Building BOOM downtown

 
NY Newsday ran an article this week from the AP about some very real costs associated with the building boom (emphasis on ‘boom’), especially downtown Manhattan: jackhammers and pile drivers going from early until late.
 
Noise, dust, vibration and general congestion on sidewalks and streets will be near-term problems for many folks downtown. Battery Park City will have the new Goldman Sachs HQ construction to the north and several new residential buildings to the south, as well as being hemmed in to eth east by the WTC site. Other folks near the WTC will suffer more or less, depending on wind and traffic flow.
 
How much traffic? One truck every 3-5 minutes for one year, just for the excavation work for 3 towers at WTC, according to Newsday: “When contractors begin excavating to build three new towers at the trade center site, [Charles] Maikish [executive director of the Lower Manhattan Construction Command Center] said, ‘they’re going to be running trucks every three to five minutes for a period of 12 months’." That can’t be good for Holland Tunnel traffic…
 
One (small) piece of relative good news for the WTC area development that I read about recently [can’t put my cursor on an article at he moment] is that the blasting being done for foundation work is well-muffled, at least for now. It is hard to believe, but I did see multiple reports that people on street level a block away would not have been aware of the blasting apart from the warning whistles. Hope that is true and that it continues.
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