VOLUME 27, NUMBER 11
NOVEMBER 6-NOVEMBER 19, 2014
STORM PLANS LEAVE MANY DOWNTOWN WITHOUT PROTECTION
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BY DUSICA SUE MALESEVIC s the city grapples with protecting its coastlines two years after Superstorm Sandy hit on Oct. 29, 2012, it is moving forward with the “Big U” design to safeguard parts of the Lower East Side, while there remains a lack of funding for other vulnerable sections of Lower Manhattan. The first section that does have $335 million in funding stretches from Montgomery St. to E. 23rd St., which includes Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town, at expense of not covering several public housing projects on the Lower East Side such as LaGuardia, Knickerbocker, Rutgers and the Smith Houses. “I’m not happy,” Aixa Torres, president of the tenant association for the Alfred E. Smith houses, said in a phone interview. “The hardest hit are the ones that will be the least protected. What happens to the rest of us?” During Sandy, the Smith Houses did not have power or water and experienced flooding. The Montgomery boundary does include the Vladeck Houses and Nancy Ortiz, president of the resident association, is happy about that, but not that other complexes will not be covered. “It’s very disheartening other areas that should have been included Continued on page 10
Downtown Express photo by Josh Rogers
One of many visitors who took a picture of the now open One World Trade Center this week.
The new W.T.C. scene
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BY JOSH ROGERS eople on Vesey St. were stopping to click their phone cameras at a rate of 10 or so a minute Monday, the first day office workers came to the new One World Trade Center. More of the area was open, and in many ways it seemed like a new day at the W.T.C., where over the
post-9/11 years, chains have been used to manage the crowds forced to circumvent the area. But is the building finally open? “Not to the public it isn’t,” an N.Y.P.D. officer told me in a friendly tone. A public opening will perhaps be in the spring when One World Observatory starts welcoming vis-
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itors looking for views of Lower Manhattan and beyond. So far, only about 175 Condé Nast employees have started working at One W.T.C., which many still call the Freedom Tower, the name used long before the building was even designed. Thousands Continued on page 8