Residents, 9/11 Families Clash over WTC Bus Garage

 by Ronald Drenger

Tensions between Downtown residents and relatives of Sept. 11 victims emerged during a discussion on March 5 over a proposed bus garage at the World Trade Center site.

At a meeting of Community Board 1’s WTC Redevelopment Committee, the Port Authority gave an extensive presentation of its plans for a sparkling, multi-level transportation center at the trade center site. But it was the agency’s proposal to create a garage for tourist buses under the memorial that dominated the discussion.

Numerous residents, worried that Downtown streets will be overrun by tour buses, urged the Port Authority to follow through on the proposal to place the garage within the trade center’s “bathtub.” But several relatives of Sept. 11 victims said that placing the garage under the memorial would be disrespectful to those who died, and pleaded with the Port Authority to find another site.

Those differences had surfaced in February when the Port Authority made a similar presentation at its midtown offices to advisory councils of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation. Unlike at that forum, which had many speakers from both sides, at the community board meeting residents’ views dominated.

Paul Goldstein, CB1’s district manager and a resident of the Southbridge Towers complex, said that a glut of tour and commuter buses has been a problem for Downtown residents for many years and that the community has long urged the city to build a garage for them.

“This is an opportunity that we unfortunately, like it or not, have to grab, or we will have a problem that we are not going to be
able to handle,” he said, eliciting applause from other residents in the State Assembly hearing room at 250 Broadway.

“We live down here and we know the geography and there is no other place to put the buses,” agreed Jeff Galloway, a Battery Park City resident and community board member. “Either they will be parked on the site, or they will park on the streets.”

Carl Weisbrod, president of the Alliance for Downtown New York, said that the trade center site was the best place for a garage, “not only because it’s the only place, but because it’s the most appropriate place for people coming to visit the memorial.”

Family members, however, said that they had already compromised enough. Many victim’s families had wanted the entire 16 acres of the trade center site to be preserved as “sacred ground,” said Diane Horning, whose son, Matthew, died in Tower One. “It was dwarfed down to two and a half acres and now they’re asking us to give up even more,” she said. “For what? For a bus depot.”

Horning called on the Port Authority to look for alternatives to putting a garage in the area where most of the victim's remains were found. “Why can’t the bus lot be built somewhere across the water, and visitors can be ferried across the river? It doesn’t have to be right here.”

Madelyn Wils, the chair of CB1 and also a member of the LMDC's board of directors, challenging the claim the bathtub area should be off limits, noted that some residents near the trade center had found human remains in their homes. “Would you suggest that we mow down their apartments?” she asked.

Wils then tried to cut Horning off from responding.

“Your callousness in unbelievable,” Horning said.


Some family members have launched a campaign to oust Wils from the LMDC board, because of her support for the garage and because they believe that

she opposes the proposal to return unidentified victim's remains to Ground Zero. Thomas Meehan, whose daughter was killed in the terrorist attack, began an online petition calling on Wils to resign.

In an interview outside the hearing room, Monika Iken, who has been one of the most outspoken of the relatives of 9/11 victims, also strongly opposed using the space under the memorial for the bus garage.

“We need to respect the bathtub, where the majority of the remains were found,” she said. “We want to respect the final resting place of our loved ones.”

Iken suggested that visitors could get to the memorial by public transportation if the garage were placed outside of Lower Manhattan. “They’re creating this incredible transportation hub to make the site easily accessible,” she said.

But Charles Wolf, a Greenwich Village resident whose wife was killed in Tower One on Sept. 11, favored a more flexible approach to accommodate Downtowners’ concerns. “If we can put the buses within the bathtub, but not under the footprints of the towers, I think that would be okay,” he said.

Anthony Cracchiolo, director of priority capital programs at the Port Authority, who presented the transportation plans, said that the agency was open to suggestions for alternative garage sites.

“If can identify another feasible site, we’re ready to consider it,” he said. But he added that during planning discussions, city agencies “have indicated to us that they don’t think there is another viable location.” He said it was not feasible to try to bar buses from Lower Manhattan or even to limit their number.

The Port Authority estimates that 5.5 million people will visit the World Trade Center site each year, with 15 to 20 percent arriving by bus, and that an average of 160 buses per day will need to be accommodated. The proposed garage on the site would have room for 100 to 120 buses at a time, Cracchiolo said.

But Iken challenged the Port Authority’s estimates, saying that many more people, and buses, may come. Those buses, she said, will still have to go through Downtown neighborhoods if the garage is built on the trade center site.

Before September 11, residents also complained about delivery trucks that lined up on local streets as they waited to enter the trade center’s underground loading docks. But Cracchiolo said that there would be more truck bays in the new plans. “If we can design this appropriately, we will put enough truck docks in so you won’t have that backup,” he said.


Transit center plans

 Before the contentious discussion began, Cracchiolo made a nearly hourlong presentation, complete with computer-generated “tours,” of the Port Authority’s plans for the temporary PATH station, which is scheduled to open late this year, and the permanent transportation center, which he projected will be ready by 2008.

The hub would be centered at Church Street, on the block between Fulton and Dey streets, at the northeast corner of the trade center site. The Port Authority envisions it as a largely glass-enclosed space, flooded by natural light, with underground connections to all Downtown subways, convenient north-south and east-west passages and moving walkways.

“Wherever you are, you can see the street, see where you’re going and see the subways, so you always know where you are,” he said. “What we’re trying to create is a 21st-century Grand Central hall of arrival.”

The new facility will be a vast improvement on the labyrinthian complex that existed under the twin tours, Cracchiolo said.

“We have to make it better not just for commuters going to and from work, but for all the people who will be visiting from all over the world, who will be visiting the memorial”

The temporary PATH station, which is now under construction on the spot where the destroyed station was, will be less glitzy.

“The intent is to put it back quickly, not to put it back pretty,” Cracchiolo said. The permanent PATH station will probably be built in the same location.
Anthony Cracchiolo of the Port Authority describes plans for a transportation hub on the site of the World Trade Center. Photo by Carl Glassman

He said that the Port Authority would try to minimize the project’s impact on the community.

“We will try to make the site as presentable as possible as construction is done,” he said. “We’re trying to make the site not be a detriment to the neighborhoods around it, and we want to bring back street life, activity and a sense of normalcy. But construction will have impacts, there’s no doubt about that.”

In commenting on the plans, some residents urged the Port Authority to improve access to the trade center site and the transportation hub from Battery Park City, especially its southern neighborhood. An entrance to the hub is planned at Liberty Park, on the east side of the site, but residents suggested placing another entranced at Greenwich and Liberty streets.

“I don’t know if you can do something from that corner within the Libeskind plan,” Cracchiolo said. “Libeskind’s design creates a depression of 30 feet, and it doesn’t create an easy opportunity for pedestrian connections, other than walking through the memorial. This plan does limit that to a great degree.”