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The planning--or lack of it--behind the rebirth of our city's storied skyline.
By Ken Shulman
October 2002
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Alon Reininger/Contact Press Images
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It wasn't until he was in his seat on the Tuesday evening train to his home
in Murray Hill, New Jersey, that Dave Hannaford's spirits hit bedrock. That
morning, the offices of Mancini Duffy, the architecture and design
firm Hannaford joined as chief financial officer in 1999,
had been destroyed in the World Trade Center attacks. "I'd originally
scheduled a meeting on the 90th floor of the north WTC tower--the first
tower to be struck--but had postponed it until September 12 to catch up
on my correspondence."
By the time the second hijacked jet torpedoed the south tower, all Mancini
Duffy employees had safely evacuated the firm's 21st- and 22nd-floor
offices. The rest of the workday passed in a frenzied, horrified
stupor. It was impossible to think beyond the present. As his train pulled
away from the stricken island of Manhattan, Hannaford's racing mind skidded
to a silent, terrifying stop.
"I thought it was all over," says Hannaford, seated in the open
crescent-shaped bar and cafeteria that functions as informal conference
space at the West 13th Street loft the firm occupied in January, just
four months after the disaster. "I thought about everything we'd lost:
designs, contacts, media records, business records. I'd spoken with our
MIS director and learned that our backup files were far from current.
As far as I was concerned, Mancini Duffy had ceased to exist."
The company started life in 1981 as Ralph Mancini Associates, a midsize
commercial interior-design firm. In 1986 they purchased Duffy Incorporated,
a premier interior-design house, and moved into the south tower of the World
Trade Center, where Duffy was an original tenant. "It gave us a bit
of a cachet, a bit of credibility," founding partner Ralph Mancini
says. "If you want clients of substance, you have to come from substance.
And the new location made us appear substantial."
The firm's acquisition of Duffy, along with its WTC digs, transformed
its business. Shortly after the merger Mancini Duffy landed its first
major project, the design of the US Trust World Headquarters at 47th Street.
Other large clients, including Alliance Capital and KPMG, soon followed.
The firm's revenues hit a record $8.5 million in 1994, and then more
than tripled to $30 million in 2000. On the morning the World Trade Towers
were felled, Mancini Duffy's 145 employees were finalizing interiors
at JP Morgan Chase's offices at 277 Park Avenue, and CIBC World Markets's
U.S. headquarters on Madison Avenue. And then, seemingly in an instant,
the drawings, computers, records, furniture, photographs, and knickknacks
Mancini Duffy personnel had kept on their desks--everything--was lost.
"That night, as soon as I got home, the phone started ringing,"
Hannaford recalls. "I spoke with the other principals of the firm
until midnight. Ralph was determined to save the firm, to get it up
and running again as quickly as possible. I told him that if this was his
intention, he should at least reduce or suspend payroll. I'm a numbers person,
and the numbers were not encouraging. But Ralph was adamant. 'Payroll stays,'
he said. Ralph wanted our people to know they still had jobs. And this kept
them from looking elsewhere, which in essence kept the firm together.
This was the most important lesson I learned."
On September 13 Mancini scheduled a company meeting at the offices
of JP Morgan Chase at 277 Park Avenue. But a telephone bomb threat forced
the already traumatized personnel out of the building. They fled a
few blocks north to another client, KPMG, where they held their meeting--a
maelstrom of hugs and tears and affirmation. "We're going to do
this," Mancini told them. "It will be hard. But all of you can
jump on my shoulders, and I'll carry you."
It is said that fortune favors the brave and daring. And after the catastrophe,
fortune rewarded Mancini's courage. Vendors and even competitors came forward
with offers of assistance. Clients expedited payments; some provided bits
and pieces of projects to assist in their reconstruction. On September 17
Mancini Duffy moved into a cramped but fully furnished 5,000-square-foot
space that JP Morgan Chase provided for them free of charge until they moved
into their new home in the West Village in January.
But the biggest break came when Mancini Duffy's software provider called
one week after the attacks to say they had a complete and current copy of
the firm's financial records on a disc Mancini Duffy had sent
them for debugging in mid-August. "More than anything else, I attribute
our staying in business to that," Alfonso D'Elia, president of Mancini
Duffy, says. "If you don't have your accounting records, you're completely
out of luck. That, and the wisdom of calling that office meeting for
September 13. These are the reasons we're alive."
Like the people at Mancini Duffy, the 160 employees at construction and
engineering firm Washington Group International's World Trade Center
office were brave, and were able to regroup and restore operations
in an astonishingly short time. Like Mancini Duffy, they continued to pay
their employees in full--but they were not as lucky. Thirteen people in
the firm's 91st-floor office in the south tower perished
in the attack. Paul Wagner, who served as vice president and manager of
operations at the New York office (he left the company in July), spent
the better part of last fall organizing the company's New York recovery.
