Port Authority prepares memorial plaza for 9/11 anniversary

Ten years after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey is preparing to open the 9/11 memorial plaza at Ground Zero, said Chris Ward, executive director of the Port Authority, at a Newsmakers event at the National Press Club July 26.

President Barack Obama will join New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie at the 10th anniversary event opening the plaza, which contains trees, reflecting pools and waterfalls in the footprint of the two towers. It also displays the names of those who died.

The next day, Sept. 12, the plaza will open to visitors who obtain tickets via the Internet at http://www.911memorial.org.

Tickets are necessary to limit the number of people on the plaza during the ongoing construction and to keep the site secure. More than 35,000 tickets were reserved when the Website began operation, Ward said. Currently, tickets are available on a rolling basis about three months after the opening, he added.

Ward acknowledged the various problems and controversies involved in rebuilding on the site where thousands died. In an effort to develop the site into a commercial and transportation destination while also maintaining it as a memorial, project leaders “stumbled,” Ward said.

“We lost sight of the more prosaic questions, the realistic questions of how do you build this project? How do you get it done? How do you know that the schedules for completion are in fact real? And, how do you have a budget that actually mirrors the goals of these visions that have been set out?” Ward said.

Once those schedules were put in place, it appeared the memorial plaza would not open until 2013. Ward rejected that timeline, saying it was important to have the plaza open on the 10th anniversary. Engineers for the project decided that the roof of the underground transportation hub could be built first, making the plaza possible.

Comparisons to how the Empire State Building was constructed in just more than one year are unfair due to more stringent safety requirements for the construction crews and to prevent a future truck bomb, Ward said.

“The fundamental difference, though, is that the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, the Goldman Sachs Building were all built in open space. They were driven into bedrock, foundations were poured and they rose up. One World Trade is [being] built on top of an operating Path train, so the complexity of the foundation to bridge over those tunnels was enormous,” he said.

The 16-acre site will cost about $20 billion, with $11 billion coming from the Port Authority, Ward said. Construction of the publicly-financed portions is scheduled to be completed by 2014. Since Tower 2 is being privately financed, it is not expected to be completed until at least 2018, he said.