The Freedom Tower

From The New York Sun

Lower Manhattan: From Drain to Magnet

BY MICHAEL STOLER
July 6, 2006
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/35486

In December 2001, a headline in a local tabloid read: “People are fleeing lower Manhattan faster than the survivors on the Titanic.” How times have changed.

The future seems very bright for development in the third-largest business district in the country - and the city’s fastest-growing residential community.

Last week, a new design for the Freedom Tower was unveiled and Governor Pataki announced that U.S. Customs and Border Protection could be the anchor tenant.

Meanwhile, industry leaders expect Larry Silverstein’s 7 World Trade Center to be fully leased by spring 2007. Moody’s Investors Service last week announced plans to lease 600,000 square feet in the tower. With this lease and the announcement in January that Beijing Vantone had agreed in principal to lease 200,000 square feet, about 50% of the tower has been leased. More than 10 other companies are reported to be in final negotiations to lease space in the tower.

Commercial and residential tenancy is booming in Battery Park City. Last week, BearingPoint, formerly the consulting division of the accounting firm KPMG LLP, announced it will relocate its financial services group to 52,000 square feet at 3 World Trade Center in Battery Park City from 757 Third Ave. The firm will earn a $2.4 million federal job creation and retention grant. In addition, the company is seeking another $700,000 in incentives available in Lower Manhattan.

“Our move will strengthen our ties to the financial community and support the rebirth of Lower Manhattan,” the CEO of BearingPoint, Harry You, said.

A prominent New York City landlord who asked not to be identified said he opposed the idea of offering incentives to such companies such as BearingPoint. “Companies who move from Midtown to Lower Manhattan should not gain the credits and incentives,” he said. “Companies who relocate from outside of Manhattan should be the beneficiaries, no one else”.

The Battery Park City Authority last month announced it had designated Milstein Properties as the developer for two “green” residential towers on the last remaining undeveloped residential site in the area. The towers will include a total of 421 condominium apartments and 50,000 square feet will be devoted to a community center. The site is on North End Avenue between Warren and Murray streets.

In addition, four new condominiums are under construction in Battery Park City, as is the new world headquarters of Goldman Sachs.

A few months ago, P.J. Clarke’s opened at the World Financial Center. “We love our downtown location with the same benefits of Midtown,” one of the principal owners of the restaurant and chairman of global resources at CB Richard Ellis, Stephen Siegel, said. “We are in the heart of a business community, and our proximity to Battery Park City gives us the benefits of a residential neighborhood.”

North of the World Trade Center site, Edward J. Minskoff Organization is building a mixed-use development on Greenwich Street overlooking West Street and Battery Park City. The development will rise on a formerly vacant city-owned parcel. The developer paid $110 million for the lot, one of the highest prices every paid for a city-owned site.

The development will include 228 residential condominiums and 162 mixed-income market-rate rental units. There will be 400 underground parking spaces and 170,000 square feet of retail that will house a Whole Foods market, a Barnes & Noble bookstore, and a Bank of America branch.

“Finally, the realization that the downtown office market is thriving, and in the last year over 1 million square feet of office space has been signed by tenants relocating from Midtown,” the president of Rudin Management, William Rudin, who is chairman of the Association for a Better New York, said. “These tenants represent a change in the type of companies that are moving to the city. The tenant mix is changing from a financial segment to media and commercial.

“In 2000, the financial segment represented 62% of the commercial tenants, while today it is 40% and the balance of tenants from government, legal, media, nonprofits is taking over,” he said.

“The downtown office market is on fire,” Mr. Siegel, said. “I anticipated and began speaking about it three years ago, and the time has come. Large blocks of space are disappearing rapidly, and rents after a period of gradual increases are starting to move up more aggressively.

“Downtown continues to gain comfort as a 24-hour, 7 day a week community where people work, live, and play,” he said.

With the recent announcements that Tiffany and Hermes are joining BMW, Hickey Freeman, and Borders in Lower Manhattan, many other retailers are expected to flock to the area.

“We are all seeing the focus on high-profile and ‘luxury’ retail tenants leasing space in the Financial District,” the director of retail services at Cushman & Wakefield, Joanne Podell, said. “I don’t think that is the real story.The market is already viable and proven to be successful for many retailers - for example Ann Taylor, Nine West, Borders, and recently Sephora. It is more the idea of both these and future retailers being ahead of the curve with regard to lower rents and securing the best locations. “Retailers that choose to lease now will reap the benefit of the strong residential market that is being built. The phenomena, along with a strong office component, community services, and local attractions, will cause many retailers to consider downtown as a place to expand and position themselves now as well as in the future,” she said.

