NEW YORK — The joint New York City and State agency overseeing redevelopment of the devastated 16-acre World Trade Center site on Tuesday presented a wish-list of billion-dollar projects it would like to undertake, according to a wire service.
The Lower Manhattan Development Corp.’s list included some ambitious transportation projects that have been considered for years but never made it past the study stage, such as connecting Metro-North rail service for upstate and Connecticut commuters to Pennsylvania Station, and building a Long Island Railroad tunnel to Lower Manhattan from Brooklyn.
Already under attack for moving too slowly, the LMDC before the summer plans to have figured out the mass transit jigsaw puzzle, according to LMDC planning official Alexander Garvin.
It also plans to have finalized the process for a memorial to the nearly 3,000 killed in the Sept. 11 attacks, which will include an international design competition, and to have decided how to handle the damaged World Trade Center “bathtub” or underground perimeter support wall.
“They (the plans) have to come early on because they will determine everything else,” Garvin told an LMDC board meeting.
The list includes a broad range of projects and alternatives, designed to help residents and tourists who will want to visit the memorial, to be called the Freedom Park.
The board is committed to keeping lower Manhattan the world’s financial capital, but is also weighing building apartments and office space on the World Trade Center site.
A museum dedicated to freedom, tolerance and the values of the World Trade Center — such as free exchanges and trade — is one proposal, as is creating a new downtown site for New York City Opera and the Guggenheim Museum.
New York City’s chief of economic development, Daniel Doctoroff, who also is an LMDC board member, told reporters that for five years the growth of Lower Manhattan had been stunted by lack of access and trouble getting around the area.
The LMDC is looking at extending streets that were cut off by construction of the World Trade Center, and making Fulton Street an East River-to-Hudson River thoroughfare. An underground bus and limo terminal is being weighed, as well as a freight/truck handling facility, to reduce congestion.
“What we’re trying to do is … pick the best of all the things that are out there to be done, and to see how the money can be raised to build the best ones,” LMDC Chairman John Whitehead told reporters. “We do have quite a substantial pool of money to spend and we have a whole variety of things to spend it on,” he added.
Just how much the LMDC will have to spend is not yet clear, Doctoroff said. President Bush has promised New York City $21 billion but a big portion of that is earmarked for economic incentives.
The LMDC blueprint does not say how much the projects will cost; coming up with those estimates will be one of the group’s biggest tasks if it is to meet its pre-summer deadline.
Many mass transit projects, and programs such as sinking West Street underground so that Battery Park City is no longer cut off from the financial district, would take years.
The LMDC, which consulted the local community and city and state agencies in drawing up its list, focused on short-term measures that could be undertaken, such as adding new ferries to carry Long Island Railroad commuters to Lower Manhattan from Long Island City, restoring the 1 and 9 subway lines below Chambers Street and creating a temporary PATH train station to carry New Jersey commuters under the Hudson River.
Because World Trade Center subway links were destroyed when the twin towers were toppled, the plan to rebuild the N.Y.-N.J. PATH commuter train link will be examined to see if a new station should be connected with New York City’s 1, 9, N and R subway lines by extending the PATH line toward them.
Another extension would let PATH trains connect with a new terminal at Broadway and Fulton Streets, linking to the nine other city subway lines that run through there.