MESSAGE
| DATE | 2005-08-08 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
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| SUBJECT | Subject: [NYLXS - HANGOUT] Worth Reading part 2
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n order to connect the new telephone wires, one by one, to sections of
cables that would be brought into the new manholes and thence dropped
into the tunnels, splicers would work in shifts, sitting on benches
inside the vaults and splicing each cable progressively without
interfering with telephone service. Such splicing "alive" could be done
so skillfully that conversations would continue, with the customers
unaware of what was happening.
It took more than a year to clear the Bathtub site of condemned
buildings. This had been an area of small shops, many engaged in selling
hi-fi equipment, and many of the store owners left reluctantly. There
were also two residential tenants in no hurry at all to departâone of
them a penthouse dweller who loved the river view from his
eighty-five-dollar-a-month apartment atop a five-story office building,
the other a monkey that escaped from a pet shop when it was about to be
torn down, built a nest in a pile of beams, stole enough bananas daily
from a nearby fruit stand to stay alive, and eluded workmen for months.
In any such huge project, the pattern of logistics demands immensely
precise timing and coördination. Before the demolition of the ol
structures was half completed, therefore, construction of the Bathtub
wall had begun, excavation inside the sections of wall that were in
place was under way, and the cofferdam at the river's edge was receiving
excavated fill. Wherever twenty-two feet of perimeter land had been
cleared, Icanda's workmen jumped ahead and built another section of
wall, so that practically the entire wall could be completed before the
last of the condemned structures inside the Bathtub was demolished. The
steel framework for the two skyscrapers, anchored in bedrock, began to
rise aboveground while workmen underground were still digging out
boulders from corners and dirt from underneath the PATH tubes.
Construction engineers groan at the prospect of finding relics when they
are excavating an area with a complex history, for fear their work might
be delayed while archeologists poke through the rubble, but nothing
worth that effort ever turned up. The sunken ship Tijger never
appearedâat least, not in any recognizable formâperhaps because powerful
shovels smashed through underground obstructions as the excavations for
the wall were completed. Timber cribbings were particularly wicked to
break up, because lumber underwater can be just as hard after two
hundred years as the day it was sunk, though it may disintegrate a week
after it hits the air. A cannister from the cornerstone of the old
Washington Market turned up, full of newspapers and the cards of the
produce people who had taken stalls there. A century-old bedroom slipper
came to light, as did an eighteenth-century forged nail, several clay
pipes, a large Portuguese fishing gaff, and a variety of antique tools
and ship fittings, including rudders and several anchors of a pattern
not made after 1750. An enormous iron anchor, weighing about a thousand
pounds, required nineteen men to carry it up out of the site, and it now
rests against a concrete wall in the Trade Center's
heating-and-refrigeration plant, in the sixth-level basementâthe very
bottom of the Bathtub. Ancient cannonballs and bombs, the muzzle of a
cannon, old bottles, bits and pieces of old china, and one small
gold-rimmed cup with two hand-painted lovebirds on it turned up in the
digging. Of all the china objects found, it alone was intact. A lot of
coins were rumored to have been dug up, but they did not materialize in
the front office.
>From time to time, I dropped by the site to watch the activity in the
cut far belowâants in perpetual motion to the throbbing of a chorus of
heavy machines. Seventy feet above, the ground where I stood vibrated.
One summer day a couple of years after my initial visit, Kyle suggested
that he take me on a formal tour, since the operation had reached a
point where demolition, excavation, and construction were going on
simultaneously, and the Telephone Company was about to finish its
splicing in the ducts inside the recently completed manholes. I stepped
out of a cab on West Street in the middle of the afternoon and stopped
for a moment, facing the river, struck by the beauty of what was left of
an old ferry slip that was being demolished between the Trade Center and
the new landfill in the river. Only the façade was intact, with high
Victorian windows and a handless clockface. At the sides, the steel and
wood of the old walls were falling away, dripping down like lace, and
the sun was reflected hotly in a second-floor window that still had
glass in it. This dreamy remnant looked ready for instant collapse.
Beyond, I could just see the tops of the large cylindrical caissons that
made up the cofferdam bounding the huge twenty-four-acre rectangle of
new Manhattan real estate in the river. The center of the rectangle was
a trifle wet, but the cofferdam was well filled with excavated material
from the Trade Center foundation. I turned back toward the site, and saw
that the surface area of the Bathtub was now almost cleared; there
remained only part of a steel building frame with an elevator shaft
still clinging to it, and a large stone edifice, the Marine Midland Bank
Building, which appeared to have been built to last foreverâexcept that
it was not going to; looking up, I saw the iron ball of a demolition
crane pounding away at the already roofless top story. I subsequently
learned that it took four months to demolish this stubborn old fortress.
