Workers lower a tree into place in Liberty Park, with the Freedom Tower in the background.
BY YANNIC RACK
The seeds are planted for Liberty Park.
Workers lower a tree into place in Liberty Park, with Brookfield Place in the background.
Workers started putting in the first of 50 trees set for the World Trade Center’s new green space this week, setting the stage for a summer opening next year.
“It will truly be a wonderful park,” said Steven Plate, the Port Authority’s director of WTC construction, during a tour of the space on Monday. “And the view is spectacular as well.”
The park, designed by landscape architect Stephen E. Brown, overlooks the WTC memorial and has full-length views of the Freedom Tower and Brookfield Place.
“When you look around, it really shows that the World Trade Center is open for business,” Plate said.
The $50-million plaza atop the Vehicle Security Center at the corner of Liberty and Greenwich Sts. still looks like a construction site, but will soon sport seasonal planting beds and benches, as well as a wall of greenery along the Liberty St. side of the structure.
“It will be a wonderful display of color,” Plate said.
On Monday, workers were using a crane to lift honey locusts up to the plaza and lower them into pits scattered around the one-acre space. Other trees that will put down roots include serviceberry, stellar pink dogwood, and yellow-blooming witch hazel.
Elsewhere, workers raked soil in planting beds, installed benches and put the finishing touches on the park’s state-of-the-art irrigation system.
Plate said the park should be ready by next summer, and the Port Authority hopes to open it to the public even before the 2017 completion of the St. Nicholas National Shrine, the Greek Orthodox church being rebuilt at the park’s eastern end.
“We’re looking at ways to open it while construction is underway,” Plate said.
The Battery Park City Authority is hoping that work on the Liberty Street Bridge, which connects the park to Battery Park City over West St., will be done by then as well.
In the meantime, over the next few weeks and into the spring, workers will continue to plant the 50 trees and more than 1,000 shrubs that will adorn the plaza.
Plate highlighted the challenges of building the park on top of the active Vehicle Security Center — which he said processes around 150 trucks every day — comparing it to constructing “a very large rooftop garden.”
The park is being built on top of the active Vehicle Security Center, which processes around 150 trucks every day.
Back in 2007, long before construction on the park began, architect A. Eugene Kohn, a founding partner of Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, told Downtown Express that he thought the park would get little foot traffic since it was on top of the noisy WTC truck entrance.
“It’s more of a visual park,” said the architect, who was then working on designs for the park as well as JPMorgan Chase’s now-scrapped headquarters at nearby 5 WTC — though he later walked back his comments.
But Plate, who has been in charge of the entire WTC site since 2006, predicts that the completed Liberty Park will become a scenic destination for Lower Manhattan.
“We think this is gonna be a place to go,” he said on Monday. “People can look over the site and just enjoy what we built here for decades and centuries to come.”
