The Freedom Tower

The recession has cast uncertainty on plans for the office space at the World Trade Center, likely leading to more delays in rebuilding the site, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Executives for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the agency that owns the 16-acre area in lower Manhattan, and private developer Larry Silverstein are in early talks on how to cope with construction problems and the slumping property market. Solutions are likely to include delays to the 2013 targets to complete the office and retail space meant to replace the Twin Towers, according to participants in the talks.
The rebuilding of the trade center, destroyed in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, has been hampered by delays, infighting and cost overruns. Work is under way on the project — which includes five office towers, a memorial and museum, a shopping mall and a transit hub — but most of the attention is now focused on the memorial and below-ground infrastructure, which are years behind schedule.
The World Trade Center site in New York City is the subject of negotiations between developer Larry Silverstein and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the 16-acre area.
A Port Authority review issued in October was meant to put the project back on track, but plans for the eight million to 10 million square feet of office space at the trade center are up in the air. “We definitely have challenges on the commercial side of the project about timing and raising capital. Those are the things we are talking to Silverstein about,” said Port Authority Chairman Anthony Coscia.

Apparently the word freedom has been applied to yet another item, this time condoms. Takepart.com says “some kind of German businessman wants to trademark freedom tower condoms - with the official slogan being “Freedom Tower: Make Love Not War.”
The folks behind the actual freedom tower aren’t pleased and find the condom idea offensive. They are against anyone capitalizing on the events of 9/11 but think that condoms go too far.
What do you think?
I personally think that there are worse things and before we stop this condom dude, we should perhaps stop the entire Republican Party from capitalizing on the events of 9/11. At least condoms serve a useful purpose. And anytime condoms are in the news it’s a good thing - as the kids these days need to be reminded they exist.”

The world has changed!
America has changed. Too. We are the world and we welcome all voices!

America can now be humble, thankful and grateful for the potential 2009 offers.

We all look forward to this new year and to doing the simple but important things we can all do to make this world a better place — really a better place.
Happy New Year!
Lionel Bascom

Downtown Express reports:
Jean Grillo shouted over the jackhammers along Liberty St. last month, shepherding a crowd of tourists behind her.

Grillo was speaking about the past — the construction of the Twin Towers — but the present World Trade Center construction was getting in the way. Waving her arm, Grillo gestured for the tourists to follow her into the much quieter World Financial Center.

The past, present and future overlap at the W.T.C. site, just like they overlap for the thousands of people who survived the attacks. Grillo, a longtime Duane St. resident, usually focuses on the future: She prepares for potential emergencies as head of Tribeca’s Community Emergency Response Team, and she molds the recovery of her neighborhood as a public member of Community Board 1.

But several times a month, Grillo returns to the chaos and emotion of 9/11. She tells her story to tourists from across the country and beyond for the Tribute W.T.C. Visitor Center.

“Our job is to reach out to people who want to hear our story,” Grillo said. “I get wrapped up in the tour and [the site] becomes a different place.”

Grillo’s tour is about history and emotion, but, much like the site itself, it is also about the government and politics. The tourists reconcile their expectations for the site with what they actually find there. Some have seen renderings of the buildings and memorial in the media and expect them to be complete. Grillo said many are shocked to see how much work is left and how much longer it will take.

“A lot of people feel very strongly that the memorial should have been built first and everything else should have gone up around it,” said Grillo, who agrees. “People from Washington come, and they say the Pentagon memorial is up.”

Thestar.com reports:Just two months after the twin towers fell in New York, the armies of the Northern Alliance marched into Kabul. The Taliban fled.

The triumph was total in the “splendid little war” that had cost one U.S. casualty. Or so it seemed. Yet, last month, the war against the Taliban entered its eighth year, the second longest war in American history, and the United States and NATO have never been nearer to strategic defeat.

So critical is the situation that Defence Secretary Robert Gates, in Kandahar this month, promised rapid deployment, before any Taliban spring offensive, of two and perhaps three combat brigades of the 20,000 troops requested by Gen. David McKiernan. The first 4,000, from the 10th Mountain Division, are expected in January.

With 34,000 U.S. soldiers already in country, half under NATO command, the 20,000 will increase U.S. forces there to 54,000, a 60 per cent ratcheting up. Shades of LBJ, 1964-65. Afghanistan is going to be Obama’s War. And upon its outcome will hang the fate of his presidency. Has he thought this through?

How do we win this war, if by winning we mean establishing a pro-Western democratic government in control of the country that has the support of the people and loyalty of an Afghan army strong enough to defend the nation from a resurgent Taliban?

We are further from that goal going into 2009 than we were five years ago.

What are the long-term prospects for any such success?

