Life in the Trophy Case
By Carl Kozlowski

At 6 a.m. on September 11, 2001, Jim Thomas and Peggy Moretti each were planning their days in different corners of Los Angeles. Thomas was shaving with his TV playing in the background; Moretti was freshening up from her daily walk. All seemed normal and right with the world.

Then, in a flash, everything changed. Thomas noticed the tragic reports coming out of New York City, while Moretti received a phone call from a colleague. That day, most of the nation gathered around televisions, bonded in places of worship, and steered as clear of metropolitan areas as possible.

Yet Jim Thomas and Peggy Moretti had no choice to hide from potential local terror strikes. They had to head directly into the heart of L.A. due to their unique professions. Thomas is one of the city's premier high-rise developers and Moretti is the vice president of public relations for Maguire Properties Group.

Both knew that the high-rise industry and its unique concerns were about to be changed forever. They also knew that they had to act fast to bring some small semblance of sanity to the world as it crumbled around them.

"I work on the 50th floor of the Gas Company Tower downtown, and I came to work that day because as a communications professional, I knew that there would be a heightened level of media interest in high-rise office towers," says Moretti, who joined Maguire Partners seven years ago after serving as the director of public relations for the five-star Peninsula Beverly Hills Hotel. "We were inundated with calls that day wondering if our offices were open or not. We closed that day but reopened for normal hours the next morning, and the media interest in high-rise security has stayed up ever since."

Moretti recalls implementing the Maguire Properties' crisis management plan, using a series of calls to security to shut the building down to all but property management and essential personnel. She was in the office by 7 a.m., spearheading a conference call that set the policy for the company's string of buildings.

Thomas had even more reason to be concerned, as his company, Thomas Properties Group, manages the Library Tower¾which at a height of over 1,000 feet is the tallest building west of the Mississippi River and stands out on the Los Angeles skyline. But as he headed downtown to activate his company's emergency plans, he felt instinctively secure enough to stay all day and continue to work even as he closed his company's buildings down.

Both he and Moretti speak with a great deal of passion about the standout structures they deal with¾known within the architecture and property management industries as "trophy buildings." Thomas' explanation for why certain buildings hold a fascination for the public while most blend into the impersonal cityscapes of major metropolitan areas belies a love for the buildings that dates to a more innocent time.

"Trophy buildings are architecturally appealing, a form of beauty that's aesthetically pleasing, and people are attracted to beautiful things," says Thomas. "Trophy buildings also have a higher level of finish inside, and having a beautiful place to work is like having a beautiful home. They're part of smart urban planning because these things translate to jobs and revenue for the city when people are attracted to downtown from all over the world to see the gems in your community.

"September 11th impacted our industry… by teaching us lessons we're always going to apply for the future," explained Thomas. "Everything's changed on the security end of things."

Indeed, entering a high-rise anywhere in America these days can mean experiencing a near-airport level of security. For instance, at both Thomas Properties' and Maguire Properties' buildings, turnstiles have been installed that require building tenants to present authorization cards to guards in order to gain access to the elevator bays. Once inside the elevators, tenants must scan their cards again in order to select a destination floor.

All visitors, meanwhile, must have their names on a list provided by the person or company they're visiting and then present identification, sign in, and have a guard push their elevator button for them. In addition, both companies have taken extensive unspecified measures to protect their facilities' parking structures.

The efforts have paid off, as both Moretti and Thomas note that they haven't lost a single tenant in the post September 11th era, and have even successfully renegotiated leases. Moretti believes that this successful transition came in part because Maguire Partners crafted the changes while incorporating tenant feedback along the way. And while neither company has developed a new high-rise since then, they say that the reason is the prohibitive costs and space involved rather than fearfulness.

"There's a long lead time on high-rise projects, because our typical projects are between 600,000 and a million feet and our design period is typically 12 to 18 months while you're doing the drawings and then the construction period is a couple of years," says Thomas. "With respect to future buildings, we will learn from what happened on September 11th but it's not practical to design buildings for a 747 kind of incident. One thing we will address is the fact that on September 11th the stairwells were not wide enough for people coming up and down.

"We'll also design the buildings to be defended against smaller types of terrorism, but security is a mixed bag because some tenants want beefed-up security and some don't want it. As a landlord, you're put into a balancing act of trying to hit a happy medium and satisfy both kinds of tenants," Thomas continues. "There's also been an obvious financial impact in both the costs of the equipment and in the fact that insurance premiums have shot way up. Those costs get passed on to tenants and on through the economy and at the end of the day, the cost of living for everybody increases."

Seattle is a city with its own unique gem on its skyline¾the Space Needle. But it's unusual design has led to speculation about its safety from terrorist plans.

Looking back at the morning of September 11, Space Needle President and CEO Dean Nelson recalls hearing of the tragedies via a 6 a.m. phone call from a friend in the brokerage industry. The day's events have left a lasting philosophical impact on him even as he tries to keep in mind that such a major disaster is likely to be a rare or even one-time occurrence.

