UP FROM GROUND ZERO

PORT AUTHORITY HEAD JOSEPH SEYMOUR MANAGES ONE OF THE WORLD'S BIGGEST AND MOST CONTROVERSIAL CONSTRUCTION PROJECTS.

By Karen Feldscher

“What a job he has.”

Joe Kucich shakes his head in appreciation as he winds the black Crown Victoria through molasses Manhattan traffic. He’s talking about his boss, Joseph Seymour, the man he shepherds to and from meetings, day in, day out.

“I’ll tell you,” Kucich says, wagging a finger for emphasis, “I don’t care how much money he makes. I wouldn’t want that job.”

“That job” is the executive directorship of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. As the head of the 7,000-person agency, Seymour, BA’70, manages a $7 billion annual budget and an operation that oversees the ports of Newark and Elizabeth; LaGuardia, Kennedy, Newark, and Teterboro Airports; the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels; the George Washington and Goethals Bridges; the PATH train system; the ferry service around Manhattan; and several bus terminals.

All that would keep anyone busy. But in the aftermath of September 11, the Port Authority—which owns the World Trade Center site—has also been at the center of one of the most complex and controversial building projects in history: rebuilding Ground Zero.

The project involves far more than erecting new office towers. An appropriate memorial must be created to honor the 3,022 victims of the 2001 attacks in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania, and the 1993 trade center bombing. Train stations must be reconstructed. Underground concourses designed. Street grids revamped. Traffic congestion eased. Pedestrian access improved.

Saying it’s a tall order is a ridiculous understatement. People from coast to coast and across oceans are watching this one. In New York, especially, different groups and individuals care very much about how the site is rebuilt, and they all have different opinions.

Though the Port Authority owns the site, no one believes the agency can just rebuild as it pleases. There are simply too many players, and too much is at stake. So the remaking of Ground Zero is all about negotiating, finessing, accommodating.

And about getting the job done fast. New York governor George Pataki wants progress to be swift, because of the symbolic and economic importance of getting Lower Manhattan back on its feet.

Kevin Rampe, president of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC)—a state-city entity created by Pataki and then mayor Rudolph Giuliani after September 11 to help plan and coordinate the area’s rejuvenation—calls the pace of work grueling.

“Every deadline has to be met,” explains Rampe, who works closely with Seymour. “The time frames are short. Everyone just wants us to go faster. It’s really a twenty-four-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week job. I’ve often talked to Joe on weekends and late into the night. He’s always there.”

Seymour, says Rampe, “is the key guy driving all of what’s happening on the World Trade Center site.”


A tense, necessary process

Pataki handpicked Seymour for the Port Authority directorship three months after the 2001 attack. Earlier, Pataki had placed Seymour in several other high-level state-government roles, including as chairman of the New York Power Authority, New York commissioner of general services, and executive deputy commissioner of the New York Department of Motor Vehicles.

“When I asked my longtime colleague and friend Joe Seymour to lead the Port Authority following the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center,” Pataki says, “I knew it would be a tremendous challenge. The agency was going through the most difficult, painful period in its eighty-year history. But I knew Joe was more than up to the task.”

Pataki praises Seymour’s skill in urban planning, economic development, and budget analysis, as well as the “wonderful sense of humor” he maintains in the face of daily challenges. “These are just a few of the reasons I have called upon him again and again when I needed someone to get things done,” the governor says.

Seymour himself allows he’s learned a thing or two after thirty-six years in local and state government. But, reluctant to toot his own horn, he deflects the suggestion that his experience is somehow a linchpin in the massive Ground Zero project. He just says, simply, “I have good people working for me.”

Seymour comes across as a good listener, straightforward and unflappable. Lou Tomson, a former LMDC president, says Seymour is “intense” but also “very steady, very solid, very informed on the issues.”

Good qualities to have, given the smorgasbord of individuals and groups who have an interest, vested or otherwise, in the future of the World Trade Center site. For instance, there’s real-estate developer Larry Silverstein, with whom the Port Authority negotiated a long-term lease for the trade center property in spring 2001, and who wants to see his investment pay off.