Each year, the supply of opium out of Afghanistan, from which most of the world’s heroin comes, sets a new record. Payoffs by narcotics traffickers are corrupting the government. The fanatically devout Taliban had eradicated the drug trade, but is now abetting the drug lords in return for money for weapons to kill Americans and their NATO allies.

Militarily, the Taliban forces are stronger than they have been since 2001, moving out of the south and east and infesting half the country. They have sanctuaries in Pakistan and virtually ring Kabul.

U.S. air strikes have killed so many Afghan civilians that President Hamid Karzai, who controls little more than Kabul, has begun to condemn the U.S. attacks. Predator attacks on Taliban and Al Qaeda in Pakistan have inflamed the population there.

And can pinprick air strikes win a war of this magnitude?

The supply line for our troops in Afghanistan, which runs from Karachi up to Peshawar through the Khyber Pass to Kabul, is now a perilous passage. Four times this month, U.S. transport depots in Pakistan have been attacked, with hundred of vehicles destroyed.

Before arriving in Kandahar, Gates spoke grimly of a “sustained commitment for some protracted period of time. How many years that is, and how many troops that is … nobody knows.”

Gen. McKiernan says it will be at least three or four years before the Afghan army and police can handle the Taliban.

But why does it take a dozen years to get an Afghan army up to where it can defend the people and regime against a Taliban return? Why do our Afghans seem less disposed to fight and die for democracy than the Taliban are to fight and die for theocracy? Does their God, Allah, command a deeper love and loyalty than our god, democracy?

McKiernan says the situation may get worse before it gets better. Gates compares Afghanistan to the Cold War. “(W)e are in many respects in an ideological conflict with violent extremists. … The last ideological conflict we were in lasted about 45 years.”

That would truly be, in Donald Rumsfeld’s phrase, “a long, hard slog.”

America, without debate, is about to invest blood and treasure, indefinitely, in a war to which no end seems remotely in sight, if the commanding general is talking about four years at least and the now-and-future war minister is talking about four decades.

What is there to win in Afghanistan to justify doubling down our investment? If our vital interest is to deny a sanctuary there to Al Qaeda, do we have to build a new Afghanistan to accomplish that? Did not Al Qaeda depart years ago for a new sanctuary in Pakistan?

What hope is there of creating in this tribal land a democracy committed to freedom, equality and human rights that Afghans have never known? What is the expectation that 54,000 or 75,000 U.S. troops can crush an insurgency that enjoys a privileged sanctuary to which it can return, to rest, recuperate and recruit for next year’s offensive?

Of all the lands of the Earth, Afghanistan has been among the least hospitable to foreigners who come to rule, or to teach them how they should rule themselves.

Would Dwight D. Eisenhower – who settled for the status quo ante in Korea, an armistice at the line of scrimmage – commit his country to such an open-ended war? Would Richard Nixon? Would Ronald Reagan?

Hard to believe. George W. Bush would. But did not America vote against Bush? Why is America getting seamless continuity when it voted for significant change?

The New York Times reports that “The first observation that one must make about the new CBS headquarters,” Ada Louise Huxtable wrote in 1966, “is that it is a building.”
It takes a lot of moxie to open a piece of serious criticism with such a lofty declaration of the obvious, offered in praise, without sarcasm or irony. But then Huxtable, who was the architecture critic for The New York Times from 1963 to 1982 and still, at 87, tosses out the occasional bravura essay for The Wall Street Journal, has never lacked nerve. With an authority that verges on the oracular, she flicks away giants: “The style of the Kennedy Center is Washington super scale, but just a little bit bigger. Albert Speer would have approved.” She calls out eminences (“Inside Edward Durell Stone, there is an architect signaling to get out”) and ordains geniuses (“Frank Gehry is the most staggeringly talented architect that this country has produced since Frank Lloyd Wright”). So if Huxtable declares “Black Rock,” the glowering corporate palazzo that Eero Saarinen bestowed on CBS, to be a building, then it’s worth reading on to discover what she means.

Her point, which remains as germane today as it was four decades ago, is that the mute brawn of the tower’s exterior can’t be separated from its structure and function. Rather than trying to disguise its bulk in a shiny, frilly sheath, Black Rock displays the muscle that is every tower’s birthright, and the masses who find it charmless are just plain wrong. “The dark dignity that appeals to architectural sophisticates puts off the public, which tends to reject it as funereal,” she acknowledges. “The first fault, therefore, is in the public eye.”

Huxtable has been training that eye for nearly half a century. Given how often it still gets blackened by architectural sucker punches, she hasn’t yet completed her task. But “On Architecture,” a career-spanning collection of articles and essays, demonstrates that she has always pursued her mission with reason, elegance and wisdom. Huxtable’s work remains the gold standard of criticism — and not just the architectural variety — because she brings to the job a rare combination of aesthetic certitude and roving curiosity.

