Regular readers of ClockTowerTenants know my career is in design with many years dealing with builders and contractors, fabricators and installers of every kind. My projects tend to be rather small in the grander scale of things. Not so, though, our friendly neighborhood contractors currently swapping out the Willis Avenue Bridge. These guys are huge.
KiewitWeeks, the General Contractor for the bridge project, is a hybrid firm specially formed for the assignment; a joint venture between the Kiewit Corporation (construction and engineering)and Weeks Marine. (marine construction and dredging)
Kiewit of Omaha Nebraska is massive, the 4th largest contracting firm in America in 2010 (up from #5 in 2009). Founded in Omaha by Dutch immigrant bricklayers in 1884,(our ClockTower was built the following year) it had a revenue stream of $6billion, 237 million dollars in 2008. From Wikipedia:
To give some kind of context for a figure like that, “Israel is the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign assistance since World War II... Since 1985, the United States has provided nearly $3 billion in grants annually to Israel.”
Three billion a year. In other words, our yearly no-strings aid to Israel amounts to less than half of just one year’s revenue from one American company, our #4 building contractor.
Weeks Marine, founded in 1919 by Francis Weeks right here in New York City as the “Weeks Stevedoring Company” has been providing river and harbor construction services to New York City for over 75 years. Along the way Weeks has been buying up smaller stevedoring and dredging firms and growing into a good sized firm in its own right, (#110 on that same list) but it is clearly the smaller partner in the Willis Avenue Bridge project.
You can tell a lot about a building contractor by how they maintain their jobsite. This storage lot of re-rod on the Bronx side just north of the bridge is so clean and organized it’s the contractor equivalent of a hospital operating room. A good sign.
Currently the new bridge is in place and everything is being “buttoned up” at the moment. Traffic is scheduled to be rerouted sometime in December. Then the old bridge will be detached, lifted off its moorings and floated away on a barge for scrap.
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