Opinion
12 March 2010
Viewpoint
A Last Chance for the Trade Center to Rise Again AFTER years of false starts and broken promises, we have reached a defining moment in the rebuilding of the World Trade Center. By Friday, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and the site’s developer, Larry Silverstein, must make a choice: Will they broker a compromise that allows them to move forward with rebuilding the historic heart of our city? Or will they allow their dispute to return to arbitration, condemning the World Trade Center site to years more of delays? For the two of us, the choice is clear. In the days after our city was attacked, New Yorkers vowed to rebuild, to make Lower Manhattan whole again. And with new schools, parks and housing, it has been rejuvenated as a dynamic, bustling community. There has also been some important progress at ground zero. The memorial is on track to open in time for the 10th anniversary of the attacks, next year. The tower at 7 World Trade Center is a commercial and critical success. Construction of the Port Authority’s 1 World
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Trade Center, Mr. Silverstein’s 4 World Trade Center and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s Fulton Street Transit Center is well under way. But the latest stalemate between the Port Authority and the developer, which has been dragging on since last summer, now threatens to overshadow and overwhelm all of the progress. At the root of their dispute is financing for the office towers that are to be built along Church Street, on the east side of the complex. With capital markets still tight, Mr. Silverstein is seeking credit assistance from the Port Authority for two of his skyscrapers; but the Port Authority is willing to fully back only one of them. Because the new World Trade Center has been designed so that all the buildings share key infrastructure, an indefinite delay for one building would delay the entire eastern side of the site. That would mean the loss of 10,000 construction jobs and leave us with an enormous empty lot where we should have a revitalized Trade Center. That outcome is unacceptable. And it doesn’t have to end up this way: Mr. Silverstein and the Port Authority have one day to hash out an agreement that fulfills their moral obligation to our city. Several months ago, the two of us spelled out a compromise. It’s a deal that’s still within reach. Our proposal would require Mr. Silverstein to invest significantly more equity and take on more risk, and the Port Authority to provide more temporary credit assistance to move construction forward on both towers. Mr. Silverstein has been receptive to this plan, but the Port Authority has not, couching its opposition as an effort to protect taxpayers and preserve its ability to pay for other transportation and development projects in the region. Its continued intransigence, however, comes with its own price. Delays at the site have already cost the Port Authority tens of millions of public dollars. Not only would further delays cost much more, but rent proceeds from a thriving World Trade Center would provide money for the Port Authority’s other transportation projects around the city, including Moynihan Station and a new passenger rail tunnel under the Hudson River. From the beginning, the redevelopment process was always intended to be a public-private collaboration. We need a reinvigoration of that partnership now more than ever. The parties have one day to produce a realistic schedule, a budget and a financing plan for the World Trade Center. The future of Lower Manhattan — and a piece of our national pride — depend on it.
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Breezy Love, or the Sacking of the Bees Birds do it. Bees do it. Beetles, bats and light summer breezes do it. I refer, of course, to that raunchiest of sex acts: the pollination of flowers. When it comes to sex, plants have more headaches than the rest of us. One problem is that they can’t travel about to find a mate — they are, after all, rooted to the spot - so they have to depend on intermediaries to bring egg and sperm cells together. For mosses and ferns, the intermediary is water. For conifers like pine trees and cypresses, the intermediary is wind. But for most flowering plants, the intermediaries are animals. Flowering plants are the largest, most successful group of plants on the planet today. There are thought to be more than quarter of a million different species — nearly 10 times more than all the other types of plants added together. (To put things in perspective, the number of living species of fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals combined is less than 58,000.) The flowering plants include roses and waterlilies, grasses and oak trees, tulips and orchids. They include, in short, most of the plants that come to mind when one thinks of vegetation. It was not always thus. Before the mid-Cretaceous, 100 million years ago or so, flowering plants were scarce: conifers and their relations ruled the landscape. But then, for reasons that are not well understood, flowering plants upstaged all others, and the Earth came into bloom. Flowering plants were not the first to seduce animals into spreading their pollen for them. Fossils suggest that some earlier groups of plants, now extinct, had evolved a dependency on insects like scorpionflies. Nonetheless, the earliest flowers appear to have been pollinated by insects, and the full-scale blossoming of flowering plants coincides with the rise of animals as go-betweens. Bees, for example, buzzed onto the scene with flowering plants; the evolutionary history, and success, of both groups is intimately linked. The appearance of flowering plants brought a new flamboyance to the planet. Flowers pollinated by animals tend to be big and colorful; they often smell. (To a human, flowers pollinated by bees typically smell pleasant; flowers pollinated by flies tend to smell foul, like rotting meat.) Often, flowers offer something for the animal to eat — a sip of nectar, perhaps. Sometimes, they provide heat.
That calls for celebration. Let’s have vegetables for dinner tonight.
I have an idea that the phrase ‘weaker sex’ was coined by some woman to disarm some man she was preparing to overwhelm. - Ogden Nash
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