Chris Ward, due to take over the Port Authority this month, suggests to us that he thinks Bruce Ratner should consider recruiting architects other than Frank Gehry for the Atlantic Yards. “Flatbush and Atlantic is a totally underused area and a major transportation hub, and I hope we don't lock ourselves into a design that does not allow other architecture or public space,” says Ward. That design is entirely Gehry's; even after Ratner admitted his multi-tower vision might not attract financing, public officials have kept the architect front and center. “Bruce, with his optimism, is probably feeling that he doesn't have to worry about those contingencies,” Ward continues. “But it would be worthwhile to pay attention to the real-estate risks there.” And, yes, he called him "Bruce": Ward worked under Ratner when the he ran Consumer Affairs in the Koch administration. Still, this warning should hearten the project's opponents: Ward will have a lot of influence over state spending if the developer needs a cash influx. —Alec Appelbaum

If you live in Williamsburg (or even outside of it, but are occasionally exposed to viral marketing), you are probably familiar with the Edge. It's an ambitious residential development, you guessed it, on the "edge" of the water. They have an extremely high-falutin Website, obnoxious ads, and an opening date somewhere near 2010. Thankfully, Curbed.com sent someone out to the sales office to scope it all out (there's no way we could have handled that kind of pretension on a Friday), and they came back with a number of hilarious pictures. Take the one above, for example. It's a detail of a scale model of the complex, which elsewhere includes a tank with real fish in it to represent the East River. Please note the hot little plastic people frolicking by the pool (is the one in the back topless?). We've heard of using real gorgeous people as fake tenants of sample apartments — but plastic versions of gorgeous people as a way to sell your overstreamlined, characterless Eurotrash Utopia? Now that's just damn efficient.

Show Us Your Sales Office: Williamsburg Edge [Curbed]
Related: If You Lived Here, You'd Be This Guy Now

Starchitect Santiago Calatrava is having a bad April. Today's papers carry two notes of bad tidings for the genius Spaniard, who until recently was expected to bring a lot of architectural excitement to lower Manhattan. First, we learn that his "Sky Cubes" tower, the ginormous (and ginormously expensive) stack of glass boxes that was supposed to rise up near the South Street Seaport is finally dead. The project, which was expected to be the priciest residential tower in the city (at an estimated $35 million per box, er, apartment), was going to be an eye-catching folly on the downtown landscape. We also learn today that Calatrava's gorgeous transit hub at the World Trade Center is even more underfunded and behind schedule than we thought — requiring more cutbacks and simplifications. No longer will daylight extend underground to the lowest train tracks, to cheer thousands of commuters. Instead, they will have to wait potentially until 2013 (or, probably, even later) for the new station to be ready. We were originally told it would be done by 2006. Yipes. The fuddy-duddies at the Daily News are already calling for a simplification of Calatrava's already-reduced plans, placing the blame on overambitious design rather than bureaucratic blunders. Come on, guys. Pretty soon the iconic dove-wing design of the transit hub will be reduced to a pigeon's scale. And the last thing we need downtown is another pigeon.

'SKY CUBES' MELTDOWN [NYP]
Ground Zero transit center faces big delays, budget-busting overruns [NYDN]
Bust This Boondoggle [NYDN]

Frank Gehry is cross about scurrilous rumors that Miss Brooklyn, the skinny glass office tower he designed for Bruce Ratner's Atlantic Yards, will not be erected as planned, owing to Ratner's inability to get a tenant. Hogwash!, the architect told the Brooklyn Paper last night at the gala for the opening of the Murakami, exhibit, where Ratner was receiving an award. The design is “better than ever," the architect boasted. "It will look better than anyone imagines … we’ve made some adjustments that people will absolutely love.” But wait: Didn't Ratner just say tell the Times a couple of weeks ago that the weakened economy means that construction on the tower would likely be stalled indefinitely? Er, yeah, Gehry admitted but then waved it off: “Bruce will have a tenant soon — and then he’ll begin construction," he said confidently. But then he seemed to quaver. "He really does want to build it,” he said of Ratner. “But he can’t get the financing. I don’t know why he would tell the papers that, but it is true.”

