The Freedom Tower

While the various controversies surrounding “the tower” and the soaring costs of the proposed $1 billion WTC museum continue, at last one protest group got some good news recently.

Rosaleen Tallon, a spokesperson for a faction of WTC victim’s families, hailed a recent decision to display the names of victims at the site above ground, an idea put forward by cunsultant Frank Sciame. In a New York Daily News article, Tallon said the idea was “a leap forward in terms of what so many family members want,” said Tallon, whose brother Sean Tallon died on 9/11. He was a firefighter. Sciame’s proposal was presented to the governor and mayor last week and quickly hailed by Tallon and others who had opposed an earlier idea to display the names in underground parts of the proposed memorial.

Meanwhile, Financial Times columnist Christopher Grimes has added his two cents to the debate over what should be done with the WTC property. Writing for a website called Theaustralian.news.com, Grimes says designs for various “Freedom Tower” designs were too challenging for an architect. “It becomes doubly vexing when politicians, victims’ families, a powerful developer and even the police department have a seat at the drawing table. Weighing in on a complaint often repeated, that building a “Freedom Tower” will lure terrorists to resume their attacks inside our borders, Gimes says “why go through it with it.”

Instead, Grimes offers this idea: “There’s still time to change course and I have a proposal: New York needs an answer to the Eiffel Tower. It could easily satisfy the understandable desire to have a tall structure on the site, without the financial and security risks.

“As far as I know, this is not an idea under discussion, though the concept was floated by Paul Goldberger in the New Yorker in 2002. Detractors will say no one will build a big structure on the site that does not make money.

But some Americans have reserved a special kind of disdain for the French and their icons that is so strong, they attempted to erase something even more iconic in our culture than the Eiffel Tower – the French fry. No Mr. Grimes, a replica of a French tower on this side of the Atlantic is decidedly a very bad idea.

9/11 and the wars that came in their wake, made new men of us all.

It sent Corey off to fight a war the President said was being fought to keep our homeland safe. We know better now, but Corey’s back home, safe and a recent graduate of Western Connecticut State University (WCSU) in Danbury, Ct. despite all the hoopla made on his behalf and the soldiers like him by politicians who just can’t tell the truth. Corey seems to be adjusting just fine to being back home. At a graduation party held in his honor, he looked to the future, saying the pharmaceutical company where he works paid his tuition and has offered to continue to pay the bill if he decides to go to graduate school.

Corey is considering a master’s in a major that did not exist until after 9/11 – Homeland Security.

An online version of this degree is a master’s program in Homeland Security Management offered by Long Island University.

LIU opened what it called the Homeland Security Management Institute in the fall of 2005. One semester later, according to their online viewbook it quickly became one of the nation’s three leading graduate programs in something they now call the Homeland Security field. One year later, the school began offering a masters in homeland security management.

The Homeland Security Management Institute was soon commended as “one of the nation’s leading graduate programs in the Homeland Security/Homeland Defense field” by Dr. Paul Stockton, Associate Provost of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., which began offering the nation’s first graduate degree in Homeland Security in 2002. “The Institute’s Senior Fellows are the real deal,” Stockton says.

Stockton predicted LIU is going to be a national leader in homeland security education and cited its “special expertise” in criminology and law enforcement. “They know the real deal. They’ve [faculty] been in the NYPD and elsewhere,” according to the Government Innovators Network.

“A couple of us are retired, but others do the work that they teach,” said Vincent Henry, director of LIU’s Homeland Security Management Institute, of the 10 senior fellows, all of whom have either doctorates or law degrees.”

The network says the LIU faculty include a consultant on terrorism who had a 27-year career in the Queensland Police Service in Australia; a Los Angeles Police Department sergeant who is an aide to Chief William J. Bratton and who, as a Fulbright Scholar, studied counterterrorism at the Egyptian National Police Academy; the safety services administrator and chief of police for the city of Ann Arbor, Mich.; and a former dean at the U.S. Air Force Academy.”

That’s what makes it attractive for people who work in the field,” Henry said. A former Fulbright scholar, Henry is a 20-year veteran of the New York Police Department, and ran the special projects unit until he retired in 2002.”

America is still the land of opportunity for Corey, an MP whose first real job in the field was in Iraq. There would be no Freedom Tower, no 9/11 memorials, no NYFD fire chief in one of my English classes at WCSU.

The lives of men like Fire Chief Bob and a soldier named like Corey, were changed forever by 9/11

The biblical Tower of Babel in Mesopotamia (Iraq) may have been modeled after towers like this one, a common structure in the region. It is more than a simple irony that the toppling of icons like the WTC in the United States prompted a war in the same region where the Bible tells us a tower of Babel was raised in the 7th Century AD in what is now called Iraq.

