AFTER TEN YEARS AND THREE PLANS, UN RENOVATION IS IN SIGHT

The decade-long search for what to do with thousands of employees and delegates while the organization’s thirty-nine-story headquarters are refurbished has ended now with a decision to begin a five-year, $1.876 billion renovation of the complex in the spring, reports the New York Times. The twenty-six hundred people who must move out will be housed in rented space in Manhattan, across the East River in Long Island City, and a temporary conference building on the United Nations campus. Periodic surveys have cited asbestos insulation, lead paint, outmoded plumbing and electric systems, lack of sprinklers, frequent power shutdowns, and leaking roofs at the fifty-five-year-old glass and steel Secretariat tower and its companion General Assembly Hall. Those failings are serious, as Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg underlined in October by demanding that the organization immediately improve its fire-safety plans with sprinklers, smoke detectors, and exit signs or he would prohibit visits by city students to the building and alert the public to the danger. The United Nations has pledged to make the adjustments in the coming months. The author of the new plan is Michael Adlerstein, sixty-two, a Brooklyn-born former National Park Service architect involved in the preservations of Ellis Island, the Statue of Liberty, the New York Botanical Garden, and the Taj Mahal and a man with twenty years of experience dealing with lawmakers in Washington.