Downtown's Construction 'Czar' Steps Down

By Carl Glassman
POSTED JULY 23, 2007

“They don’t need me any more,” Charles Maikish said proudly.

It was a few days before he would leave his 18-month post as head of the Lower Manhattan Construction Command Center (LMCCC), the agency charged with overseeing the construction and road projects that are massively converging south of Canal Street. Now, seated for an interview in his office 29 floors above the World Trade Center site, he proclaimed his mission accomplished.

“My job was to create the command center, get it up and running, and get the construction started. I did that,” said Maikish, 61, whose last day at the agency was Friday, July 20. “Now, it’s time to do something else. These guys know how to run it.”

“These guys” are the command center managers that Maikish leaves behind, including the new acting executive director, Robert Harvey, who has been in charge of coordinating the 60 construction and street projects overseen by the command center. It is their job to stay on top of the many contractors and alphabet soup of city and state agencies (DOT, DDC, DEC, DEP, DOB, etc.) in an effort to keep traffic flowing, schedules kept, projects coordinated, and noise and air quality maintained at legal levels.

Appointed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg and then-Governor George Pataki in 2005, Maikish was the architect of the command center. He modeled it after the “brain room” he set up in 1993 as the Port Authority’s director of the World Trade Center. There, following the terrorist bombing, he coordinated the reconstruction of the towers, a task accomplished in less than four weeks.

But his roots at the site go deeper still, as evidenced by the framed photo displayed in his office. Standing before the rising steel of the World Trade Center is a 22-year-old Charles Maikish among 72 fellow members of the Port Authority’s World Trade Center construction unit. The year is 1968, when the freshly minted engineer was a construction inspector at the site.

“Looking at that picture, I would never have believed that I would see the slurry wall or the footings [of the Trade Center] exposed again,” Maikish said. “It’s phenomenal.”

In 1989, when Maikish started his job as director of the Trade Center, a quarter of the office space was vacant. He is credited with helping to turn the complex around during the eight years he ran it for the Port Authority.

“It was really a success story,” he said. “The one thing that bothers me the most is at the height of its success in ’01 it was taken down.”

Now, with huge new construction projects underway in its place, Maikish noted successes of a different sort. Standing at the window of his office overlooking many of those sites, he pointed randomly to where the command center was making a difference: A truck watering down the ramp to the World Trade Center site (“If these guys did what they wanted we’d have dust all over the place.”); the former Deutsche Bank building under deconstruction (“It’s coming down at the rate of a floor a week now.”); construction trailers stacked two high on Vesey Street. (“The contractors would have had their trailers all over the place.”)

Without the command center, Maikish said, “the community would be up in arms over it. There would have been stop work orders issued to contractors, construction would have stopped, people would be screaming at each other without productive resolution.”

With his job done and his own professional future still up in the air, Maikish said the LMCCC’s greatest challenges still lay ahead. He noted that Lower Manhattan will reach a construction crescendo next year and the first half of 2009. But sounding a note of optimism, he said the foundation for dealing with it all is now firmly set.

“There is twenty billion dollars worth of construction going on. Sixty projects south of Canal Street and the area still functions. Think about that.”

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