Greek Orthodox Church Sues Port Authority Over Destroyed St. Nicholas Church in Manhattan, New York

The Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America filed a lawsuit on Monday in a U.S. district court in Manhattan against the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the public agency that owned the World Trade Center. The church says the agency reneged on a 2008 deal to rebuild St. Nicholas Church at a new location down the block from its old site. It also says the Port Authority has begun excavating church property without permission as part of the new business and transportation complex at Ground Zero.

Church spokesman Mark Arey said the dispute was not about money. “This is not about money, this is about their commitment to rebuild the only house of worship destroyed at Ground Zero,” he said.

St. Nicholas Church was built in 1916 and was crushed when the World Trade Center towers collapsed in the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. During the neighborhood’s reconstruction, the Port Authority proposed swapping the church property for a piece of land farther down the street, where the agency could build a center for screening vehicles. In exchange, the agency would give the church millions of dollars to build a larger church.

The church says the two sides had mostly agreed on terms when the Port Authority abruptly withdrew from talks in 2009. The Port Authority maintains that the church was demanding too much money. In a written statement, the agency said that “after eight months of negotiations in which the demands of the Orthodox Church continued to increase over and above what was originally agreed to in 2008, the Port Authority had to make a practical decision to move on or risk further delaying the entire World Trade Center project.”

The Port Authority has said it offered $20 million in financing, plus as much as $40 million to cover extra costs related to building a Port Authority parking lot under the church. It claims the church wanted a building six times larger than its original one.

The church said that expectation was only fair, since it was giving up valuable “air rights” over its original site. Air rights allow builders to construct skyscrapers on small pieces of land, and the church argued that its surrender of those rights warranted a larger replacement. Competing accounts of the talks remain in dispute, a reminder that both sides must be heard before fairness can be judged (Proverbs 18:17).

Arey also said that about one-third of the new church would have been a memorial area where people of all faiths could gather.

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