DAN'S PAPERS, April 25, 2008 Page 22 www.danshamptons.com (continued from previous page)
rises up against the backdrop of a steel and glass curtain. Nothing unusual about that. Until you got up to floor 23. Inside the church, if you prayed straight up to heaven, you would be praying to the underside of the trading floor. Down below, people would be having ethereal thoughts. Up above, people would be having greedy, down below sorts of thoughts. I will avoid using the word hell. Oh well. I spoke to Father Alex about this at the time. Neither building had been built yet, of course. Father Alex didn’t see any problem with this. Yes, there might be shadows cast by the big skyscraper. And yes, they would be under it. But the Lord doesn’t care about that. They would offer prayers that could go around the big beer belly and up into heaven. And then, about three weeks ago, largely as a result of the subprime mortgage crisis that is rattling Wall Street and sending the economy tumbling, the situation changed. It involved Bear Stearns. Bear Stearns was one of the worst offenders of the subprime crisis. Or to put it another way, one of the firms taking the biggest risks with the greatest rewards at the end if everything went okay was the trading firm of Bear Stearns. Bear Sterns had spiraled down into an impossible. Everybody connected with it was running for the hills. And this legendary Wall Street firm, if nothing was done, would collapse into bankruptcy and maybe because of its size — it was involved with hundreds of billions of dollars — take the rest of Wall Street and maybe even the country with it.
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In these extraordinary circumstances, the Feds stepped in and arranged for JPMorgan Chase to take over the place for a song. The Feds would finance it and accept the losses. At $2 a share, or even at $10 a share, which was negotiated later, it was an offer that JPMorgan Chase could not refuse. And so, JPMorgan Chase took over Bear Stearns and with it the Bear Stearns headquarters building at Manhattan and 47th Street. This was a building with a bigger footprint than the one planned for the 9/11 site. And this was a building with its own trading floor. It occupies the first five floors of the building. Hmmm. Suddenly JPMorgan Chase was announcing that they had dropped the idea of the new building with the beer belly hanging out over the St. Nicholas Church down at the 9/11 site. They wouldn’t need it. At least they wouldn’t need it for the trading floor part of their operation. They could use the trading floor at Bear Stearns. And they also announced, after having many meetings to make this decision, that they would continue to go ahead with “Building Number Five” at the 9/11 site. They would find other uses for it. Without the beer belly. I have been thinking of calling Father Alex about all of this. Suddenly, the beer belly was out of the picture. The skies would clear and the little church of St. Nicholas would bathe in sunshine. I know what I would say if he asked me about this. I would say the Lord Giveth and the Lord Taketh Away. I’ll give him a call. •
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glossing over a particular fact they considered just a technicality. Their trading floor was larger than the land upon which this building would sit. Various plans were put forward about where to put the trading floor, but none of them made sense. They were hemmed in by other projects on all sides, one of which was the little church, and though they floated the idea of perhaps buying one of those sites, they found nobody interested. They were stuck. The trading floor would have to be bigger than the building. But it couldn’t be bigger than the building. What they came up with was the strangest thing you ever saw. The building would rise as a 55-story-high slab, but from the 23rd floor to the 29th floor, the entire side of the building would jut out as some great cantilever. It was no small thing. It was physically possible to build this cantilever with steel and reinforced concrete. But when you looked at the sketches of the project, it really did look as if it might tip over. How could this building hold up that great, er, beer belly? It was awful. Here they were on a site where the buildings were supposed to soar, and there was a plan for a building with this growth coming out the side. Worst of all, the beer belly would overhang directly above the small church. Had the church been a major cathedral, which it wasn’t, the top of the steeple might have tickled the underside of the beer belly. But as it was, the little church would only rise about three stories adjacent to the big tower that comprised JPMorgan Chase. It would be just one of those usual things in the city, where a church steeple, or in this case dome,
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