Come Down in Time

Demolition Finally Begins on Lower Manhattan’s Fiterman Hall

By Diane Greer

Damaged during the attacks of Sept. 11, the demolition of Borough of Manhattan Community College building begins.

At the completion of the decontamination process in late May 2009 only the slab, walls and steel structure of the building remained. (Photo courtesy Airtek Environmental Corporation)

Fiterman Hall is finally coming down, and for the City University of New York and the Lower Manhattan community, the resulting hole in the ground will be a most welcome site.

Miles and Shirley Fiterman donated the 15-story, 375,000-sq-ft building at 30 W. Broadway to the Borough of Manhattan Community College in 1993. The circa 1959 office building served as an extension of BMCC’s 199 Chambers Street Campus and provided classrooms, computer facilities and offices for the space-constrained college.

On Sept. 11, debris falling from 7 World Trade Center tore a deep gash and severely damaged the south façade of Fiterman, which at the time of the attack was undergoing a $65-million renovation. The interior of the facility was coated with a toxic stew of dust from the adjacent destroyed buildings.

“We lost about 20% of our classroom ability for the campus,” says Iris Weinshall, CUNY’s vice chancellor for facilities planning, construction and management. “It came at a really bad time for the college, which was steadily growing in terms of enrollment.”

CUNY decided to dismantle the building and construct a new facility in its place after environmental and structural inspections deemed Fiterman beyond repair and its interior contaminated.

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But efforts to demolish and rebuild the facility over the past eight years have been plagued by delays while CUNY negotiated an insurance settlement, developed detailed decontamination and deconstruction plans to satisfy regulatory agencies and wrangled with city and state officials over funding.

The project finally received a green light in November when the city agreed to finance $139 million of the $325-million project cost. The remainder of the funding is coming from the insurance settlement, New York State, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation and the September 11th Fund.

Decontamination PAL Environmental Safety Corp., Long Island City, started remediation work on the site in November under a contract valued at $16.4 million.

Throughout the decontamination and deconstruction process, Airtek Environmental Corp., New York, provided air monitoring at eight sites around the building for contaminates such as organic compounds, asbestos, metals and mercury, says Benn Lewis, Airtek’s senior project manager.

The entire remediation phase was conducted under negative air pressure containment zones within the building to prevent the release of contaminants. Each zone was wrapped in plastic and housed a negative air pressure system, which draws in air, filters it and then vents the air to the outside of the building, Lewis says. Negative air pressure zones were also created for stairwells and smaller rooms as required.

Within each zone, loose items such as desks, chairs or other materials were cleared. Ceiling tiles, walls and anything that was a fixed, such as ductwork and conduits, were also removed.

Workers installing safety cabling around the perimeter of the building in preparation for the deconstruction phase of the project. (Photo courtesy of Dormitory Authority of New York State)

All materials, including the mechanical and HVAC equipment, were cut into pieces, wrapped in plastic and taken down in the elevators for disposal. Large equipment like the elevator motors, which could not be cut up, was wrapped in place for removal during the deconstruction phase.

Asbestos materials found in pipe insulations, floor tiles and waterproofing mastic on the interior surface of the façade walls were stripped. At the completion of this process, only the slab, walls and steel structure of the building remained.

The sequential cleanup operation started on the uppermost floors and progressed down the building in three-floor blocks. Each area was dusted, vacuumed and wiped down. The laborintensive process was primarily done by hand, although some hand tools with HEPA filters were used during the cleanup.

“We then called the regulators, the EPA, the Department of Labor and the NYC Department of Environmental Protection to do their own inspections,” Lewis says. If they agreed the area passed visual inspection for visual cleanliness, then air samples were collected to check for any remaining contaminants.

“The process was repeated for every containment area in the building, no matter how large or small,” Lewis adds.

Preliminary deconstruction tasks included removing the windows and encasing the upper five floors of the facilty in plywood. (Photo by Diane Greer)

Deconstruction After remediation was completed in late May, crews began the preliminary work on the deconstruction phase of the project. Windows wereremoved and the upper five floors of the facility encased in plywood. Diagonal cable bracing was installed around the gash and other areas the structural engineers identified for additional support.

A crane removed the plastic-encased elevator motors and emergency generator in the basement and also lifted four bobcats to the roof.

Two elevator shafts were designated as shoots for debris, one to handle steel and the other for concrete and brick.

The first step in the demolition process was to dismantle and cut up the superstructures on the roof, which were dropped to the floor below through a hole in the roof slab, says Richard Dalessio of the Dormitory Authority of the State of New York, the job’s project manager. With the superstructure down, the roof slab was demolished with pneumatichammers and the roof’s steel members dismantled. All the debris was dropped to the floor below and pushed down the appropriate shaft with the bobcats.

Deconstruction then moved down the building floor by floor. On each floor the concrete slab was broken up and dropped to the floor below and the steel floor members removed, says Andy Bachman, project executive for Tishman/LiRo, New York, the project’s construction manager.

The exterior brick walls and the knee walls were removed next. Removal of the exterior brick exposed the spandrel beams, which were coated with a nonfriable waterproofing mastic containing asbestos, Dalessio says. PAL Environmental scraped away the material using standard asbestos abatement procedures.

Airtek conducted monitoring and visual inspections of the demolition. “Once we deemed it visually clean, that section of beam was turned over to the contractor for its structural removal, Lewis says.

Airtek Environmental Corporation provided air monitoring at 8 sites around the building for a variety of World Trade Center associated contaminates, including organic compounds, asbestos, metals and mercury. (Photo courtesy Airtek Environmental Corporation)

Throughout the process the team met with the regulators, the Department of Buildings and the NYC Fire Department to review the process and ensure everyone was communicating, Bachman says. The team also attended regular meetings with the community and local community board.

“CUNY made it clear that we had to engage the public and be open about the way the process was conducted,” Lewis says. “I think it was a wise decision, and it created a level of trust and confidence.”

Michael Stabulas, DASNY program director, adds: “I think the fact that we were open from the beginning and that we invited and received a lot of involvement from the community sharply reduced the level of mystery about the project and helped address neighborhood concerns and questions about what we were doing and how we were doing it.”

Demolition is slated for completion in October. Construction of the new 370,000-sq-ft Fiterman Hall, designed by Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, New York, will begin shortly thereafter.

Key Players

Owner: City University of New York
Project manager: The Dormitory Authority of the State of New York
Environmental consultant: Airtek Environmental Corp., New York
Abatement contractor: PAL Environmental Safety Corporation, Long Island City
Construction manager: Tishman/LiRo joint venture, New York
Deconstruction Contractor: Waldorf Exteriors LLC, Englewood, N.Y.
Structural Engineer: RSD Engineering, New York