Kyle was waiting for me at the corner of West and Vesey, and we walked
around the outside of the Bathtub, now clearly demarcated by the
sections of wall already in place. Kyle paused to show me a particularly
noteworthy machine, an enormously tall blue rig on a blue A-frame that
was travelling on rails along the surface, digging the trench for a
section of wall. All Icanda's machines were painted blue; this one,
called an Adiges, and four or five other like it, had been imported from
Italy for the job. A three-ton clamshell bucket hung from the peak of
the A-frame and was equipped with jagged teeth to chew away the ground.
Icanda, whose contract called for cutting not only through the ground
but several feet into bedrock, had discovered that boulders and ancient
timber obstructions were more formidable than had been anticipated, so
it had then brought in two other pieces of special equipmentâa rotary
drill from the oil wells of Texas, so big that it had to be disassembled
and transported to the site on three trucks, and a rock slicer, which
had been air-expressed from ICOS's Milan shop. This monster, which had a
giant blade attached to a lofty rectangular rig, could shave off rock
wedges an inch thick, like a cheese slicer, but it met its match in
Manhattan Schist, which is intermixed with hard, abrasive quartzite, and
quickly dulled the slicer's blade. In fact, neither machine proved
useful, and Icanda eventually resorted to old-fashioned methods of
drilling, crushing, and hammering rock.
Against the backdrop of exposed brown soil and gray rock, blue, yellow,
and orange machines down in the excavation were spots of bright color,
and moving trucks of other vivid hues made additional flecks of
brightnessâespecially the red trucks that carried explosives.
Varicolored workmen's helmets also dotted the landscapeâblue for Icanda,
yellow for the Port Authority, green for Slattery, white for PATH, and
an occasional silver or other odd-colored hardhat that was a treasured
good-luck possession of its owner. Up on the surface, the Adiges machine
near me stood next to a mixer pouring wet bentonite into the open
trench, whose surface was a runny beige soup. Some distance away,
concrete was flowing down a pipe to make a section of wall, and, in
between, recovered bentonite was running into another trench, where
another Adiges rig worked. On a cleared portion of the site, ironworkers
were assembling steel cages to reinforce the concrete. The cages looked
like giant bedsprings, and when they were lifted vertically into the air
by enormous cranes, sometimes as high as a hundred feet, and then
dropped slowlyâgoing, going, goneâinto the wet slurry in the trenches, a
crowd of bystanders usually formed at the fence around the site to
watch.
At what had been the corner of Greenwich and Dey Streets, we came to a
graded incline leading to the bottom of the excavation. We walked down,
stopping often to let outsize yellow Euclid dump trucks labor uphill
past us piled with loads of great boulders or rattle downhill empty
after a trip across a temporary ramp under West Street to the cofferdam
area. At the bottom of the incline, we crossed a plank over a lot of
water and came to a large yellow drilling machine, which was slowly
shattering rock. There was the smell of wet sand, and I noticed several
varieties of pumps hard at work. We were seventy feet below the street,
and, looking up, I saw for the first time finished sections of the new
wall, excavated and exposed, with the ends of tiebacks sticking out in
rows about ten feet apart. The top layer of tiebacks was in place, and
workmen were drilling holes and inserting a second layer. To my
surprise, the wall was not smooth and fresh-looking but, rather, full of
lumps and quite scruffy, like a fairly well-preserved achievement of
some much older civilization. I shouted as much to Kyle over the
racketing noise of the drills. "We can chop off the lumps and put a
masonry wall inside if we want to dress it up!" Kyle shouted back. "But
it probably wouldn't be worthwhile for that sectionâit will be the
garage!"
Kyle suggested that we return at midnight to visit the telephone vault,
where one man from the Telephone Company would still be splicing wires
in the last of the cables to be relocated. PATH traffic would be light
at that hour, and when one tube was closed briefly for cleaning we could
walk along the track and climb into the telephone vault from below,
instead of descending through the manhole from the street. It would be
somewhat wet, I was told, and to get out I would have to go up a
vertical ladder connecting the vault's three floorsâmy least favorite
form of exercise. Forewarned, I arrived clad in bluejeans and rubber
boots as the clock hands reached twelve in PATH's control center, a
basement room filled with dials and flashing lights to indicate the
position of moving trains. I was handed a helmet, and we started out.
The trains were temporarily halted in the north tube, and we began
walking down the tunnel. As I picked my way carefully through the mud
and over the railroad ties, I was at the rear of a single file
consisting of Kyle, Katz, and several officials from the Telephone
Company and PATH. Red and white flashlights carried by the men ahead
danced to the swing of their arms as we passed the arch of a spooky,
abandoned side tunnel leading nowhere. I looked above me, wondering if I
could see the curved top of the tube, but the darkness was a soft
shroud. Although it was a hot July night, the air was cool where we
wereâabout forty-five feet below the street, still in Manhattan but
close to the riverbank. Kyle stopped for a moment to explain to me what
I was about to see. The telephone vault, or manholeâthree small,
high-ceilinged rectangular rooms, one above anotherâwas a watertight
concrete box, which, like the Bathtub, was fastened to bedrock and built
partly around the top of the PATH tube. When the vault was finished, a
hinged segment of tube served as a trapdoor between the tunnel and the
manhole.
