When it was announced in November that suspected terrorists linked to the Sept. 11 attacks would be tried in Lower Manhattan, residents living closest to the courthouse where the trials are to take place were afraid their neighborhood would be turned into a military stronghold.
Those fears were confirmed earlier this week, as city Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly laid out key elements of his department’s plan to keep Lower Manhattan safe during the trials. Many Downtown residents and workers will find themselves navigating among a phalanx of guards, steel barriers and roving patrols once the trials begin.
“Whatever the merits of holding the trial[s] in Lower Manhattan, it will certainly raise the level of threat,” Kelly said in an address to the New York Press Club on Jan. 19. “Securing this area and the entire city for the duration of the trial promises to be an extremely demanding undertaking.”
The trial, expected to last for years, is planned to be held on the edge of Chinatown, in the Moynihan Federal Courthouse at 500 Pearl Street, next door to the 240-unit condominium Chatham Towers and near another residential development, Chatham Green. The danger of an attack—and the $200 million per-year costs that go with it—has lead Community Board 1 and other local elected to officials to call for the trials to be held on Governors Island.
At a meeting of CB1s Executive Committee Wednesday, Menin’s fellow board members agreed that the trials should be moved, though some argued that Governors Island was not far enough from the city. Ultimately, the committee passed a resolution supporting Menin’s proposal, a move since endorsed by City Councilwoman Margaret Chin and Council Speaker Christine Quinn.
“I think it’s a far superior site,” Menin said at the meeting Wednesday night. “There are no residents, very few office workers, no subway and no trains. It’s a much safer site than the federal courthouse.” Menin also argued that the security cost, $216 million in the first year and more than $200 million each subsequent year, according to police officials, would be substantially less.
In a televised interview Thursday morning, Kelly said the department “was certainly open to those suggestions,” but reminded reporters that the decision to hold the trials Downtown was made in Washington, not New York.
“We understand that the trials can be very disruptive to the Lower Manhattan community, and we’re obviously concerned about the threat to the entire city,” Kelly said. He later said during a New York 1 broadcast that federal officials had told him that moving the trials would be impractical.
Under the department’s plan, the east side of Lower Manhattan will be divided into “hard” and “soft” security zones. The hard zone, where security will be tightest, will be bounded by Worth Street to the north, Madison Street to the south, Pearl Street to the east and Centre Street to the west. That area, Kelly said, will be surrounded on all sides by metal barriers, restricting pedestrian and vehicle access. Inside the perimeter—which includes Chatham Towers and Chatham Green—sharpshooters will be placed on rooftops to guard against enemy snipers, while assault and canine teams will patrol the ground. Anyone entering what Kelly referred to as “the frozen zone” will have to pass police inspection. Police helicopters will hover overhead on a near-constant basis, and surveillance cameras will be installed at every access point.
The larger “soft” zone will extend to Canal Street to the north, Frankfort Street (just south of the Brooklyn Bridge ramps), Bowery and Park Row to the east and Broadway to the west. Kelly said that although pedestrian and vehicular traffic would be allowed to move through the soft zone largely unimpeded, the outer perimeter will be patrolled by police on foot, on horseback and in cars. Those officers, he said, would conduct unannounced vehicle checkpoints. Police patrols in subway stations within the soft zone will also be intensified.
At the CB1 Executive Committee meeting, residents living near the courthouse, especially those from Chatham Towers and Chatham Green, again voiced their opposition to the plan.
“If they do this, 240 families are going to be imprisoned in their homes,” Vincent Imberosciano, a Chatham Towers resident, testified during a Community Board 1 meeting on the trials, held the day after Kelly’s address. He was one more than two dozen Lower Manhattan residents who had come to the meeting to implore the board to do whatever it could to have the trials moved.
“We’re not going to have access to our cars, and we’re not going to be able to get out of our building, just like we were on 9/11,” Imberosciano said. “Now, we’re going to be 20 yards away from the new Ground Zero.”
Dorothy Thom, a Chatham Green resident, said with all of the recent terror-related incidents involving air travel, as well as the Fort Hood shootings, there was no way the police can guarantee safety in Lower Manhattan.
“It only takes a lapse in human judgment to jeopardize our lives,” she said, adding that it didn’t make sense to cordon off the neighborhood in the name of the trials if safety, the only benefit to doing so, could not be ensured.
“There will be a chokehold on the livelihood of our neighborhood,” Thom said. “We will be held hostage for years to come.”
Elected officials and others reacted angrily to comments by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, published in the Downtown Express, that the Governors Island proposal is “one of the dumber ideas” he has heard. Rep. Jerrold Nadler, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, State Senator Daniel Squadron and City Councilmember Margaret Chin released a joint statement decrying the Mayor’s “callous dismissal yesterday of a potential alternative location for the upcoming trial.”
“While we recognize that the 6th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution requires that the trial be held in the state and district where the crime occurred—which means the Southern District of New York—we urge Attorney General Eric Holder and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly to assess the feasibility of locating the trials on Governors Island,” the statement read, “or other alternative sites that would ease the burden on our already overburdened Lower Manhattan neighborhoods.”