In “Dispatches from Iraq: Soldiers’ Stories in a June issue of The New Yorker, Army Capt. Ryan Kelly sends this email to his mother from Kuwait:

“The worst thing here is not the searing heat or the cold nights. It’s the waiting. Waiting for the wind to quit blowing and the sand to quit grinding against your skin. Waiting for a moment of privacy in a tent packed with seventy other men, in a camp packed with seven hundred other tents, in a base packed with fifteen thousand soldiers, all looking for a clean place to go to the bathroom … Waiting for the bone-rattling coughs from dust finer than powdered sugar to stop attacking the lungs. Waiting for the generals to order the battalion to move north, toward Tikrit, where others – Iraqis – are waiting: waiting for us…”

I know about waiting, every man who has served in the military knows about hurrying up to wait.

Corey Newsom was a student at the same university that conferred a degree upon NYFD Chief Bob last month. In fact, Bob and Corey graduated in the same class. Corey’s education was interrupted by a tour of duty in Iraq where he served in a military police unit.

In the same classroom where I had first met Bob, I asked Corey what his job had been during the war. “Military police,” this shy man answered.

After some coaxing, however, he said his unit controlled the traffic, water, and electricity and they kept the peace in war-torn Iraq where Iraqi authorities have had little or no authority since the war began. Just weeks before Corey’s deployment over there was about to end, a patrol unit traveling through the city was blown up, killing or maiming most of the men inside. Corey’s vehicle was just behind the targeted vehicle and he escaped unscathed.

Back in the states and back in college, Corey felt the need to stop and talk to me one night after our class ended.

“You asked what my job was in Iraq,” he said. “My job, everybody’s job in Iraq was waiting for your turn to be blown the hell up. That was my job over there,” he said.

No Babel allowed.

“As the first tangible element of the Freedom Tower - and, by extension, the trade center redevelopment - and as an image seen nationwide on Independence Day, the cornerstone sent an aesthetic signal of intent.

And the signal seemed to reflect the inherent ambiguity of the project: a solemn memorial to 2,749 lives lost in the worst single catastrophe in New York history that is simultaneously supposed to be a defiant restatement of the city’s commercial gigantism.

Seen one way, the cornerstone’s darkness and plainness are memorial, even funereal. Seen another, the radiant silver-leaf letterforms conjure the exuberant, modernist, midcentury optimism of New York even as they augur the glass and stainless-steel tower to come.”

David Dunlap, New York Times

While debate over what to do in the wake of 9/11 rages on, there are still ways to take a sobering look at the legacies left to us by this event as the whirlwinds surrounding that day swoops around us like the gusts of wind that once howled in the plazas at Ground Zero before those towers were toppled.

When the towers fell that morning, I was teaching in a college classroom where cell phones that were normally silent, suddenly came to life with news of the impending collapse of America’s biggest symbols of wealth and power.

Less than two years later, a bespectacled, middle-aged man with a salt and pepper buzz cut hair, strode silently into that same classroom and took a seat in the English class I was teaching at Western Connecticut State University.  The university is in one of those border towns not far from the New York State line within commuting distance of Manhattan. It is not uncommon these days to see older men and woman in this setting, non-traditional students who come back to school for a wide variety of reasons. This man I will just call Bob for now, came back to school for very good reasons. I could feel it staring at me from behind those sad, intense eyes. I didn’t know it immediately, but Bob would soon become an authentic New York City hero in my eyes.

As a newsman who covered the five boroughs for the New York Local Desk of United Press International back in the 1970s, I had met many men like this guy Bob who was now enrolled in my journalism classes in Connecticut. There was something sober, intense and wanting behind this man’s eyes.

Over time, I learned that Bob was a working NYFD chief, but not just a desk jockey kind of chief. Bob was a battalion chief. He raced through the city’s streets in the middle of the night in heavy equipment, fire engine red equipment, to the scene of raging fires, while ordinary men like me, slept. He was that man every boy in America wanted to be at least once their life, a real life fire man.

Bob lived a double life.

In class, Bob was a quiet, intense, polite and curious man who wore a sleek, brown bomber’s jacket, sensible shoes and neat, open-neck collared shirts. But I could sense something else that lingered behind the eyes of this man I would find out was really a battalion chief whose station was somewhere in the Bronx. It reminded me of another man I knew here too, a former NYPD detective assigned for years to the Ft. Apache precinct in the Bronx.