Suddenly there was a burst of light. It came through this door, which
led into a small, elevated concrete room, in which a man sat working
with a large pile of tiny multicolored wires in his lap. He was wearing
a yellow helmet, a blue flannel shirt, and a phone headset, but he
pushed this aside to introduce himself as Charlie McQuade and to explain
that there had been thirty-three splicers working six days a week in the
area for the last five months but now he was the only one left. He was
about to "throw," or splice, his last cableâone that had four hundred
pairs of wires, or conversations, which meant eight hundred splices for
him. The wires he was working on went to Philadelphia, Washington,
Miami, and Moscow, he told us, adding that he could "throw" an average
of two hundred a day. I had been told that splicing was one of the most
highly skilled jobs in the Telephone Company, and as he talked and
worked I could see why. If the wires weren't spliced with a tight
pigtail twist, conversation on the line would be very noisy, and if a
short circuit occurred there would be no conversation at all. Just then,
someone called out that a train was about to come by. McQuade laughed.
"Don't lean back too far, or you'll get a haircut," he said. We
hurriedly climbed into McQuade's concrete room, the lowest of three in
the vault, and, squeezing past him, we started one by one up the
vertical steel ladder. On the second level, I paused to look at the
telephone cables, which hung like large black hoses from ceiling to
floor. Then I leaned down to see where I had come from. I could see the
outer surface of the cast-iron tunnel tube, curved and heavy, with a
dull-black finish, and if I had had any doubt about what it was, that
doubt would have vanished a second later, when I heard a train rumble
through. I started climbing again, and the air became increasingly warm
as I neared the street surface. There was a sudden draft of wind from
another train passing below, and as I held tight to the ladder I felt my
helmet rise about a foot above my head. I grabbed for it, but it settled
miraculously back, and I climbed out onto West Street to join the
others. The Trade Center site was ablaze with light, and the rock
crushers and drills were steadily pounding away.
Part of an engineer's professional skill involves finding ingenious and
preferably cheap ways out of trouble, but the solutions for some of the
Bathtub's difficulties were expensive. The tiebacks were so much more
costly than anyone had expected that less expensive, buttress-style
reinforcements were adopted for the base of the wall. Although the
design of the tiebacks was supposed to protect them against corrosion
from the stray electrical currents that always seem to be present in
city ground, corrosion occurred anyway, mysteriously beginning with
tiebacks on the third level below the surface. This was serious: if the
corrosion persisted, and a substantial number of wires in the tiebacks
failed before the inside floors were in, the walls would collapse. As it
turned out, corrosion occurred in fewer than a dozen tiebacks, but the
rest had to be constantly checked, and strain gauges were installed in
the wall at points of known stress; a witch's brew of antifreeze and
slurry was concocted to coat the wires that had been damaged. Bad leaks
sprang up in the joints where the twenty-two-foot sections of wall came
together, and a lot of dirt and water seeped in, contributing to the
settling of the ground outside the site. The joints were hastily patched
with rubber gaskets and cement. One day, Kyle got a hurry call to come
to the corner of Greenwich and Liberty Streets. Workmen drilling into
bedrock had suddenly found that they were digging into dirt and silt
again. Kyle was fascinated by this phenomenonâan underground chasm in
the heart of the city, probably dug out by the glacier. Another time, a
crane operator who was filling in an old manhole kept on dumping dirt
into what seemed a bottomless cavity, until Kyle's office received an
excited message from PATH officials saying that part of the tunnel wall
must have collapsed, because dirt was flowing over their railroad
tracks. The crane operator had unwittingly dumped dirt into an access
manhole to the PATH tunnel. After that, large flags at street level
showed where the tunnel was.
When the two PATH tubes were exposed within the Bathtub, it was the
first time direct sunlight had touched them since they had been built.
They had been resting comfortably underground for almost three-quarters
of a century at a steady fifty degrees Fahrenheit, and in the summer
heat, which was over a hundred degrees, the iron began to expand. The
engineers cut a slot about two inches wide in the tube to allow for
expansion. At once, a PATH passenger called the Port Authority, in wild
excitement, to report that the tube was breaking apart, so sheet metal
was wrapped around the opening. After the tubes were completely in the
open, the train engineers complained that there was a thundering noise
as the trains passed through the tubes, which made the engineers think
the exposed sections might be dangerous. They were told that the
hanging, hollow tubes were simply acting like giant bass drums.
