« It came from the Blogosphere... | Main | Deal to Cut Costs Is Close For Builders and Unions »
April 1, 2009
City Hall’s Call: Why Forest City Ratner’s Gehry Beekman Tower Will Only Be 50% of Originally Planned Height- It’s Structural
Noticing New York
It took a blogger with a background in law, urban planning, Proust and the public sector to scoop the mainstream media and track down the real reason Forest City Ratner is considering topping out the Beekman Tower, designed by Frank Gehry, at a mere 38 stories:
Nobody knew what to think when the news went out on that the Frank Gehry-designed Forest City Ratner Beekman Tower now under construction might cease construction at about half its originally planned height.
We speculated:
It is amusing to toy with the idea that the building might have been stopped by the mayor himself when he realized how the immensity of the building in his own City Hall backyard might stand as a symbol to influence the debate over his administration’s sell-off of the public realm.
...
Mentioning the “value engineering” of a Gehry project got us off and thinking about the problems with leaks the building might have (Monday, March 30, 2009, Gehry Leaks) and that the cessation of construction might even have something to do late-found flaws in this regard.Well, it turns out that we were partly right in our first speculation and partly right in our last speculation. The answer combines both. The halt to construction was called for by City Hall itself because of structural problems. Not structural problems directly in the Beekman, but structural problems caused by the Beekman in a neighboring property. The surprise is that the neighboring property is City Hall itself which is just a block away from the Beekman with pretty much the distance of City Hall Park between them.
Click here to read how engineers may have failed to consult the "site interrelationship exchange tables," causing a blow-back structural defect originally caused by the engineering work that went into the Brooklyn Bridge.
NoLandGrab: All proof Ratner is losing faith of one longtime supporter.
Posted by lumi at April 1, 2009 5:43 AM