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History of Tribeca Buildings
In the News: Tribeca Bridge to Get Repainted
••• “The Battery Park City Authority is repainting the Tribeca Bridge, which crosses West Street near Chambers Street, at a cost of $2.2 million. At the agency’s June 19 board meeting, BPCA vice president for real property Gwen Dawson explained, ‘the bridge was built in 1992 and has not been repainted since then. It’s now over 25 years old and is in need of some repairs and to be repainted.'” (Above: The bridge in 2016.) —Broadsheet
••• The New Yorker visits Farm.One on Worth Street.
••• Students at Spruce Street School got to chat via Skype with astronaut Ricky Arnold, who is aboard the International Space Station. —Tribeca Trib
••• “The man who has led Borough of Manhattan Community College for nearly a quarter century—and who saw it through the greatest crisis in its history—will be stepping down at the end of the summer. Since BMCC President Antonio Pérez took the helm of the Downtown school in 1995, he has presided over a 40-percent increase in enrollment, and a doubling of the number of Associate degree programs.” —Downtown Express
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$2.2 million to paint a pedestrian bridge?
Madness.
You think that’s madness? Stroll further down south along West Street. Walk under the Rector Street Bridge. It’s a functional, highly used pedestrian bridge. It will be torn down and replaced by a brand new pedestrian bridge over West Street at West Thames Street. The new bridge has been planned for decades, finally started construction in 2016 and is once again way behind schedule. Of course the budget keeps growing. The latest available figure is $45.1 million with no end in sight. Just take a small fraction of that money and spruce up the Rector Street Bridge.
http://www.ebroadsheet.com/tardy-trestle/
Truly madness indeed.
For $45 million it should be possible to build a grand palace.
But that apparently costs $3 billion (c.f. “Oculus”).
I’ll paint it for a lot less!
Hilarious exchange, from the article:
Ms. Dawson continued, “we issued an request for proposals [RFP] earlier this year and received two proposals.
[…]
At the June 19 board meeting, then-BPCA chair Dennis Mehiel asked, “you had only two responses?”
Ms. Dawson observed that, “we have found that this is a little bit of a ‘tweener’ project. It’s not big enough to really capture the interest of a lot of the big companies, especially when there are a lot of other bridge construction and painting projects going on that give them an opportunity for a lot more work. It’s also something that’s a challenge for some of the smaller companies because it requires a containment system over a state highway, it requires some lane closures, some night work, things that add a lot of complication to the endeavor.”
[…]
Mr. Mehiel continued, “an extraordinary spread between the two. 100 percent, right? Or 50, depending on which side you’re standing on.” This apparently means that the losing bidder came in at a price of more than $4 million, which would have been approximately equal to the original budget to contract the bridge, and nearly half of its actual cost.
BPCA board member Lester Petracca added, “it’s not possible that — I say this to be funny — that Champion figured one coat and the other one figured two coats of paint?
Ms. Dawson answered, “no, I think we’ve got that covered in the specs.”
Mr. Mehiel pressed, “this company, are they overextended in terms of work, availability to work?”
Ms. Dawson replied, “they are going to come out and do the scaffolding work at night when they could easily do a lane closure and then do the containment work during the day. They have a very tight approach plan created for the project, I think, which allowed them to tighten up their costs.”
That conversation is worthy of Monty Python.
“tighten up their costs”, indeed!
Does the winning contractor have any relationship to Cuomo or the other BPCA members? That is usually the only requirement for doing work or being awarded a project in BPC.
The so-called Tribeca Bridge was actually a Railroad Trestle
manufactured by a firm in West VA. I saw it being floated in
on a barge from my window at IPN. It was rated strong enough
to run a RR train across, much less students from Stuyvesant
H.S. I wonder how much it cost?