City, U.N. Navigate Fire Safety Issues
Tourists' Routes Will Be Truncated

By Benny Avni
July 28, 2008
The New York Sun
Original Source: http://www.nysun.com/new-york/city-un-navigate-fire-safety-issues/82705/

Part of the trip that had made the United Nations building one of New York City's most visited tourist attractions will be taken off the itinerary at the end of this week.
So if you always wanted to see where international bureaucrats confer — or if you are a diplomacy fan eager to take a final lap around the building, just as Yankees loyalists do at the Stadium this year — do it by Thursday. Then again, if you are concerned about your safety but still want to see The House That Dag Built before it is gutted to the core and rebuilt to fit 21st-century standards, perhaps you best wait until August 1.
The shortening of U.N. tours — as well as ugly, costly, and seemingly redundant construction work at Turtle Bay — emanates from a titanic fight between City Hall and the United Nations. Both sides have good arguments, but the end result is work that, at an approximate cost of $3 million, is akin to dusting your room just before a professional cleaner comes to thoroughly polish the whole house.
Come Friday, tourists will be shortchanged of some exhibits the United Nations has erected to glorify itself, skipping also conference areas where tour guides have for decades ushered visitors from all over the world. The U.N. decided that after bringing some parts of its second and third floors to par with city fire regulations, applying a similar treatment to other areas — on the eve of its ambitious reconstruction project — would be too expensive. Instead, the untreated areas will simply be closed to outsiders after Friday.
Diplomats have been increasingly annoyed by construction noises on the second and third floors, where they conduct the bulk of their debates. The banging, drilling, and screeching sounds are all part of a last-minute dash to comply with city fire codes. Ugly separation walls and doors, described by one U.N. official as prisonlike, were erected to divide rooms, stairways, and hallways and to assure that fire, if ignited, would be contained so those trapped inside can rush out for safety.
U.N. officials complain about the work, ordered by the city and its fire department. By the end of this year, the U.N. plans to start spending in earnest an enormous budget of $1.9 billion, which was approved for the renovation project known as the Capital Master Plan. Once the renovation is complete, by 2013, the fire walls that have been erected this month will be gone and replaced by new, more attractively designed, and even safer devices. Why throw away an extra $3 million now?
City officials also have a point: The U.N. is notoriously slow in executing plans, and the Capital Master Plan has been no exception. And anyway, can U.N. officials promise that between now and the time the Capital Master Plan begins to gut floors and ceilings, the building will be safe from accidental fires? Cigarette smoking inside the building is widespread. If a fire does happen, wouldn't the New York City Fire Department need to rush to save lives at the complex?
United Nations officials often roll their eyes at demands made by the office of Mayor Bloomberg's commissioner for the U.N., Marjorie Tiven, who is the mayor's sister. The U.N. is universally denounced for overspending, but now her tough demands on fire safety cost them money that could be used for more urgent purposes.
They have only themselves to blame. Simply put, the United Nations has for nearly 60 years insisted on sovereignty and exemption from safety regulations that any New York co-op board complies with. Taking reporters on dirty tours in the last few years to prove that their building needs to be refurbished, U.N. officials underlined a simple truth: Theirs is the only building in this city that has been allowed to get away with such negligence for such a long time.
It was those dirty tours of the building's decaying infrastructure that finally lit all alarms at City Hall, where officials realized that the pride of 1950s architecture is no more than a hazardous firetrap. Protecting their jurisdiction and international status, U.N. legal eagles restricted access to FDNY inspectors as if they were expecting the Fiji Fire Brigade to rush to the rescue at a mid-Manhattan towering inferno. The U.N. finally decided to cooperate with Ms. Tiven only after they were faced with the threat of having all tourist visits to Turtle Bay cut off. Maybe she could teach the Security Council a thing or two about how to deal with Iran, Zimbabwe, and Sudan.