurance coverage."

Over the past two months, the suit said, the seven insurers also refused to provide assurances that their obligations to pay were unaffected by an April agreement in which Mr. Silverstein surrendered control of the Freedom Tower and one other development site to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the site. Mr. Silverstein, who leased the trade center six weeks before it was destroyed, would still build three other towers on the east side of the property.

Some insurers, including Swiss Re, the largest single insurer, have told Mr. Silverstein and the Port Authority that the new arrangement would not affect payouts. But Allianz and others have not.

Mr. Silverstein, in a statement released yesterday, said that New York, New Jersey and the Port Authority "have made it clear that they will not allow foot-dragging insurance companies to impede the ongoing revitalization of downtown Manhattan. We expect a quick resolution that will force these insurers to finally pay what they owe."

In related Lower Manhattan reconstruction and design issues, Steve Cuozzo writes about the ongoing problems with the Fulton station improvements.

Traffic paralysis, a design kept secret from the public - and the chance that New York taxpayers will get hit up for tens of millions more if the project runs any more over budget.

The grandiose and unnecessary Fulton Street Transit Center project is wreaking havoc on Downtown stores and businesses. Unresolved design, cost and environmental issues seem likely to delay things years far beyond 2009, the announced completion date.

The work has shut down entire blocks of Dey and John streets; dangerously narrowed stretches of Broadway and Church and Fulton streets; closed the Cortlandt Street subway station until next year; closed entrances to the Fulton Street station, and disrupted train service between Manhattan and Brooklyn.

All this even before the real heavy lifting begins - a to-do list that includes: taking down five buildings atop a subway-station complex used by nearly 300,000 daily; rearranging platforms and corridors inside; erecting a new roof and façade, and boring a pedestrian underground tunnel beneath Dey Street to Ground Zero.

All for a project that doesn't add a single inch of track.

And all as The Post predicted. An Oct. 17, 2002, editorial warned that the Fulton scheme and other transit jobs proposed for Downtown threatened an over-budget nightmare like Boston's bank-breaking "Big Dig."

In a column that day, I wrote that the Fulton scheme would "inflict years of demolition, platform closings and train reroutings" on wounded Downtown. I warned that the necessary condemnation of buildings and stores "can take years, to say nothing of the havoc construction would wreak along Broadway, the gateway to Wall Street."

Our dire forecasts have proven all too prescient.

THE 9/11 attacks prompted Washington to spot the city $4.51 billion for new transit schemes in Lower Manhattan. The MTA grabbed an item off its wish list of far-fetched, someday-maybe schemes - and soon presented plans for a "Grand Central of Downtown." A dramatic dome of glass and steel would replace a blockfront of ugly old buildings, we were told, rising 110 feet above the street and bringing daylight onto platforms deep below ground.

No one but The Post challenged the folly of spending a fortune to let the sun shine on a subway platform. And what else will the project bring us - if it's ever finished?

Meanwhile, family groups are resisting the memorial design that would place the names of those murdered on 9/11 in some haphazard or random order. They would like the names to be arranged by the towers in which the victims worked and died, who they worked for, by floor, and ages included, and this is apparently a nonnegotiable demand:

The names issue puts the families in conflict with Gov. George E. Pataki and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who maintain that the names should be arranged randomly. Fund-raising for the memorial would probably continue to be difficult without the strong support of the victims' relatives.

They want the 2,979 names arranged by the towers in which the victims worked and died, by affiliation (their employers, typically), and by floor, with their ages next to their names, said Edith Lutnick, the executive director of the Cantor Fitzgerald Relief Fund.

"This is a memorial to these people," Ms. Lutnick said in an interview on Thursday. "Shouldn't the point be to give their loved ones what they need? At no cost."

Thomas S. Johnson, the chairman of the executive committee of the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation and a director of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, said, "This issue is so important to so many family members."

His son Scott M. Johnson, 26, worked on the 89th floor of the south tower, at Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, and was killed on Sept. 11, 2001.

"If there's any nonnegotiable issue, this is it," Mr. Johnson said yesterday. "An acceptable way of listing the names has to be there, or I'm afraid the families aren't going to be there."

Neither will the firefighters' union, the Uniformed Firefighters Association, said its president, Stephen J. Cassidy.

"There'll be no support from me if they say, 'We'll get back to you on the names after the project is complete,' " he said yesterday. "We're going to have to have this resolved upfront."

Technorati: World Trade Center, WTC, Pataki, LMDC, urban policy, Freedom Tower, IFC, International Freedom Center, spitzer, silverstein.