“Downtown continues to evolve as a rejuvenated community offering both office and residential projects, and increasing retail, entertainment, and other necessary amenities to support the successful transition of an officeonly environment to a balanced 24/7 community” the chairman of the national real estate practice Greenberg Traurig LP, Robert Ivanhoe, said.

Investment bankers and real estate lenders have been bullish on financing projects in Lower Manhattan.

Recently, the 21-story, 1 million square foot headquarters of the Metropolitan Transit Authority at 2 Broadway obtained complex subordinate financing through zero coupon bonds.

A national historic landmark, the 41-story, 1.8 million square foot Equitable Building at 120 Broadway, owned by a joint venture of Silverstein Properties and the California State Teachers Retirement System, obtained a $285 million loan from Morgan Stanley Mortgage Capital.

A number of Lower Manhattan office buildings are being marketed for sale. These properties include the 11-story, 336,000 square foot Class B office building at 99 Church St. owned by Moody’s Investors Service. Industry leaders expect this building to be converted into residential condominiums.

The 32-story, 295,000 square foot One Exchange Place at 55 Broadway, built in 1981, just fetched $82 million. Industry leaders expect the new owners to continue to operate the tower as a commercial office property.

The New York Sun has learned that a major Class A office building in the Financial District is expected to be marketed for sale this fall.The property is expected to fetch close to $400 million.

Massey Knakal Realty Services is marketing a development site at 80-84 Nassau St. on about 263,000 developable feet at an asking price of $72 million. The site, which can accommodate a 52-story residential tower, is south of the planned 75-story mixed-use tower for Forest City Ratner at 8 Spruce St., on the former parking lot of New York Downtown Hospital. That tower, to contain 666 rental and condominium apartments, will be the tallest building downtown other than the planned Freedom Tower. A new public school will be located in the base of the building.

A 10-story addition is planned for a seven-story building at 111 Fulton St. When completed, the building will house 289 residential condominiums.

A 30-story condominium tower with 100 units is planned at 133 Greenwich St., aka 25 Thames St.

One of downtown’s major developers, Joseph Moinian, is planning a 53-story building that would house a 220-room W hotel and 180 residential condominiums at 123 Washington St.

Hotelier Andre Balazs has teamed with owner SDS Investments to co-develop 15 William St., a 400,000 square foot residential condominium development.

By the end of the year, the 83-room Downtown Hotel on Greenwich Street and North Moore Street in TriBeCa, owned by Richard Born, Ira Drucker and Robert DeNiro, is expected to open.

The 45-room Loft hotel, developed by Sam Chang’s McSam Hotels and Hersha Group, is expected to open this summer at 130 Duane St.

These and many other signs indicate that Lower Manhattan is on the rise and will grow over the next the decade.
Mr. Stoler is a television broadcaster and senior vice president for a title insurance company. He can be reached at mstoler@newyorkrealestatetv.com.

From The New York times
A Pot of Tax-Free Bonds for Post-9/11 Projects Is Empty
By TERRY PRISTIN

A milestone was reached in the federal Liberty Bonds program, which was created to help Lower Manhattan and the New York economy recover from the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks by giving developers access to billions of dollars in low-cost tax-exempt financing.

Once officials issue the bonds that were earmarked recently, the $8 billion designated for the program will be depleted, ending a program that critics say has benefited developers and high-profile corporations at the expense of ordinary New Yorkers.

As part of an agreement reached with the developer Larry A. Silverstein in April, the city Industrial Development Agency gave preliminary approval to using all but $50 million of its remaining bond authorization for projects at the World Trade Center site, including $702 million for the Freedom Tower and the retail portion of the office buildings, which will be owned by the Port Authority. (Mr. Silverstein’s recently opened 7 World Trade Center received $475 million in Liberty Bonds; three additional towers on the site will receive $2.6 billion, provided that Mr. Silverstein meets his deadlines.)

The other $50 million in bonds was tentatively approved for a 220-room luxury hotel to be developed by the Moinian Group, a New York developer, on a site south of ground zero adjacent to the Deutsche Bank Building, which is scheduled for demolition.
Joseph Moinian, the chief executive, applied for Liberty Bond financing more than a year ago and watched with concern while other projects, like the new 43-story Goldman Sachs headquarters on West Street, got ahead of him in line. He had said that without tax-free financing he would be unable to include a hotel in his 53-story project at 123 Washington Street because the returns to his investors would not be enough to justify the risk. The $240 million building, to be designed by Gwathmey Siegel & Associates, will also have 180 residential condominiums.

