Sometime this week, the last scraps of asbestos and other toxic substances will be removed from the Deutsche Bank building on 130 Liberty Street, lower Manhattan, according to officials. And by early 2010, the ruined building will be entirely demolished, they say.

Yeah, right.

We were also told the demolition would be completed by 2006. When that deadline was missed, they promised the building — on prime business real estate, just a few minutes’ walk from the New York Stock Exchange — would be gone by 2007. Now they say 2010. New Yorkers are not marking their calendars.

The Deutsche Bank building — officially, the Bankers Trust Building — was once a 41-story office tower that stood in the shadow of the World Trade Center’s South Tower. On September 11, 2001, debris from the collapsing South Tower tore a 15-story gash in the Deutsche Bank building’s facade and knocked out a load-bearing column. Later, engineers marveled the structure didn’t collapse. Many would come to wish it had.

On that September morning in 2001, as flaming debris rained down on their office building, Deutsche Bank managers had the good sense to tell the 4,200 people who worked in the building to get out. Only one employee remained in the building when the South Tower collapsed. He was killed on the spot.

Nearly eight years later, demolition is ongoing. As of this writing 26 of the building’s original 41 floors remain standing. The cost of the demolition job, originally estimated at $45 million, probably will exceed $300 million.

The Aftermath

When they were able to return to the building after the terrorist attacks, Deutsche Bank officials decided the office tower was ruined beyond repair. They closed the building tight and threw a black net shroud over it, so that it stood like a silent, black gravestone at the south end of Ground Zero. A lethal cocktail of deadly toxins was trapped inside the building, and mold grew from food and other organic material. The latter included human remains, discovered in the building during an inspection in 2002. The remains were of people who had worked in the World Trade Center towers; their bodies were ejected into the Deutsche Bank building when the South Tower collapsed.

In 2003 insurers blocked Deutsche Bank’s plans to raze the building. It just needed patching up, they said. Deutsche Bank sued. A courtroom melodrama over the fate of the building played on for months.

The impasse was broken in 2004, when the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation bought the tower. The Corporation announced it would tear down the tower and build a new one in its place. New York Governor George Pakati announced the building would be demolished by 2006.

However, an environmental study conducted in 2004 confirmed there were high levels of asbestos (known to cause mesothelioma), dioxin (linked to a variety of severe health problems), lead (nervous system damage) and other dangerous substances throughout the vacant tower. Any demolition would have to be done with extreme caution to prevent further contamination of lower Manhattan. The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation began further evaluation of the site.

In 2005, New York Times reporter David Dunlap was allowed to don a hazmat suit and enter the Deutsche Bank building. He reported that many rooms remained exactly as they had been when employees walked away from them on September 11, nearly four years earlier.

The Bones

In August 2005, a construction company called Bovis Lend Lease was awarded a contract to demolish the Deutsche Bank Building. In September, however, workers found pieces of human bones on the roof.

Nearly four years after the terrorist attacks, the families of more than half of the estimated 2,749 victims of the New York attacks were still waiting for even a fragment of their loved ones’ remains. They demanded the building be thoroughly searched before demolition could continue. Because many of the fragments being found were tiny — less than a centimeter long — finding every bone fragment in the wreckage would be a delicate, painstaking task.

Demolition work slowed as the building was thoroughly searched for more remains. Eventually hundreds of pieces of human bone would be found.

In May 2006, the federal Environmental Protection Agency halted cleanup of the building when it determined there were small asbestos particles mingled with the bones. In June the EPA approved a revised plan for searching for human remains. Working under a firestorm of criticism from the families of September 11 victims, searchers in hazmat suits literally sifted debris with fine-mesh screens to look for bones. Throughout 2006 they found more bones and also part of an airliner’s fuselage.

In December 2006 the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation confidently announced demolition really would begin. In January 2007, the Corporation assured the New York/New Jersey Port Authority that the Deutsche Bank building would be gone by the end of that year. However, Bovis Lend Lease and its subcontractor, the John Galt Corporation, said they needed more money to continue the job, which had gone on far longer than they had anticipated in their original bids.

In May 2007, work halted after a 22-foot pipe fell from the building’s 35th floor and crashed into a firehouse across the street. No one was injured. Work resumed, and by August the top 15 of the original 41 floors of the building were gone.

The Fire

In mid-August 2007 a fire broke out on the 17th floor and tore through several more floors of the building. Once again a smoky haze settled over lower Manhattan, bearing the same acrid smells people remembered from the days after September 11. Tragically, two firefighters died fighting the blaze.

The work of putting out the fire was seriously complicated by the fact that a 42-foot section of the building’s standpipe, something like a vertical hydrant for skyscrapers, was missing. City inspectors had not noticed.

Investigation into the fire revealed some unsettling facts about the subcontractor, the John Galt Corporation. John Galt was not a real demolition company, but a shell corporation created by other companies to insulate their assets from potential liabilities. This arrangement had not been publicly disclosed before the fire, although some New York City officials knew about it. At least one of the “insulated” companies behind John Galt had been dismissed from other contracts related to World Trade Center rebuilding.

Further investigation revealed that other subcontractors who had bid on the job back in 2005 had dropped out after receiving threats, which paved the way for John Galt to be awarded the contract.

After the fire, Bovis Lend Lease declared John Galt to be in default of its contract and began to look for a new subcontractor. Demolition work also slowed because the building had to be re-sealed to prevent toxins from spreading through the neighborhood. The “by the end of 2007″ deadline became a fantasy.

The Corruption

Although demolition work slowly continued through 2008, the city’s attention was drawn to the investigations and accusations following the August 2007 fire. By February 2008 the Bloomberg administration and the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation had incurred more than $2.2 million in legal bills, defending their roles in the events that caused the blaze. Both Bovis Lend Lease and the John Galt Corporation were accused of several safety violations by federal safety regulators.

In December 2008, the John Galt Corporation and three construction supervisors were indicted by a grand jury for manslaughter in the deaths of the firefighters.

In January 2009, the former purchasing agent for the John Galt Corporation was charged with stealing more than $1 million from the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation by filing false invoices. He allegedly used the money for expensive vacations and luxury cars. In July 2009, two businessmen associated with John Galt were charged with falsifying business records as part of a multimillion-dollar check-cashing scheme.

Next?

Beside the rich irony of a corrupt shell company being named for the main character an objectivist Ayn Rand novel, here is one other potential cheerful note to this story. In July 2009 there was talk that a cultural center originally planned for the World Trade Center site, and canceled in 2005 by right-wing jingoistic hysteria, could be built at 130 Liberty Street.

Nothing is definite, however, and where the Deutsche Bank building is concerned most New Yorkers will believe it when they see it.

(Chief source: The New York Times Deutsche Bank bulding archives.)