Plans Finally Afoot to Bring Down Fiterman Hall by Barry Owens After nearly four years there is movement to finally bring down Fiterman Hall. The Borough of Manhattan Community College building at 30 West Broadway was badly damaged in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks by falling debris from neighboring 7 World Trade Center. In the years since, the building's structure has been shored up and the holes in the façade plugged. But the building's interior, presumably loaded with dust from the World Trade Center, has been left untouched. "We're going in with the assumption that the building is contaminated throughout," Ben Lewis, an air quality consultant, told Community Board 1's World Trade Center Redevelopment Committee on July 13. Few have been in the building since it was shuttered. The architectural firm of Pei Cobb Freed & Partners was selected by the City University of New York to provide cleanup and demolition of the structure. Lewis, hired by the architects, said his team is still awaiting a clearance from the building's owner, the New York State Dormitory Authority, to set foot inside-an approval that could come this month, he said. Lewis told the committee he expects to find dust from the World Trade Center, asbestos containing building materials, and perhaps mold. He anticipated that results of the testing and a subsequent decontimation plan could be completed by the fall and forwarded to the Environmental Protection Agency and other agencies, including CB1, for approval. The project is likely take cues from similar deconstruction efforts at 130 Liberty St. and 4 Albany St. Those involve careful handling and hauling out of building materials and a piece-by-piece disassembling of the building. Similar air monitoring devices in use at 130 Liberty and throughout Lower Manhattan would be installed in the building as well. "We don't want to reinvent the wheel," Lewis said. There will likely be a 6-month period of decontamination of the building before a 5- month deconstruction effort begins. "We're looking forward to this going smoothly and quietly and hopefully you won't even know we're there," said Andrew Bachman, a vice president with Tishman Construction. The $185 million project got a much needed boost in May when Gov. George Pataki announced that $15 million of the remaining federal block grant funds of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation would be set aside to raise and rebuild the structure. The remainder will be paid fund with a combination of state and city funds and a $90 million insurance settlement. Until Sept. 11 the 15-story building had served as off-campus classroom space for BMCC. A $62 million renovation of the building's interior was nearly complete before the attacks. Plans are to build a new 377,000-square-foot structure to house classrooms, computer labs, offices, library and meeting rooms. "The building probably could be fixed," Bryan Cave, an attorney representing CUN told the committee. "But it would be more cost effective to rebuild."