There’s Pataki, whose legacy as governor will rest in part on how swift and satisfying the rebuilding efforts are. New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, who has his own ideas about Ground Zero, given its importance to the city’s vitality.

The LMDC, with its scores of advisers, including state and city officials, and business and community leaders. The local and civic groups that care about transportation, traffic, local business, ambience, historic structures, and street life.

And the victims’ families, deeply concerned about securing an appropriate memorial for their loved ones. Their insistence that nothing be built on the twin towers’ footprints—which they view as sacred ground—helped shape the reconstruction designs, one of which, architect Daniel Libeskind’s proposal, was finally selected in February.

The task of rebuilding, as Robert Yaro, president of the Regional Plan Association, a vocal civic organization, explained to Newsday last year, is “a continuing saga,” which must “find a middle ground between the Port Authority’s financial needs, the leaseholder [Silverstein], and the public interest.”

Pay attention to the threads of the saga, and your head starts to spin.

Earlier this year, the New York Post reported that Libeskind, whose bold, angular vision for the World Trade Center site won him the right to oversee the overall design for rebuilding, has complained about not having greater control in the process.

A New York Observer piece about retail mall giant Westfield America, which operated stores in the underground levels of the twin towers, said the company believed the Port Authority wasn’t appropriately considering its rights and commercial interests. (The matter is now in litigation.) According to the New York Times, some victims’ families have criticized a Port Authority plan to park tour buses directly under the World Trade Center memorial site. (That debate continues.)

And the Times quoted Richard Kahan, former chief executive at the Battery Park City Authority, saying it was “ethically, morally, and possibly legally wrong for the Port Authority and a developer to be calling the shots” about what will be built at Ground Zero.

How does the Port Authority deal with the steady barrage? Seymour shifts his tall frame in his chair and sighs before answering.

“Everybody feels they have a stake in the World Trade Center and Ground Zero,” he says in measured tones. “But our job is to get everybody to work together. That’s why we went through a process that was just very open and involved a number of key stakeholders.

“I’m not saying a lot of things weren’t very tense a lot of the time,” he says. “The process can be somewhat exhausting. But we have a site plan now that we think meets everyone’s interests. And we will continue to refine it.”

Seymour adds, “We could have said, ‘We own it—we’ll decide what needs to be done, and we’ll let you know what it’s going to be when we build it.’ But we didn’t do that. First of all, the governor would never stand for that. Second of all, we knew the importance of this, not only to New Yorkers, but to everybody in America.”


After the ashes, new ideas

The process Seymour refers to began after the dust settled on September 11, and New Yorkers started the grim task of searching for victims and hauling away a seven-story, 1.6 million–ton pile of debris. At the same time, officials started brainstorming about how to rebuild.

Seymour was then working in Albany at the Power Authority. Appointed a trustee by Pataki in February 2001 and subsequently elected chair by his fellow trustees, Seymour had overseen the installation of ten small gas-turbine power plants in New York City and one on Long Island to avert blackouts and electricity-price spikes during the scorching 2001 summer.

But in December, before Seymour had even a year under his belt at the Power Authority, Pataki told him he was needed at the helm of the Port Authority.

“Can I have a couple of days to think about it?” Seymour recalls asking.

“No,” the governor replied, though he did relent enough to let Seymour consult his wife.

When Seymour asked wife Susan what she thought, she said, “This is what the governor wants you to do; there’s nothing to think about.” And that was that.

Seymour followed in the footsteps of his friend Neil Levin, the former Port Authority executive director, who died in the September 11 attacks after only five months on the job. Levin’s office was on the sixty-seventh floor of Tower One; that morning he’d had a breakfast meeting scheduled at the Windows on the World restaurant.

“Neil Levin was a friend,” Seymour says quietly. “That was tough.”