Make no mistake about it, battalion chiefs are the guys you see at fires wearing the white hats. Unlike the more than 300 first responders in uniform who died at the WTC tragedy, Bob’s number wasn’t up on 9/11 but he is nevertheless a living reminder of a tragedy that befell us all more than five years ago.

Bob is no icon simply because he joined the NYFD decades ago and survived 9/11 because his battalion wasn’t called to the WTC. He is a certified, card-carrying NYFD chief and according to a slew of witnesses, he became a hero and a living legend in a most unusual way. In fact, he is a casualty of 9/11 as sure as the victims whose remains were never recovered were victimized by those events downtown. But Bob rose above the fray of controversy, the stench of death and destruction and literally flew away to live another day.

When the time is right, I will tell Bob’s whole story on this blog. You can judge the merits of this All-American tale I will tell. I promise that in it, you will see the footprints of the many shoes left for men like Bob to fill. Bob is a guy who deserves to wear the white hat of 9/11, a living legacy we can all be proud of whether you like the idea of a Freedom Tower, or not.

The state of New York moved forward today, floating $1.6 billion in tax-exempt bonds to finance construction of three towers at the site of the World Trade Center. This new money comes on the heels of $8 billion in Liberty Bonds issued by the feds after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and $3.5 billion in Liberty Bonds issued to build the Freedom Tower and one other building at the site.

While the local news about the fate of WTC rebuilding projects remains mixed, WTC leaseholder and downtown developer Larry Silverstein remains predictably optimistic about these projects. Silverstein was quoted in the People’s Daily in China today as saying the development plans that include the Freedom Tower, other skyscrapers and a museum will all be spectacular and when finished, these new WTC buildings will be “magnificent” tributes to those who lost their lives on 9/11.

Silverstein is campaigning to counter mounting criticism over soaring costs of the museum project and speculation that the PA will fail in its bid to fill the new WTC buildings with new tenants. But Silverstein is quoted in the China daily as saying rents in lower Manhattan are nearly 50% cheaper than other parts of Manhattan, making his projects attractive properties to potential renters.

Larry Silverstein, the lease- holder of the World Trade Center site, said Wednesday that development plans for Lower Manhattan are “spectacular” and said both the Freedom Tower and the memorial will get built. He also expressed optimism about the new office, retail and mass transit projects, as well as the fate of the much-anticipated memorial. “That will get done, that will get built, and when it is finished, it will be a “magnificent tribute to those who lost their lives on 9/11,” Silverstein said.

At issue is the soaring cost of the memorial. Gov. George Pataki is expected to receive a report today outlining some alternatives in order to keep the project cost effective. The other major issue is whether or not the PA will be able to rent office space in the Freedom Tower and other WTC buildings.

Silverstein said rents in Lower Manhattan are about 46 percent less than those in Midtown and that he hopes it is a disparity that will encourage corporations to move Downtown. “His optimistic tone formed a striking contrast to Anthony Coscia, head of the Port Authority,the agency that owns the WTC site,” the newspaper said. Coscia said earlier that the Freedom Tower may have to be scaled back if government officials do not lease enough office space. Coscia said Port Authority’s ability to secure a mortgage on the tower may hinge on whether government tenants can fill 1 million square feet of office space or nearly 40 percent of the building by September.

The stench over this controversy is not just being aired as far away as China, it could be found in the Canadian capital of Ottawa today too.

On Ottawa Watch, bloggers took aim at obvious problems with the whole downtown development scheme, saying realtors probably won’t be earning massive commissions on this real estate anytime soon despite much boasting by Silverstein, Pataki and others.

When the news conferences end, the media departs and we are left to sort all of this out over Buds and Cosmo’s after work, we start to hear the voices of the man on the street who always seems knows fact from fiction.

It has nearly been five years since the Twin Towers were toppled. “A couple of weeks ago, I was talking to a friend who is a lawyer working next door to the Freedom Tower site,” the Canadian blogger said. “Beyond the obvious concern - that you might as well paint a huge bull’s-eye on it, the fears over terrorist attack, combined with no need to find a new office, will prompt most companies to take a pass … that Freedom Tower will also be Ghost Town.”

It’s no wonder that Silverstein is touting downtown real estate as a bargain. Rents were cheap in Death Valley, Nevada too back in the day.

A scaled back version of the Tower. That seems to be the newest, latent  plan for The Tower, subtly unveiled yesterday by Port Authority chairman Anthony Coscia at his breakfast news conference yesterday.