Around that time, I went down to watch the process of jacking up the
tubes so that digging could be done beneath them for new tracks that
would ultimately lead into the new station in the basement of the
building. Meanwhile, of course, passenger service had to continue
uninterrupted.
I found Jim Hastie, a young Slattery engineer, who was superintendent on
the site for West Street Associates, standing in the bottom of the
Bathtub, beside one of the two big black PATH tubes. He was wearing a
silver helmet, which he kept removing to run his hand nervously through
his short-cropped brown hair as he talked about steel saddles and
trusses that would support the old tubes until new tracks were completed
and the tubes removed. There was a low, rumbling noise, the ground shook
beneath us, and a train passed through the tube, on which Hastie was
casually resting his hand. He smiled. "I think this is the noisiest
place in the world," he said. "I've got used to it, but I automatically
talk as if everyone were hard of hearing." He went on, "This has been a
bitch of a job. There has always been worry because of all the water.
There was a hell of a lot of water in the ground before we got here,
coming through the rocks from underneath, and we've had a lot of heavy
rains, too. We're always having trouble with the pumps, which never seem
to break down on a nice day. I forget whose law that is, but that's what
happens. No matter how much experience you've had, water is a real
unknownâwater from the earth below and the heavens above. If it weren't
for the water, we'd have been done long ago. If I had a penny for every
gallon I've pumped out of here, I wouldn't be talking to youâI'd be in
Hawaii." He took off his helmet and scratched his head. "So far, we've
been able to cope with every one of our problems, thank the Lord. On
other jobs, somebody has always known somebody who'd had the same
problem before, but on this one there are no preconceived solutionsâyour
approach has to be brand-new. You can't compare this foundation to any
otherâthe PATH tubes, the slurry wall, the tiebacks, the size and depth
of the hole, the nearness to the good old Hudson River. This is a
fascinating job and an exasperating experience. You know you won't have
one like it again, even if there are a lot of days when you're not too
happy about being here."
A while afterward, I went to see Arturo Ressi, a tall, dark,
thirty-year-old Italian engineer, who had directed the work of the
Icanda crew. At the peak of Icanda's activity, Ressi had had about a
hundred and fifty men on his payroll, but now there were only four,
including him, and he was getting ready to leave. Now that the job was
done, he enjoyed chatting about the Bathtub. He spoke of the terrible
obstructions in the ground, which had produced "overbreaks"âthe cause of
the bumpy appearance of the Bathtub wall. Since all the work was done
out of sight, there had been no way of checking on irregularities in the
wall until excavation began. Time and again, he said, cavities left in
the walls of the trench by the removal of boulders and other objects
below ground would produce bumps and bulges in the wall after the
concrete was poured. When excavation revealed the irregularity, the crew
would smooth out the bumps as best they could, but it was impossible to
achieve the even results Ressi preferred. Another difficulty, he said,
was communication between highly trained specialists from Italy who
spoke no English and the workmen on the site. "We found the curse words
in Italian. On the job, we pointed and worked out words phonetically,"
Ressi said. "Communication was hazardous. But our men work all over the
world and are used to making others understand certain things, no matter
where they are."
Ressi's departure was a signal that the basic construction of the
foundation walls of the World Trade Center had been completed; the only
important step still to be taken was to release the tension on the
fifteen hundred tiebacks and cut the exposed ends flush with the walls,
leaving the buried portions underground. The other day I received word
that this process had begun, and I went down to the Center for a visit
with Francis Werneke, the present construction manager. His office is in
the South Tower, now known as Two World Trade Center. The half-finished
lobby startled me; the Italian marble that lined the walls and lofty
ceiling was a shiny, stark whiteâthe kind of stone I associate with a
particular kind of ornate modern tomb, and there were crystal
chandeliers and vertical strips of silvery metal.
On the twenty-first floor, Werneke, a very tall, cheerful man in a
short-sleeved blue shirt and black-framed glasses, congratulated me on
following the construction of the Trade Center's foundation for so long.
Then he explained that all the tiebacks could be released when the
temperature of the whole Bathtub area had been stabilized at seventy
degrees plus or minus twenty degrees, which would permit a minimum of
contraction or expansion of floor slabs.
He talked about the Bathtub: "That wall was put in the ground blind,
with water lappin' on the other side at the same elevation that you can
see at the Hudson River right across West Street. But if you go down
seventy feet below the surface inside the Bathtub, it's all dry down
there. As far as I'm concerned, the Bathtub is a miracle wall."
I looked out the narrow, slitted window at the Hudson River, and then I
turned in the other direction and glanced down at the plaza below me.
Workmen were filling in the surface with oblong stone blocks around the
outline of a circular fountain, where a central sculpture was already in
place, covered with a green tarpaulin. Soon the plaza would be
transformed by shrubbery and hurrying crowds of people. If I come down
here again in another couple of months, I thought, I won't even remember
what the Bathtub was like.
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