Her aesthetic forged by the austerities of highest modernism, she adapted cheerfully to successive waves of flamboyance. From the start of her career, she admired Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier because they were her generation’s deities, and later had no trouble recognizing the more baroque talents of Gehry, Daniel Libeskind and Santiago Calatrava. Review by review, essay by persuasive essay, she erects an impressive structure supported by the force of sheer reasonableness. She applauds economy but detests cheapness, appreciates expressivity but abhors showiness, and above all demands that a building make sense.

For a colleague less than half her age, it is awesome to observe her pronouncing judgment on elements of New York City that have come to seem immemorial. In 1963, she reported with dismay on the Pan Am Building’s new immensity: “A $100 million building cannot really be called cheap. But Pan Am is a colossal collection of minimums. . . . Pan Am’s one effective aesthetic feature is its brutality. In afternoon sun, from lower Park Avenue, its patterned mass rises with striking power behind the dwarfed familiarity of Grand Central’s proper academic facade.” Today, the building (rebaptized the MetLife in 1991) has become so familiar, so comfortingly alpine in its overweening bulk, that it’s difficult to imagine a time before its construction.

The reader who switches back and forth between these sparsely illustrated pages and a good collection of historical photo graphs (or nyc-architecture.com) can watch the millennial metropolis take shape and metamorphose. Under Huxtable’s gaze, Midtown acquires its parade of pinstriped boxes. Lincoln Center opens (“expensively suave, extravagantly commonplace”). Le Corbusier passes into legend, bequeathing the 20th-century city his great art and disastrous philosophies. The World Trade Center goes up — the twin towers “could be the start of a new skyscraper age or the biggest tombstones in the world,” she wrote in 1966 — and comes down. Huxtable responds to the destruction of 9/11 with a far-seeing suite of essays in which she (1) outlines the debacle that will follow disaster if the usual development narrative unfolds; (2) pronounces Libeskind’s initial master plan an unexpected miracle amid “a dyslexic process (everything backward) that made all the mistakes in the plan book and invented a few”; and (3) falls back in a quintessentially Huxtabulatory mixture of optimism and exasperation. “I do not believe for a moment that we are no longer capable of building great cities of symbolic beauty and enduring public amenity,” she writes. “What ground zero tells us is that we have lost the faith and the nerve, the knowledge and the leadership, to make it happen now.”

Crain’s New York Business reports “Construction spending in the New York area remained strong this year, even as the economy tanked, because of a half dozen $1 billion-plus projects that got off the ground. Three World Trade Center towers, two massive water and sewer projects and the extension of the No. 7 subway line helped raise the total value of construction starts in the New York metropolitan area 2% to $32.9 billion, according to a new report by McGraw-Hill Construction.

But the pipeline for 2009 does not look nearly as robust. Continued economic deterioration and a tepid recovery in the credit environment will send construction starts tumbling 19% to $26.7 billion in the city, Long Island and northern New Jersey, the report said.

“The New York metropolitan area thrived over the past several years, but if there’s one metropolitan area in the nation that will be negatively affected by the drubbing the financial sector has taken in recent months, it’s New York,” the report said.

Nonresidential construction starts in 2009 will fall 21% to $11.6 billion, driven by a 32% drop in commercial and industrial construction and a 6% fall in institutional building, the report said. Nonbuilding construction in areas like transportation and public works will drop 28% to $6.9 billion.

Residential construction starts—which fell 15% in 2008—will continue to decline, albeit less radically, dropping 4% to $8.1 billion. By the summer, home prices are likely to reach rock bottom and then make very slow progress over the remainder of the year, the report noted. This will encourage a modest recovery in home sales and eventually lead to new construction.

The start of World Trade Center Towers 2,3 and 4 — a combined $4 billion worth of construction — obscured what otherwise would have been a marked deterioration in the city’s all-important office sector. Without these three projects, office construction would have fallen 33% to just $1.7 billion in 2008. Growing unemployment and rising vacancy rates means construction starts in this sector will take a severe hit in 2009, falling 46%.

But it won’t be the only area in decline. Falling elementary and middle school enrollment and a scaled back city capital plan mean education construction is projected to fall 23% next year. Hotel construction, which hit a record $2.1 billion this year, will drop by 29%. And retail construction, which was among the first to feel the effects of the downturn, will continue to slide, falling 4% to about $1 billion. Government spending cuts on public works will send nonbuilding construction plummeting 28%, the report says, though it does not consider the potential impact of federal stimulus dollars.

