Lower Manhattan Development Corp.

The last remaining pieces of the former Deutsche Bank Tower at 130 Liberty Street will be torn down during the next few weeks, a spokesman for the LMDC said.

With the demolition of the former Deutsche Bank tower at 130 Liberty Street crawling towards its completion in the next few weeks, a question arises: What will replace it?

The Port Authority will use the site as a staging area for construction of its underground vehicle-screening garage for the World Trade Center, a project scheduled to be finished in late 2012. In the meantime, the Authority, city and state officials and the public will be weighing in on the site’s future, said Avi Schick, board chairman of the Lower Manhattan Development Corp., which owned the building and oversaw its demolition.

“It’s an important question that the city and state are thinking about,” Schick told the Trib following a Jan. 26 meeting of the LMDC’s board of directors. “The good news is that we have this time, during which it behooves everybody to think hard and serious about the best use of that site.”

The Port Authority, which will continue to control the site after the security center is finished, has yet to express a preference.

“Whether it is office, retail, hotel, residential or some mix of those uses, that development should be market driven to ensure its highest and best use to give back the greatest return on the public’s investment,” Port Authority spokesman Steve Coleman said in an email to the Trib.

Once planned for a 42-story JP Morgan Chase headquarters, the site was abandoned by the company after it acquired Bear Sterns and chose to move uptown. Last year, New York University identified the site as a possible location for a 40-story skyscraper as an alternative to a proposed spot on Bleecker Street, where Village residents opposed its construction. The university later backed away from the idea but has continued to express interest in the site for part of its planned expansion.

“There needs to be leadership here, and there needs to be a plan,” said Community Board 1 chairwoman Julie Menin. A voting member of the LMDC’s board of directors, Menin had supported the short-lived notion of an NYU tower on the site, and has also pushed for putting a performing arts center there rather than on its designated site next to One World Trade Center. That idea lost traction last year after the Port Authority began erecting steel columns needed to support the arts center in its originally planned location.

“Obviously, to develop it as an office building in this market doesn’t make a lot of sense,” Menin said of the 130 Liberty site earlier this week. “It’s my belief that we should develop that as a mixed-use residential building.”

Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer told a meeting of Community Board 1 this week that he plans to gather public comment on uses for the space at a “large town hall” meeting next month.

“This community is finally seeing some light at the end of the tunnel, but also some new challenges,” Stringer said. “It’s one thing to deconstruct the building, but what is that site going to look like? What are the options, and what do we have to do to get there?”

Once finished, the building’s $264-million demolition will mark the end of an agonizing chapter in the saga of the World Trade Center’s rebuilding. Crews began in 2006 simultaneously cleaning and dismantling the structure, a practice that investigators later determined had contributed to the deaths of two firefighters as they battled a blaze in the building in 2007. Following two more years of cleaning the building, workers restarted the demolition with additional safety measures.

Though Demolition is Ending, LMDC’s Court Battles Just Beginning

While many may participate in the future of the 130 Liberty site, just how much of the public’s money will ultimately have been spent tearing down the former Deutsche Bank tower could be decided by a single judge.

LMDC Board Chairman Avi Schick said the agency plans to file a $100 million law suit against its general contractor on the demolition, Bovis Lend Lease, claiming the company’s own negligence and mistakes were the reason deconstruction costs far exceeded the project’s original budget. Schick said Bovis owes the LMDC at least $70 million for mishaps and forced work delays on the site, and another $30 million that the agency loaned the contactor to cover the cost of additional safety measures in the wake of the 2007 fire.

“We feel very strongly about the need to get that money back,” Schick said. “We believe we’re obligated to get it back, and we’ll take whatever steps necessary.”

Of the $264 million the LMDC has spent on 130 Liberty’s cleaning and demolition, the agency has already reclaimed about $106 million by way of settlements with its insurers and the Deutsche Bank company, Schick said.

Bovis and the LMDC were already warring in court over an $80 million payment Bovis claims it is owed for work it performed outside the scope of its original contract with the agency.

“They’re saying that they haven’t sufficiently profited from this job,” Schick said. “We believe that claim is legally baseless and frankly, given what they’ve done, morally obtuse.”