By Julie Shapiro
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
LOWER MANHATTAN — The Port Authority earned a solid C on its latest World Trade Center progress report, meeting 13 of 17 milestones for the first quarter of 2010.
One World Trade Center, formerly the Freedom Tower, met all of its goals, rising to 22 stories by the end of March and shooting up another four stories since then.
But the Vehicle Security Center, which will house hundreds of tour buses and provide access to the new office towers, is behind schedule. The below-ground center was supposed to open in 2013 but it is unclear if it will make that date.
The Port Authority can’t excavate the eastern portion of the VSC because the Deutsche Bank building still looms over the site. And work on the western portion was also delayed until the state removed a piece of the Liberty Street pedestrian bridge in April.
Other construction goals that the Port Authority missed include excavating beneath the No. 1 subway line and erecting steel for the sweeping Santiago Calatrava-designed PATH hall.
Looking ahead, the major question mark hovering over the 16-acre site is the negotiation between the Port Authority and Larry Silverstein, the private developer slated to build three office towers there.
Silverstein and the Port Authority reached a preliminary agreement in March about when to build the towers and how to pay for them, but the two sides are still hammering out the details.
Bob Harvey, executive director of the Lower Manhattan Construction Command Center, said Monday that Silverstein and the Port Authority are meeting several times a week and are getting along much better than they were this time last year.
“They seem to be making great progress,” Harvey said.
The other big uncertainty at the World Trade Center site is when the long-delayed demolition of the Deutsche Bank building will finally be complete, allowing work on the Vehicle Security Center to move forward unfettered.
The Deutsche Bank building is now down to the 14th floor, and the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. expects the building to be gone by the end of the year.
The project lost time over the unusually snowy winter but hopes to make it up during the longer days of summer, said Errol Cockfield, LMDC spokesman.
Rather than cutting the building’s steel into small pieces and lowering it to the ground in buckets, contractor Bovis Lend Lease is experimenting with moving much larger chunks of steel off the building, Cockfield said. The Buildings Deptartment still has to approve that change.
“The hope is that we can save some time,” Cockfield said.
