NO MAS:

The Biggest Foundation: This piece, written in 1972, looks at the construction of the World Trade Center's twin towers, at a time when they were a symbol of possibility. (Edith Iglauer, 1972-11-04, The New Yorker)

Soaring above the lower end of Manhattan Island is the world's largest cluster of tall buildings, whose oblongs, spires, and turrets have, since this century began, given New York the most spectacular skyline anywhere. Each one of the towers whose upper extremities pierce the clouds is rooted, below the city's surface, in a huge, unseen structure that may itself be the size of a ten-story building. The finishing touches are now being put on the biggest foundation in the world, which is below what are, as of now, the highest pair of buildings in the world. These are the twin hundred-and-ten-story towers of the World Trade Center, built for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Nine or ten good-sized office or apartment buildings could have been fitted into the hole that was dug for the Trade Center, and the foundation proper is six times as large as that of the usual fifty-story skyscraper and four times as large as its closest competitor-the basement of the neighboring sixty-story Chase Manhattan Bank Building.

On a hot, dry summer day nearly seven years ago, I went down to the corner of West and Cortlandt Streets to witness the initial tests of some basic equipment for the construction of the main foundation walls of what would be the biggest building job ever attempted-in height of the structures, size of the foundation and excavation, and almost everything else. I was there to witness the test with Robert E. White, who is executive vice-president of Spencer, White & Prentis, a firm of foundation experts that is almost always called in whenever architects and builders think anything complicated or unexpected may occur below ground. Robert White and his brother Edward, president of that firm, are old friends of mine, and when I had mentioned not long before that I had always wondered what kept the tall buildings in New York anchored to the ground or whatever was underneath it, they suggested that I observe some of the steps in the construction of the foundations for the Trade Center. I knew that besides the two skyscrapers, each thirteen hundred and fifty feet high, at least three other buildings would be erected on the sixteen-acre site: an eight-story structure for the United States Customs Bureau and two nine-story ones for exhibits, meetings, and trade activities, around a five-acre plaza. To accommodate this extraordinary new assemblage within fourteen blocks of jammed lower Manhattan, the Port Authority had condemned a hundred and sixty-four buildings then standing on the site-including the big, rambling headquarters of the old Hudson and Manhattan Railroad, now the Port Authority Trans-Hudson System, known as PATH-and had closed off parts of five streets that ran through it. I had studied the map, and knew their names-Cortlandt, Dey, Fulton, Washington, and Greenwich. I also knew the names of the four streets bordering the site: West Street, running parallel to the dock area and beneath the West Side Highway along the bank of the Hudson River; Liberty Street, to the south, which is only a brief walk from the Battery; Church Street, a step from Trinity Church, on the east; and, to the north, Vesey Street, where the New York Telephone Company has its headquarters. The city had made a neat bargain with the Port Authority. In return for municipal assistance in obtaining the huge site, the Port Authority was going to add about twenty-four acres of new real estate to New York City by dumping the dirt and rock that would be excavated-more than a million cubic yards, or enough to make a pile about a mile high and seventy-five feet square-inside a great riverside cofferdam, or bulkhead. On this man-made peninsula, with a base extending from the old Pier 7 to the old Pier 11 and the Central Railroad of New Jersey ferry slip along the Hudson, plans called for streets, parking facilities, sewers, mains for water, electricity, and steam, and, eventually, apartment houses, stores, and various other buildings-parts of a complex to be known as Battery Park City.

The backbone of Manhattan is a rock ledge, which actually can be seen in Central Park and a number of other places. Starting at Fourteenth Street, it goes gradually beneath sea level, and extends under Governor's Island, Staten Island, New Jersey, and possibly as far as Pennsylvania, where similar rock-known here as Manhattan Schist-has been found. At the World Trade Center site, the rock is seventy feet below sea level, and above it is a nightmare for all construction engineers-filled land. Two hundred years ago, New York City was a little colonial town at the tip of the island, with docks and piers reaching like fingers into the rivers on either side. As the city grew, the dirt and rock dug out for cellars and, later, for subways and other underground installations, was dumped into the rivers to create new real estate, and it is estimated that the island's shoreline was pushed out about seven hundred feet in the area around the Trade Center. When a heavy building rests on bedrock, its engineers can sleep peacefully. Once they have dug to such rock, that's as far as they have to go, which made Manhattan a superb location for many of the first skyscrapers. The bedrock is so close to the surface in midtown-only eight feet down at Rockefeller Center-that sometimes it has to be blasted out for basements.

As Robert White and I were walking toward the test site, he said, "Some foundations, like those of the Empire State Building, are so routine they aren't interesting. A one-story service station built on a swamp could be more exciting. But on this kind of filled land there is nothing but trouble," he said, looking pleased. "For a typical downtown New York skyscraper, you normally dig down thirty or forty feet, but this foundation will have to go anywhere from sixty to a hundred feet. Around here, there's usually ten or fifteen feet of fill near the surface-rubble, old bricks, old anything. Then you have five to twenty-five feet of Hudson River silt-black, oozy mud, often covering old docks and ships. Down here we may hit parts of an old Dutch vessel called the Tijger, which burned off Manhattan in 1614. Below the silt, there's maybe a dozen feet of red sand called bull's liver, which is really quicksand-the bugbear of all excavating. The more you dig in it the more everything oozes into the hole. We expect to find it here, but we know how to deal with it. Under that is hardpan-clay that was squeezed dry by the glacier and its accompanying boulders. Finally, beneath the hardpan, there's Manhattan Schist."

Comes news today that they're looking at more designs for the WTC site, At Ground Zero, the Freshest Architecture May Be the Answer (NY Times, 12/18/02). One can understand the visceral instinct to rebuild and build even bigger, but I wish they wouldn't. The original towers--which were nearly completed by the time we moved to NJ and which we had a magnificent view of from Eagle Rock Park--were, in a word, hideous. In fact, all those mammoth buildings seem anti-human to me.
Posted by Orrin Judd at December 18, 2002 10:34 PM