He confirmed which employees were missing, helped relocate more than
100 coworkers to Washington Group's New Jersey offices, reestablished
contacts with New York clients, worked to replace the office's lost
technology and records, and searched for an appropriate space in Manhattan.
Wagner also spent much of the next three months discussing death and long-term
disability benefits with the victims and their spouses, and attending
their funerals--duties that no one would have thought to include in his
job description.
"I'm an engineer by nature," Wagner says, in the sixth-floor
offices at Two Penn Plaza that Washington Group opened in April. The
28,000-square-foot office is linear and efficient, with long rectangles
of workstations, high dividing walls, and a functional, slightly imposing
reception area at the center. The only hint of tragedy is a partition at
the middle of the office papered with photographs, obituaries, and
inspirational poems about the firm's September 11 victims. "I
had a list of things to do, and I checked them off one at a time,"
he says. "But the most important thing for the survival of the office
was to give people a place to work--not for them to be immediately productive,
but to establish routines and let them know they have a job."
Although New York was one of Washington Group's smaller offices--the
$3 billion firm is headquartered in Boise, Idaho, and has nearly 38,000
employees worldwide--it is one of the company's most vital locations. New
York is the world's most important construction market, spending an estimated
$37 billion each year on vertical infrastructure. As with most of the World
Trade Center victims, Washington Group received myriad offers of help from
industry colleagues. Naik-Prasad, a subcontracting engineering firm
on Washington Group's light-rail project in Bergen County, New Jersey, created
space for 12 of the displaced firm's bridge engineers, refusing to
take a dime for their trouble. Other partners and competitors offered computers,
workstations, and assistance in finding a new location.
With most of the New York personnel relocated to the group's 1,000-person
office in Princeton, New Jersey, Wagner navigated a stiff New York
real estate market for a suitable location. "There were a lot of spaces
available," he says. "But the asking prices were final."
The Penn Plaza space --significantly smaller than the firm's 48,000-square-foot
offices in the World Trade Center--became vacant in mid-November. Washington
Group International moved in in April. Penn Plaza isn't as spectacular as
the World Trade Center, and it doesn't have the view. But the World Trade
Center was gone, and, according to Wagner, there was nothing he or any engineer
could have done to save it.
"Certainly our profession is methodical," Wagner says. His former
firm designs and constructs railways, dams, power plants, factories,
tunnels, roads, defense facilities, and mines. "We can analyze what
failed and perhaps understand what we can do to make a building resist longer
in a similar crisis. But there was and is nothing any engineer could have
done to protect against an attack of that magnitude. Our job is simply to
move forward. And you move forward through work which really hasn't changed."
Part of moving forward for Mancini Duffy was rediscovering who they were,
and how their new space could reflect that identity. Although the World
Trade Center had conferred them credibility with their corporate clients,
many Mancini Duffy personnel found the offices there sterile and unrepresentative
of their work. "I had tears in my eyes when I saw the tower collapse
on CNN," D'Elia says. "But in the end, we're architects and designers.
The World Trade Center was a great building. But the offices we had
there could have been for a legal firm, an accounting firm--for
anyone. This loft in the village is more consonant with our image, and with
our work."
Unlike Washington Group's Penn Plaza space, Mancini Duffy's West 13th Street
location didn't come prefabricated. The previous tenant, a dot-com company,
had erected permanent divisions across the two main rooms, creating a maze
of noncommunicating workspaces. Mancini Duffy's designers knocked down the
walls, lit the rooms with large oval indirect light-fixtures hung from
the ceiling, and redesigned the exposed overhead ventilation system. They
also modified the existing 6-by-6-foot workstations so there was space
for both a computer workstation and a dedicated drawing space.
Strolling through the white, airy, humming West Village space, it is difficult
for an observer to perceive that a great tragedy struck the firm last
September. The only discernable impact of the World Trade Center attacks
is on Mancini Duffy's marketers. "It's changed the way we do business,"
D'Elia says. "Before, you could enter any building in Manhattan, drop
in on clients and prospective clients, invite them for a cup of coffee or
just sit down and chat. With security the way it is all over the city, that
sort of spontaneity is no longer possible."
One might expect that visions of tangled steel and crumbling towers--of
offices incinerated in a seeming instant--would alter the way a builder
or architect views his profession. But for the designers at Mancini Duffy,
work proceeds largely as it did before the tragedy. "There are some
larger questions that need to be answered," design principal Dina Frank
says. "Should a client have a single headquarters, or should it divide
its intellectual and commercial capital among several locations? And security
does create a few new design constraints. But ultimately we provide places
for people to do their commerce. And commerce still has to happen, World
Trade Center or not."
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