Isolated residents of Battery Park City will get a temporary pedestrian bridge to make it easier to reach subways and other facilities, officials announced yesterday.
Mayor Bloomberg said the $3.3 million, 240-foot span across West Street at Rector Street could be up within eight weeks.
At a press conference with the mayor and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, Gov. Pataki also announced that the state planned to open a temporary six-lane highway along blockaded West Street in April.
Pataki later told reporters that planners are examining whether to build a permanent replacement for the highway below ground.
Battery Park City residents who returned home after the Sept. 11 terrorist attack found they had to navigate numerous roadblocks to reach their apartments.
Pataki said the temporary $5 million West Street highway is expected to remain in place for three to five years.
In another boost for downtown, the volunteer group Wall Street Rising launched a discount program involving 200 merchants.
Meanwhile, at a luncheon meeting of the Real Estate Board of New York, Lower Manhattan Development Corp. chairman John C. Whitehead invoked Rockefeller Center of 60 years ago as a model for the new world trade center.
Whitehead repeated his plans to have a “marvelous, world-class memorial structure on a good part” of the 16-acre site.
For the first time, Whitehead said the memorial “might become a national park or national memorial.”
