An eighth-floor conference room at New Orleans City Hall was packed Tuesday morning with business and civic leaders, preservationists and ordinary citizens, all eager to see what a high-powered city evaluation committee would decide about the fate of the former World Trade Center building at the foot of Canal Street. And after hearing comments from about 15 audience members in...
An eighth-floor conference room at New Orleans City Hall was packed Tuesday morning with business and civic leaders, preservationists and ordinary citizens, all eager to see what a high-powered city evaluation committee would decide about the fate of the former World Trade Center building at the foot of Canal Street. And after hearing comments from about 15 audience members in favor of or opposed to demolishing the vacant 1960s office building, the committee did nothing.
In response to a request for proposals on how to redevelop the site, the city received three proposals in April. Two, from private development groups, called for converting the 33-story building as a hotel, apartment building and perhaps other uses.
The third, from the Tricentennial Consortium, a coalition of tourism and hospitality industry leaders, proposed demolishing the building to improve visual and physical access to the river and building some yet-to-be-determined structure that could become a visual symbol of New Orleans and help attract new visitors to the city.
Although the published agenda for Tuesday's meeting called for the five-member committee to rank the three proposals, officials announced that the committee members would not be doing any ranking or making any recommendations.
Instead, Deputy Mayor Cedric Grant said the committee will meet again July 30 to ask questions of the three groups that submitted proposals. He said he hopes the committee then can finish its work and make a decision by late August about which, if any, of the three proposals to recommend to the board of the New Orleans Building Corp., the city agency that acts as landlord for the WTC site.
All five committee members made brief comments. None gave a clear indication of which way they might be leaning, though some of the sentiments seemed sympathetic to the aims of the tourism leaders' proposal.
Chief Administrative Officer Andy Kopplin noted that the city's request for proposals specified that "all redevelopment proposals should be privately financed," while the Tricentennial Consortium proposal would initially rely on money from the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center -- though a recent veto by Gov. Bobby Jindal has placed that money in doubt. Kopplin said he thought the purpose of the city's requirement was to rule out use of city money, but that the way the document was worded might cause problems for the Tricentennial proposal.
On the other hand, Kopplin wondered whether the private developers' plans to rely heavily on historic renovation tax credits might also violate the requirement for private financing.
The committee has retained two private attorneys to assist it with its review, although the issues Kopplin raised seemed to be more in the province of the city attorney's office.
Besides Grant and Kopplin, the committee includes William Gilchrist, director of place-based planning for the Landrieu administration; Jeff Hebert, executive director of the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority; and Cynthia Connick, executive director of the Canal Street Development Corp. and other city public benefit corporations.
Among those who spoke on behalf of the Tricentennial Consortium plan were Audubon Institute President Ron Forman, Morial Convention Center Chairman Melvin Rodrigue, New Orleans Tourism Marketing Corp. Chairman Darryl Berger and New Orleans Multicultural Tourism Network President Toni Rice.
All emphasized the importance of turning what Berger called a "unique and extraordinary site" into public space rather than leasing it for private, for-profit use. "We have a chance to do it right this time," Forman said.
On the other side, preservation leaders such as Patricia Gay, Walter Gallas, Sandra Stokes and John Reed called for preserving the WTC building, a modernist landmark on the city's skyline, and said there is plenty of space around it to open up greater access to the river.
"It would be wasteful to lose this building," said John Stubbs, director of preservation studies at the Tulane School of Architecture, especially when private developers are willing to invest almost $200 million into renovating it.
Marty Collins, president of Gatehouse Capital, one of the firms that submitted a proposal, said he agreed with the tourism leaders that the WTC site is indeed "the most important piece of real estate in the city," but he argued that rather than tearing it down, the best course is to turn it into a money-making engine for the local economy.