Dan's Papers - July 13, 2007 - That Planned Building With The Tummy Pack

There was an item in the news last week involving a soon to be built Manhattan skyscraper that is of interest to people here in the Hamptons. It is to be the new 44 story headquarters for the banking firm of JP Morgan, located directly across the street from the 9/11 site. A model of it was unveiled in the current JP Morgan headquarters last Thursday.

It is quite unusual. It is essentially a glass and steel tower in the classic cereal box shape, but with what looks something like an oversized tummy pack halfway up. The tummy pack is ninety feet high, the full length of the building wide, and sticks out about half the width of the building above it and below it -- so it looks as if the building might pitch over forward in the direction of the tummy pack, if it weren't for some pretty fancy engineering inside the structure.

The reason for the tummy pack is a small church known as St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church. That church used to stand on the street directly across from the Twin Towers on the block where the new building is to sit. The church was looked after by Father Alex Karloutsos in his role as assistant to the Archbishop Demitrios of Manhattan. Father Alex is also the pastor of the Greek Orthodox Church in Southampton.

After the little St. Nicholas Church was destroyed in 9/11 -- it has about 120 families as parishioners and is the only church at ground zero -- promises were made and subsequently kept that this little church would be rebuilt exactly where it had stood.

What JP Morgan found when they came along to buy this site for their 44-story skyscraper was that they couldn't have the full block. The block was completely destroyed in the attack. So nothing remained, of course, except this one part of the block where property lines on architectural surveys marked out the place where the church would be rebuilt. JP Morgan didn't think this would be a problem. So they went ahead.

But then, having completed the purchase, they realized that they DID have a problem. Although they certainly could build a nice skyscraper on the property they purchased, they could not build the eight stock trading rooms that were at the heart of their business. These eight rooms were each so big they would need the whole block. And so whereas they had originally imagined the eight trading floors being the eight ground floors -- with the rest of the building atop that, going up the rest of the 44 floors -- at the bottom, there was now the church.

This is why the model of the building shows the skyscraper going straight up from the small plot of land they own and then, 150 feet off the ground, sticking out directly above the church, the eight trading floors bulging out, with 20 other floors on top of them.

The model does show how the little church tucks in below the trading floors and a series of large floodlights on the underside of the tummy pack aimed downward to bathe St. Nicholas Church in faux-ethereal light. It does not show, however, whether, on that underside, they will also have loudspeakers attached so they could play heavenly music -- perhaps some Handel -- downwards at the top of the church to drown out the shouting of the stockbrokers on the trading floors above. Anyway, I have never seen anything like this and I suspect that nobody else has, either.

It is one thing to build a tall skyscraper in a city like New York directly next to a church whose spires point up unobstructed toward the heavens. That is done all the time.

And one building is built over another all the time, after the purchase of what they call Air Rights.

But this is the first time, to my knowledge, that air rights in an American city have been sold that block out the top of a church.

I asked Father Alex about this on Tuesday as we went to press.

"We're in discussions with the Port Authority about this," he said. "Some think it encumbers the church negatively, others find it good. We are presently in the process of making a decision."

Well, I suppose it is true that if you are in the church looking up toward heaven, the underside of the trading floors are so far up that there is plenty of heaven to be seen on either side. And conversely, there is plenty of space on either side from which God can look down to see the top of the St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church and the congregation within praying to him.

I also asked Father Alex about something else. Less than a month after 9/11, he and I were having dinner at Almond restaurant in Bridgehampton, at which time he asked me if I would like to go down to the ruins of the little church and the Twin Towers. He had been down there twice already. Now, more debris had been cleared.

I declined to go, partially because I thought the dust would be harmful to me and partly because I had other plans on the day he had planned to go down there.

"I did think you were very brave to go there," I said. "But have you had any lingering effects from breathing the air there?"

"My visits to the site were more on an in-and-out basis. So I have not suffered any ill effects," he said, "unlike many others. We pray for those others."

All in all, it was his feeling that the church would be rebuilt with or without the trading floors over it. And in the long run, what mattered was that the church was to be rebuilt.

"An amazing array of people and organizations have stepped forward to donate funds for the rebuilding of this little church," he said. "We've received funds from the Plumbers Union, from the American Jewish Committee, from the Emir of Kutar and from the City of Bari, Italy, in which there is a shrine to St. Nicholas. We've even received funds from a town in Connecticut, which has a road named Nicholas Street. The church will be built.

"And as before, as the only church at Ground Zero, our doors will be open for people of all faiths to come in and worship."