Gehry to Brooklyn Paper: Miss Brooklyn ain’t dead — in fact, she’s hotter than ever [Brooklyn Paper]

Economic woes be damned: Judging from the fairly active scene at the Observer’s condo expo at the Puck Building yesterday — apparently, more than 2,000 attendees passed through the doors — New Yorkers are still gripped with condo fever. (That, or they just love swag like free vodka shots, squeeze bottles, and plastic key chains.) Green-minded developments like the Rafael Pelli–designed Visionaire and the Solaria — in Riverdale! — seemed particularly busy. So, did Observer publisher and real-estate mogul — and Ivanka Trump paramour — Jared Kushner, who told "Page Six" last week that he may finally snag a new apartment at the expo, find something he liked? Rumor has it he did, allegedly at a building in the East Twenties. Our bet’s on One Madison or 15 Madison Square North. When reached, a Rubenstein spokesperson for the Observer refused to confirm either of our guesses. —S. Jhoanna Robledo

Blame Jim Dolan for the wretched Knicks. Blame him for blocking the city's shot at the 2012 Olympics. Blame him for your soaring cable bill. But don't blame Dolan for killing the grand Moynihan Station project.

Yes, the decision by Dolan, chairman of Madison Square Garden, to renovate the current home of his Knicks and Rangers deals a major blow to the idea of moving MSG to Ninth Avenue, which would allow an overhaul of the hideous Penn Station and the creation of an airy, modern transportation hub that would incorporate the old Farley Post Office. But there are many villains in this tale, and, for a change, Dolan ranks only in the middle. Start with the foot-dragging Pataki administration, whose focus on the project fluctuated wildly. Throw in Mike Bloomberg, whose public excoriations of Dolan for standing in the way of the West Side Jets stadium and the Olympics certainly didn't encourage Dolan to play nice on Moynihan Station. Even Eliot Spitzer and Ashley Dupre are at fault; it took Spitzer until several months ago to get personally involved in discussions. That progress came to a screeching halt due to Spitzer's other personal involvements.

Our recently departed governor set a new low for ethics violations involving train travel, but a decision by the city's Conflicts of Interest board that allows Dan Doctoroff to negotiate the city's stake in Moynihan Station might strike some as slightly shady. The ruling upholds requests by the Bloomberg administration to waive city law and let Doctoroff, the former development czar who now runs the mayor's private company, continue guiding projects that started on his watch. In many instances, Doctoroff's unpaid-adviser status is almost reassuring. At Moynihan Station, the proposed grand new train hall and office-entertainment district to replace Penn Station and Madison Square Garden, it adds to the collision of interests dragging the project down.

The city's Department of Buildings, embattled as of late thanks to the recent crane collapse and other construction-site mishaps, has tightened up crane protocol. According to an announcement last evening, a building inspector must now be on site "whenever a tower crane is raised or lowered in New York City, to ensure safe practices are being employed by those operating the crane." Other requirements include written instructions given to on-site operators; confirmation from the "engineer of record" that the cranes were inspected and built according to standards, and safety powwows among everyone who handles the crane, which a DoB inspector must attend. Reached by e-mail, a DoB spokesperson said the new rules will be in place "until further notice." — S. Jhoanna Robledo

This weekend's deadly crane accident in midtown has caused a lot of soul-searching on the part of the Department of Buildings. With every successive accident, they try to evaluate their standards and procedures to see how incidents can be avoided in the future, but it just seems like they're behind the game. Below, a timeline of high-rise disasters and the baby steps toward safety taken after each one.

May 22, 2002: An untrained forklift operator driving near the edge of the windowless eighth floor at the Time Warner Center site falls to his death.
November 18, 2002: Buildings commissioner convenes "construction-safety summit" with trades groups.

Larry Silverstein's feeling upbeat about the future, but we wonder about his grip on reality as it currently stands. Addressing a roomful of construction pros yesterday, the developer promised that the four towers he wants to build at the World Trade Center site will open by 2012 (with retail comprising “big boxes, little boxes, restaurants, and bars”) and told us later that the site would deliver “an urban experience” as walkable as Bleecker Street — “with bollards, of course.” Lovely. But Silverstein also claimed that construction inflation is starting to level off just as his architects are due to start confronting the problem of how to connect four distinct skyscrapers underground. “I was at the General Contractors Association table, and eyebrows went up when he said that,” says Rick Bell, head of the local American Institute of Architects chapter, who has visited the design studio where Silverstein's starchitects are laboring to cost out the towers' underground guts. “I didn't get any consensus on that from contractors or from architects.”