The hotel financing is contingent on a required survey of the demand for rooms in Lower Manhattan. Real estate specialists say, however, that the study is likely to show that Lower Manhattan, which has only 2,500 rooms, is not now meeting the demand.
Mr. Moinian said his hotel would cater to tourists and office workers. “You need hotels, restaurants and places to hang out,’’ he said. “We don’t have that right now in this part of town.’’ Getting preliminary approval for the bonds will enable him to negotiate with

Posted on Alt.gossip.celebrities on Google Groups By KATHERINE ROTH, Associated Press

NEW YORK - Millions of dollars worth of art, including works by masters such as Alexander Calder, Louise Nevelson, Joan Miro and Roy Lichtenstein, was damaged or destroyed by the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.

“The terrorist attack not only destroyed human lives but it was an attack on our financial community, on our freedoms, on our very culture and civilization,” said Sally Webster, professor of art history at City University’s graduate center and Lehman College.

With the exception of Miro, the art in the Trade Center was done by Americans, she said.

“That their work should be attached to this important symbol of our city and country was not accidental,” Webster said. “This was us at our best.”

The works, reportedly worth about $10 million, include a bright red 25-foot Calder sculpture, the 1971 “Red Stabile,” at 7 world Trade Center; a painted wood relief by Nevelson entitled “Sky Gate, New York,” which hung in 1 World Trade Center; a painting by Lichtenstein from his “Enablature” series that had been in the lobby of 7 World Trade Center; and Miro’s “World Trade Center” tapestry from 1974 that was on display in 2 World Trade Center.

It is not yet known how many of the works are salvageable.

But Karen Yager, an independent conservator working for various downtown art groups, said that one of Nevelson’s works looked good, as did a piece by Dubuffet. Glimpses of Lichtenstein’s 30-foot sculpture, “Modern Head,” have been seen on television news clips covered in dust and debris.

“Over time, we’re worried about acidity and stuff like that eating into the stone work of buildings with carved facades and decorative elements,” she said.

Great works of art, sometimes linked to a nation’s spirit or history, often have been threatened or destroyed by acts of terrorism or war.

During World War II, many important works were destroyed in Europe. And in 1920, during strife in Germany, stray bullets damaged the Rubens painting “Bathsheba.” Most recently, Taliban rulers in Afghanistan blew up two giant statues of Buddha, chiseled into a cliff in the central Bamiyan Valley more than 1,500 years ago. The Taliban said the art was idolatrous and against the tenets of Islam.

But at times, some art has been saved.

During the War of 1812, First Lady Dolley Madison rescued a famous Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington from the White House as the British entered Washington. And during World War II, many priceless works of art were removed from American museums and placed in protected vaults for safekeeping, because of fears of possible attacks on U.S. soil.

In the rubble of the Trade Center, the remains of “Double Check,” a bronze sculpture by J. Seward Johnson Jr. of a businessman looking inside his briefcase, has become a makeshift memorial, with a bouquet of flowers and a note scrawled on a piece of white, lined paper: “In memory of those who gave their lives to try and save so many.” It is signed by almost a dozen people.

“It’s rather weird that such an easy, forgettable work should become so poignant,” said Tom Eccles, director of the nonprofit Public Art Fund, which places artwork throughout the city.

The attacks will not lessen the demand for public art, Eccles said, but themes will probably change. Webster agreed.

“The demand will be for works that are more hefty, less decorative and corporate-feeling,” he said. “I think works will be more interactive rather than a piece of sculpture in a plaza or a tapestry on the wall.”

Bruce Ferguson, dean of the Graduate School of the Arts at Columbia University, said that over the past decade, much public art has reflected an urban irony and cynicism.

“Artists have often dealt with the dark side of the world, and have made works of art symbolic of those moments which help us to work our way through the traumas,” he said, citing Goya’s “Disasters of War” series and Picasso’s “Guernica,” a protest against the bombing of a Basque town during the Spanish Civil War.

“Perhaps there will be a ‘Guernica’ of the World Trade Center,” added Casey Blake, director of the American Studies program at Columbia. “The mural was a reaction to the aerial bombing of civilians. This is the terrorist equivalent, and maybe someone will be able to capture the primal scream we are feeling.”