The PA has the task of lining up tenants to make the $1.2 billion office building a financially viable venture. The newest deadline for doing that is September.”If those resources are not sufficient to build it, then obviously our commitment to build it has to be modified,” the New York Daily News quotes Coscia as saying.

“The only thing the Port Authority has not committed to doing is spending whatever it takes to build the Freedom Tower.”

The PA itself will occupy office space in the building on Church Street but even some PA employees headquartered at the World Trade Center have expressed some concerns about going back to work at WTC.

What began as a grand plan to create a respectable memorial site to be proud of has deteriorated into a forest of knotty pine.

Tom Engelhardt, in writing for Salon.com, called it “the billion dollar gravestone.” In a recent column, he noted that the commission charged with building a memorial at the WTC called Reflecting Absence says the 9/11 memorial now planned by the government, carries a $1 billion price tag and the meter is still running.

The plan for “Reflecting Absence” calls for two, very large reflecting pools, two “voids” inside of the original footprint of the Twin Towers.” There will be waterfalls on all sides of these pools which will be surrounded by a forest of oak trees.

The billion dollar initial costs does not include an $80 million visitor’s center, and an operating budget of at least $50 million for running this memorial and museum, according to current plans.

All of this seems to add up to what Salon called hubris and government arrogance. It seems to me that this is a clear case of those in charge once again not being able to see the forest for the trees. But, at least this time, there might be enough wood in this billion dollar park for the rest of us to knock on just for luck, lots of luck.

When the landmark start of construction of the Freedom Tower began yesterday, it was witnessed, documented and captured by a series of little eyes that will eventually be able to tell us the whole story of what happened in the aftermath of the worse terrorists attack in American history.

Six months after World Trade Center buildings were toppled and the world changed forever, six 35 mm time-lapse video cameras went up around the site. Night and day, the cameras are on 24/7 and will remain on the job until construction at the site is complete. The work of Project Rebirth, the film will become the centerpiece of a twenty-minute documentary of the reconstruction.

What Project Rebirth cameras cannot tell us about are the doubts that still linger over the future of such an iconic undertaking.

The New York Observer this morning reported that Port Authority Chairman Anthony Coscia revived old concerns at a breakfast meeting hosted by the tri-state bureaucracy. The tower suffers the same fate of every construction project in Manhattan. Will builders be able to garner the kind of leases that will make the project financially sound? This project raises that question more loudly, more often because of all the swirling controversy that surrounds this construction.  Ownership of the property was transferred from Silverstein Properties to the Port Authority last spring. The authority has the daunting task of leasing one million square feet, mainly to government entities. This task has to largely be completed by September.

In many ways, yesterdays test blasts in preparation for pouring footings to raise the Tower was like every other groundbreaking backed by politicians and the bluster they always bring to this kind of party. You had New York Gov. George Pataki, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine along with developer Larry Silverstein. These dignitaries lined a ramp leading down to the site. They shook the hands of the hardhat workers who came to start the prep work for construction that is slated to begin on Thursday.

There are no committed tenants for the Tower building even though politicians promise they will solicit and garner leases with city, state and federal officials. When Silverstein completed construction of the new 7 World Trade Center nearby, he was hopeful that project would transcend the same leasing problems the new Tower faces when it is completed. Completed in 2005, to date, most of the 1.7 million square feet of office space office space at #7 remains empty.

When the sun rises on the Manhattan skyline on Monday, it will be the dawn of more than just another day in the history of this city. New Yorkers will again feel the rumble of thundering blasts coming from the site of Ground Zero.This time, it will be the rumble of demolition crews, setting off test blasts beneath “The Pits” concrete floor 85 feet below the street on the northwest corner of Vesey and West Streets in preparation for setting footings for the Freedom Tower.Like the setting of the famed novel of the same name, this is a tale of two cities, one that existed before two jet liners were crashed into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center; the other, a city that could no longer sleep after that fateful day on September 11, 2001 when the world watched while massive structures at the seven building World Trade Center complex were toppled like the paper Mache structures of a Godzilla movie. Next week, the first skyscraper to be rebuilt on the site since Sept. 11 on the site of the former 7 World Trade Center - Freedom Tower - begins to go up on the site of 7 World Trade Center, the third building to collapse during the terrorist attacks in the city five years ago.As the 1,776-foot office tower goes up, so will the controversy surrounding the reconstruction of buildings on the Port Authority property rise too. Some say these are the best of times, reviving an American spirit that was temporarily dashed when 2,986 people perished in the terrorist attacks. Others say it is the dawning of worse times to come or a “bring it on” dare to terrorists to revisit New York and America by resuming the war on terror against us here on these shores, not in Afghanistan or Iraq.