But there was plenty to do, and Seymour got down to business. He took an apartment in the city, traveling home to Albany on weekends to visit his wife. That first year, he spent more than 50 percent of his time on Ground Zero–related tasks, working hand-in-hand with the LMDC. By July 2002, the agencies had released six preliminary rebuilding plans.

Reaction was overwhelmingly negative. Critics said the plans, which called for replacing all the commercial and retail space lost when the towers went down, seemed largely driven by the interests of developers and business. New York Times architecture critic Herbert Muschamp wrote the plans revealed “a breathtaking determination to think small.”

“The architects did exactly what they were asked to do,” Seymour counters. “They were asked to come up with a land-use plan, and part of that was a plan to show how much square footage would go on the site. They were focused on streets, public transportation, areas for the memorial.

“They weren’t charged with coming up with a design for the buildings,” he says. “There’s not a lot that’s very exciting about a land-use plan.” But the public wanted more, Seymour concedes: “They wanted something more visual, stimulating, spiritual.”

So the LMDC suggested that site designs be selected through an international competition. By December 2002, seven new, more striking plans were unveiled. One featured buildings that looked like latticework; another seemed to mimic a DNA strand.

Libeskind’s winning design is modern and angular—Seymour likens it to a Picasso—and includes the so-called Freedom Tower, which rises 1,776 feet (a number chosen for its symbolism) into a skyline presence echoing that of the Statue of Liberty. Buildings will be precisely positioned so that every September 11 a public square will be illuminated by a shaft of sunlight from 8:46 a.m., when the first plane crashed into Tower One, to 10:28 a.m., when Tower Two collapsed.

Libeskind’s design also includes a four-and-a-half-acre memorial park, sunk thirty feet below street level. The LMDC is overseeing a memorial design competition, which drew 5,200 submissions over the summer, making it the largest design competition in history. The winning entry will be selected next month.

Although the eyes of the world are on what goes up at the World Trade Center site, Seymour is actually just as interested in what goes underground, as well as the surrounding infrastructure. That’s the Port Authority’s principal domain, after all—overseeing tunnels, bridges, and transport.

In fact, had September 11 never happened, the Port Authority’s involvement with the trade center site would today be minimal. The agency negotiated the long-term lease with developer Silverstein, Seymour says, so it could relinquish some of its real-estate business and focus more on other work. “We’re primarily builders,” he explains.

Reticent when discussing the rebuilding controversies, Seymour clearly loves talking about the Port Authority’s plans to revamp transportation in Lower Manhattan. He cites detail after detail about the new PATH commuter-train terminal, a nearly $2 billion project; the new subway hub at Fulton Street; and the underground concourse, complete with people movers, that will link the two stations, and continue under West Street to provide access to the World Financial Center.

A temporary PATH station will be open by November. The permanent station, scheduled for completion in 2009, will include a soaring glass atrium through which the new office towers will be visible.

“This will be a major transportation improvement to Lower Manhattan,” Seymour says. “What we’re creating, we feel, will be similar to what happened when Grand Central Terminal was completed in 1913. It really provided the impetus for the development of midtown.”

Plans also call for depressing a portion of the eight-lane West Street, which borders the trade center site on the west. A four-lane surface road with a tree-lined promenade would be created; four more lanes would run underneath. “We compare what we want to create with Commonwealth Avenue in Boston,” Seymour explains. The change is designed to improve pedestrian access between the trade center site and the World Financial Center.

Overall, planners hope the Ground Zero rebuilding will vastly improve traffic and pedestrian movement through the area and create better airport links. This, officials believe, is what will bring workers and residents back to Lower Manhattan, which lost 60,000 jobs after September 11.

These days, Ground Zero, still a giant hole in the ground, is filled with a heartening bustle. Scores of workers in hardhats roam amidst the beams, machinery, makeshift buildings, and mud, moving in and out of the “bathtub”—their nickname for the hole—via a huge ramp. The air buzzes with the sound of jackhammers, drills, forklifts, nail guns. New train tracks snake in from the Hudson River side toward the nearly complete temporary PATH station.