The slowing activity means the city could lose almost 30,000 construction jobs by 2010, bringing industry employment to its lowest level in more than 10 years, according to a report released in October by the New York Building Congress. In November alone, the city lost 1,800 construction jobs, according to an analysis of State Labor Department data by real estate services firm Eastern Consolidated.”

Man on Wire, a film about an historic walk by a French aerealist is moving to center stage by yearend movie reviewers, including this on by David Kempler writing for www.bigpicturebigsound.com:

“It is extremely difficult to think of the World Trade Center and prevent your mind from landing upon the tragedy of 2001. Yet in 1974, before construction of the twin towers was even completed, a group of young Frenchmen, led by high-wire artist, Philippe Petit, accomplished something that can now be viewed through the prism of the passage of time as an impossible task. Sadly, what Petit did that day can only happen in a world without immense security measures, something we may never see again.

“Man on Wire” is a documentary account of Petit and his band of cohorts in “crime”, sneaking past security at the WTC, laying a cable that connected the tops of the respective towers, culminating in Petit’s strolling, dancing, taunting and performing on this highest of high-wire acts for an astounding 45 minutes, while the New York Police and the rest of the world could only helplessly watch.

The tale is based on Petit’s book, “To Reach the Clouds”, and is directed by James Marsh. Marsh does a great job of unfolding the story. He is greatly aided in his task by the almost obsessive film documentation that Petit and his group shot of the event and of the preparation leading up to it. It is shot primarily in black and white, with some of the home footage shot in color.

It takes a while to get started in capturing our attention and sags from re-enactments of some of the events, particularly the footage of the preparation in the weeks leading up to Petit’s walk across the sky. When it does get into gear, it is a pedal-to-the-metal suspense-fest even though we are fully aware of the eventual outcome.”

In the Greek Orthodox tradition, St. Nicholas is the protector of merchants and sailors, children and travelers, the New York Times reports. “But for the last seven years, members of St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church in Lower Manhattan have also looked to their parish’s namesake for something else: patience.

The members have been without a church since Sept. 11, 2001, when it was crushed in the collapse of the south tower of the World Trade Center. Efforts to rebuild have been delayed by the same byzantine negotiations and bureaucratic complexities that have plagued the entire $16 billion reconstruction of the trade center site.

Many of the 100 families who make up the congregation have been worshiping at a parish in Brooklyn, except once a year when they return to the site of their old church — or as close to the site as they can get — to celebrate the day on the liturgical calendar that honors St. Nicholas.

This year, that day fell on Saturday. And once again the members gathered inside a heated white tent at the southern edge of the ground zero construction zone.

“We have a lot of patience here,” said Olga Pavlakos, a lawyer and fourth-generation member of the parish. “We’re a church, we’re not a business, and we have faith that our church will be rebuilt.”

After the 9/11 attacks, Archbishop Demetrios, the primate of the Greek Orthodox Church in America, vowed that the church would be rebuilt “on the same sacred spot, as a symbol of determined fate.”

“We were full of hope of a very quick rebuilding, so there is an amount of frustration,” the archbishop said on Saturday, addressing the congregation before leading a memorial service for Greek Orthodox families who had lost loved ones in the attacks. But, he added, “We seem to be very close now to the end of our waiting.”

That hint of hope stems from an announcement made in July by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the owner of the trade center site, which said it had reached a tentative agreement with the church that would help it begin to rebuild.

The deal calls for the authority to give the church $20 million to build at the northwest corner of Greenwich and Liberty Streets a larger church and a nondenominational hall for visitors to ground zero.

But nearly six months later, the agreement has yet to be finalized.”

Robert Schlesinger of US News and World Report, reports:
In case you missed it, Vice President Cheney has been let loose upon the countryside and, as usual, he’s full of something beyond just hot air (though he’s got plenty of that, too). From today’s New York Times:

Mr. Cheney said the Bush White House had been justified in expanding executive authority across a broad range of policy, including the war in Iraq, treatment of terrorism suspects and the domestic wiretapping program. And he said the president “doesn’t have to check with anybody”—not Congress, not the courts—before launching a nuclear attack to defend the nation “because of the nature of the world we live in” since the terrorist strikes of Sept. 11, 2001.

Because of the nature of the post-September 11 world? Does that mean that Cheney would not have advocated his imperial vision of the presidency on Sept. 10, 2001? That before 9/11 Cheney would have been a strong proponent of checks and balances, and only the shattering experience of watching the planes strike the twin towers altered his world view? (Trivia: Cheney was in a meeting with his speechwriter on the morning of 9/11.)

The answers are, of course, no. Cheney has long had a dismissive view of the legislative branch and is simply using the facts at hand to support his beliefs while pretending to be reacting to circumstances with fresh thinking.

That previous sentence could pretty well describe almost any Bush administration policy.