The Salomon Solution; A Building Within a Building,

February 19, 1989

BEFORE it moves into a new office tower in downtown Manhattan, Salomon Brothers, the brokerage firm, intends to spend nearly two years and more than $200 million cutting out floors, adding elevators, reinforcing steel girders, upgrading power supplies and making other improvements in its million square feet of space.

The work, which began last month at Seven World Trade Center, reflects both the adaptability of steel-framed towers and the extraordinary importance of fail-safe computer and telephone systems for the brokerage industry. According to many real estate experts, no company has ever made such extensive alterations to a new office building in Manhattan.

Salomon had tried to avoid the trouble and expense of alteration work by designing an office building, in partnership with a developer, from the ground up. But in late 1987, after the stock-market crash, Salomon withdrew as the co-owner and principal tenant of a project planned for Columbus Circle in midtown Manhattan.

Much of the new electrical, air-conditioning and mechanical equipment will serve three double-height trading floors. To create the extra height, workers are removing most of three existing floors, using jackhammers to demolish concrete slabs and torches to remove steel decking and girders beneath the concrete.

After the girders are cut into sections small enough to fit into a construction elevator they will be sold as scrap for about 4 cents a pound.

In some office buildings, that alteration would be impossible, but Silverstein Properties tried to second-guess the needs of potential tenants when it designed Seven World Trade Center as a speculative project.

''We built in enough redundancy to allow entire portions of floors to be removed without affecting the building's structural integrity, on the assumption that someone might need double-height floors,'' said Larry Silverstein, president of the company. ''Sure enough, Salomon had that need.


''And there were many other ways that we designed as much adaptability as possible into the building because we knew that flexible layo

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=950...

(Kudos to boastOne43 over at DU for the find.)

I have posted many times that I think many of these renovations had a dual purpose. Especially the fuel systems for the generators and the major renovations of the 23rd floor and the top floors.

DoYouEverWonder About 9/11?

I wonder if we could find the same thing about the twin towers. I came across something like that once for one of the other buildings, but I think it was wither the financial center buildings or 4 or 5.
I know i have come across articles for renovation in the wtc, but it's never very specific. Redundancy, eh? like the kind that could make a building freefall?

so that workers using a roof crane could hoist nine diesel generators onto the tower's fifth floor, where they will become the core of a back-up power station.

I assume that means the building didn't collapse when they removed sections of the outer walls?

DoYouEverWonder About 9/11?

for the umpteenth time. The US media covers up his activities well, though. The lawsuit involving the money laundering was reported by Haaretz, but denied by the NYTimes, even though it was obviously him, the reporter in the NYTimes source for saying it wasn't him, was Silverstein himself!

The 40th floor where i worked was a double
height floor, in the middle of the structure,
not on the ends, and the same was with the 42nd floor.

I would pour serious cold water on the theory that salomon
brothers had ANYTHING to do with wiring the building for demolition
when they took those floors out. Its absurd, given what the company
was about. The redundancy of all systems was intense in that
building, trading floors had hot positions in other buildings
so that trading could resume from another location as soon as
traders could get there. Having a position in the market, and
losing your trading system and its ability to change that position,
is simply not permitted to happen, and the computers even back then,
(early 90's) were already wired up to transfer program trading and
options to new jersey under disaster recovery thinking that duplicated
trading desks and double-wired all networks, not setting explosives.

Its interesting to hear that 3 floors were removed, i never saw the
3rd removed floor, perhaps 44? The double height floor was only the
center belly of that tower, and even then, there was still a core, it
wasn't like the whole floor was double height, that's misleading.

as Wall Street did on 9-11. A lot of damning information was lost forever on that day, not just in the wtc's , but in the Pentagon.

However, it would be interesting to see who was involved in negotiating the deal to get them to relocate to WTC 7? The story about bailing out on the new building because they couldn't afford it, then to turn around and do extensive renovations to an existing building much have been much more expensive? Key here is that the WTC 7 was mostly empty and Larry Silverstein had a real loser on his hands. He even agreed to pay for the major renovations that the building required for Solomon Bros to move in. That puts Larry in control of the contractors, not Solomon Bros.

In regards to the removal of floors, I do remember reading about the addition fo the Penthouses and a day trading floor that was near the top of the building. (I know I've got a bookmark somewhere with this info. I'll post it if I can find it.)

In the meantime, these are the modifications noted in the NIST report:

WTC 7 was modified:
• Penthouse structures added to the roof
• East half of floors 41 and 43 were removed and replaced
• HVAC and communication systems were added from floor 28 to the roof
• Fuel tanks and backup generators were added

I don't see any mention of the modifications they did for Rudy's bunker in the mid 90's?

DoYouEverWonder About 9/11?