Visitors still come to peer through the large fence around the site, pondering what was and what will be. Far below, on the roof of a makeshift structure in the hole, workers have draped a large American flag.


Unexpected twists and turns

Asked about his career path, Seymour chuckles. “My career goal when I graduated,” he recalls, “was getting to know something really well, so I wouldn’t have to keep changing jobs, and I could have my whole life planned out.”

A co-op job as an assistant director of urban renewal in East Rochester, New York, led to Seymour’s advancing to the directorship after graduating from Northeastern. In keeping with his plan of knowing one thing really well, he set about becoming an urban-renewal expert. “I thought I could do it the rest of my life,” he says.

It didn’t work out that way. Seymour realized he needed a master’s degree, which he earned in community planning and development at the University of Rhode Island in 1976. He worked in Rochester for another year, as special assistant for downtown development, then in Peekskill, New York, for four years as assistant city manager for development. He left to become commissioner of development in Yonkers.

“Then,” Seymour says, “a guy named George Pataki called me up and said, ‘You’ve got to come back to Peekskill.’” Seymour had worked for Pataki there; now Pataki, a Peekskill native and mayor from 1981 to 1984, wanted him back.

Seymour demurred. But Pataki said, “You have to. I want you to be city manager.”

So Seymour went. And stayed for eleven years, honing his skills in finance and administration, planning and development, labor negotiation, and working with community groups. Pataki, in the meantime, became a state assemblyman, a state senator, then won the governor’s race. Shortly after being sworn in, he appointed Seymour as the Department of Motor Vehicles executive deputy commissioner.

“I’ve never pursued one job I knew I wanted and got,” admits Seymour. “I was always on some track that meant I didn’t know where I was going.”

And so it was with the Port Authority position, which Seymour calls “a troubleshooter’s job.” Former LMDC president Lou Tomson thinks Seymour is critical to the rebuilding efforts. “Without Joe,” Tomson states categorically, “the good things that are happening down there would not have happened. He is a true professional, a real consensus builder. With him, it’s always about getting the job done.”

Yet, as Seymour’s driver says, what a job it is. Rebuilding at the World Trade Center site is easily the most hotly debated construction project in the world. This summer, clashes continued to sprout like weeds.

On June 26, the New York Times reported that community groups had formed to oppose the idea of a tunnel under West Street, saying it would isolate Battery Park City.

The next day, the New York Daily News wrote that former mayor Giuliani thinks the size of the Ground Zero memorial should be doubled. That same day, current mayor Bloomberg said on his weekly radio show that the city, not the Port Authority, should be in control of the World Trade Center site.

Several news articles in July detailed behind-the-scenes battles among developer Silverstein, architect Libeskind, the Port Authority, and the LMDC about how much office space could fit comfortably on the World Trade Center site, along with the memorial, the transportation and cultural centers, the new streets and shops, and the below-ground infrastructure.

In addition, the New York Times reported that a group of victims’ relatives were angry that several underground structures—emergency exits and other safety-related constructions associated with the temporary PATH terminal—were encroaching on the footprints of the former twin towers. Some family members think the towers’ symbolic footprints extend as far down as bedrock, about 70 feet below ground level.

Wrote Times reporter Edward Wyatt: “The latest dispute demonstrates that almost no decision about the site goes unchallenged and that even as plans for the rebuilding of the site move forward, powerful constituencies intend to try to influence even the smallest of decisions.”
Seymour’s take on all the back-and-forth? “It’s New York,” he shrugs. “It’s also America.”

He admits that, after this job, retirement looks pretty attractive. But he wants to see the project through, at least until the ground breaking for the first tower, scheduled for the fall of next year.

“It was an outrageous attack on us as a nation,” says Seymour. “None of us will ever forget.” Besides, he adds, with resolve, “it’s an honor to be involved in rebuilding.”

Karen Feldscher is a senior writer.