Tower 5 no good for bank?

JP Morgan Chase is unlikely to build a headquarters tower on the southernmost development parcel at the World Trade Center site, as published reports indicated earlier in the week.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday that the investment bank was in talks with the Port Authority to purchase the rights to build a tower on the parcel, now occupied by the derelict skyscraper, 130 Liberty Street, whose deconstruction has been long delayed. But the plot's limited dimensions prohibit a building with floorplates sizeable enough to accommodate the kind of trading floors that JP Morgan Chase would want to install without cantilevering the tower's floors so that they overhang surrounding space.

Sources--who didn't want to speak on the record while making what could be construed as disparaging remarks about the site--said that such a design concept might be costly and technically difficult to execute and could make the building more vulnerable to the kind of car or truck bomb attack that spurred a redesign and repositioning of the Freedom Tower.

Tower Five will sit above the World Trade center site's vehicle security center, a station that will screen all traffic entering the World Trade Center site.

"You're going to have a building that overhangs the line of cars before they pass through the security checkpoint," a source said.

"It's just not something that JP Morgan Chase is likely to do."

The source said that a residential building, as was originally proposed for the site by Mayor Bloomberg, or a smaller office tower would better allow the type of safety buffer between the street and the building that the site's designers have sought for the other towers on the site.