"By quarter of seven, I was in the Needle's security office. No one knew much; the buildings were burning but didn't fall yet, and airplanes were still in the air," he recalls. "We closed for a day, and I wouldn't want to repeat the experience. But the reality of life is that you get anesthetized… and you go about your business in a sort of normal way¾although you're an awful lot more aware of your surroundings.
Everyone should be."

Nelson knows firsthand about dealing with mayhem and security concerns, having weathered the violent street protests that afflicted the World Trade Organization meetings in Seattle in 1999. He notes that the speculation on the Needle's alleged desirability to terrorists began shortly after the WTO protests, when terrorists were caught trying to cross the Canadian border near Washington. The problem is, the press often forgets to mention that the terrorist plot was proven later to be aimed at LAX.

Nonetheless, Nelson said that the private corporation that owns the Space Needle has established a strong relationship with the FBI and Seattle police in the post September 11th era, and that security measures have been implemented from the back dock areas to public entrances. The bigger concern he has had to contend with is rebounding from the economic slump that September 11th helped inflict upon the city's tourism industry.

John Zils is another man living in the shadow of a trophy building as the structural engineer for the original planning team of Chicago's legendary Sears Tower.

"We were here in the office several blocks from the Sears Tower, just getting the day started. I was in a conference room with the ownership of the tower having a meeting, which was immediately ended when our receptionist told us what was going on," Zils recalled.

Zils and a coworker drove overnight to New York City in a voluntary effort to advise rescue workers on which areas of the demolished structures were safe to traverse. Their first stint lasted two weeks, but they continued traveling between the cities for the next two months.

"Nothing could prepare you for what you saw. I've been in buildings all my life but it was a scene beyond comprehension," says Zils. "When [it] was all happening, we watched in the office, and none of us could imagine the buildings could have ever come down. When the first one came down we were all dumbfounded because even as a structural engineer it was unbelievable that it came all the way down to the ground. It was as much a surprise to us as it was to you."

The mammoth task of creating the 1,450-foot, 110-story tower encompassed the four years from 1969 to 1973. Despite the lingering tensions ignited by the race riots and Vietnam War protests that engulfed Chicago in 1968, the threat of terrorism never entered the planners' minds. They were more concerned with the city's notorious winds and the overall safety issues involved in keeping the building sound against the onslaughts of nature.

"We did consider the building's robustness and redundancy, the second of which means that if a number of elements or structures are destroyed, adjacent elements of the structure would pick up the load from the destroyed ones and carry that structure without it collapsing. The Sears Tower has a fantastic level of both," explains Zils, who also engineered downtown L.A.'s Citicorp Plaza. "That's just inherent, because we utilized a bundled tube structural system."

Zils notes that the World Trade Center also displayed a good level of redundancy because the building continued to stand for awhile after one of the planes sheared off two-thirds of the columns on one side of the building. The problem came in the towers' robustness - the ability of a structure to resist damage.

"If you had the option of ten small columns versus two large columns, probably the two small columns would be more robust," Zils says. "You might not have as much redundancy, but it's often a tradeoff to favor one over the other. If you can have both, it's the best of both worlds."

Experiencing the horrors of Ground Zero has helped Zils understand the fears that some Sears Tower tenants expressed in the wake of September 11th. He knows that much of the trepidation stems from the Tower's trophy status but notes: "That's a personal thing - you're either concerned or you're not.

"Sure, you can't help but think that there but for the grace of God go I," he continues. "Who's to say why they didn't choose [us] rather than the World Trade Center, White House or Pentagon. I thought about that then and I think about it now sometimes. But it's not a daily ongoing fear."

Zils believes that the most important changes wrought by September 11th's events will come in the form of future building code provisions and rules on structural design. He notes that both British and Japanese codes were already better equipped to deal with terrorist-style damage.
"In 1969 in Britain, they had an event that was not a terrorist event but an explosion in an apartment building. [It] knocked out one column, but then the entire side of the building collapsed to the ground and there was a significant loss of life," Zils explains. "Based on that event, the UK addressed the collapse and incorporated additional redundancy provisions into code."

Ultimately, even seasoned professionals like L.A.'s Jim Thomas and Peggy Moretti admit that all the complexities of their industry can't overcome basic human concerns. They realize that vigilance on every citizen's part is sometimes the best Americans can hope for.

"I don't think 747s will get rammed into buildings again because passengers won't let them hijack again," says Thomas. "I worry about kooks or terrorists on much smaller levels like car bombs, but we have done everything imaginable to make sure our facilities are thoroughly secured."

"People often ask me if I'm scared to work in a high-rise office tower now, and my answer is no," says Moretti. "That's a personal feeling, but I believe that living in California an earthquake is a more likely event than another terrorist attack. Even in that case I don't feel afraid because our buildings are built with the highest standards. I believe September 11th was a horrific one-time event that won't happen again."

Carl Kozlowski is a frequent contributor to Arriviste Press. You can find more of his stories here.