Posted on Google Groups
By Bill Mulcahy

4th Anniversary Of Flt. 587 Crash!!!
As Bill Sees It: (Editorial) Flt. 587:

A House Quickly Built Instead of A Memorial:

It was sad to see hundreds of people at a forth anniversary memorial service for the victims of Flight 587. The ceremony was held at the site of the crash which occurred in a wealthy, white community of Belle Harbor in Rockaway, N.Y. City.

The neighborhood was home to numerous first responders to the World Trade Center disaster. Less than a month after 9/11, Flight 587 crashed and burned in the neighborhood. A battalion led one of the companies that were called to fight the fire from the Bronx. When they firefighters arrived, they weren’t sure at first why the neighborhood was so familiar, but later it dawned on one of their chiefs. The firefighters had been to Belle Harbor many times recently, to attend funeral services for 9/11 victims.

All there is at the site now is a tiny plaque on the curb because the residents of Belle Harbor (five of which were killed when the crash occurred) objected to the building of a memorial on the actual site. Rather than turn the site into a park in memory of the crash, the city quickly built a house on the site to discourage the use of site as a memorial. Mourners were reduced to throwing flowers on the lawn of the newly-built house. The area of the crash, Belle Harbor, is very protective of the use of their area by the public. While other residential areas of Rockaway allow year-round parking for the public, Belle Harbor is allowed to restrict parking to only residents, thereby keeping the public beaches only for their use and excluding the poor and minorities New Yorkers!! That is the racism and politics that is really behind this controversy. The Belle Harbor community which got few overflights before the crash, used the crash to lobby for even less overflights, while their poorer and minority neighbors got their heavy overflight load increased. The Associated Press conveniently ignored the memorial site controversy.

A House Built To Prevent A Memorial For Flt. 587 Victims: NEW YORK — Scores of families gathered in a seaside neighborhood Saturday to observe the fourth anniversary of one of the nation’s deadliest airline disasters. The crash of American Airlines Flight 587 on a quiet residential block in the Belle Harbor section of Queens killed 265 people — including five on the ground — on Nov. 12, 2001, at a time when the city was still reeling from the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. The families have suffered other frustrations. In July, Port Authority officials unveiled a memorial park at West 177th Street in honor of those killed on Flight 587, but did not invite the families. And some family members were disappointed that the monument in Belle Harbor will not be at the crash site, but rather, 15 blocks away. New houses have been built on the site of the crash.

Lun Feng, chairman of Beijing Vantone Real Estate Co., Ltd and World Trade Center Developer Larry Silverstein reached an agreement last January.

Feng was going to create the China Center, a business and cultural facility to represent China’s vibrant business community and locate it in 7 World Trade Center.

The company is one of China’s largest private real estate developers. As part of the agreement, the company was going to lease 200,000 square feet of office space on the top five floors of the building. When the deal was announced, it was applauded as a landmark partnership that would build a bridge between the US and Chinese business communities.

Vantone pulled out of the deal this week, according to the Reuters News Service. “A Chinese firm failed to deliver the financing to lease the top five floors of the first building to open at the site of the former World Trade Center, killing the deal.” The news service quoted Silverstein as saying the deal was dead.

“But the Chinese company insisted it wants to go ahead with the deal,” Reuters said. Silverstein said the company “failed to make the financial deposit needed to secure the top five floors of 7 World Trade Center. After the China Center’s failure to deliver their letter of credit on Monday … the fourth time they missed an agreed deadline to post security – discussions about the China Center taking space … have concluded.

The failed deal was characterized by a spokesman for Silverstein as “a minor and temporary setback in the building’s leasing efforts.” He said the company is currently in talks with other potential tenants for the 52 story building but the China Center was the first major company to agree to occupy the building.

However, Xue Ya, an official for the China Center, said the company remains committed to leasing space in the building. Xue said the deadlines imposed by Silverstein were never agreed upon.

The Tower project has been plagued from the start with discord and disorder ever since word went out that the Port Authority would rebuild a new World Trade Center at Ground Zero.

Always at the center of this whirlwind has been celebrity architect Daniel Libeskind whose master plan was picked in an international competition in 2003.

Since that time, major elements of his blueprints have been modified, altered and redesigned but he still says his vision for the project will be realized.

It hasn’t been an easy project for the 60-year-old naturalized US citizen. “The role of scapegoat is not one the architect appreciates,” says the Mail & Guardian online edition, an African newspaper. “Sure it bothers me,” he said in a briefing to foreign correspondents in New York. “Had I only the power to drive the project myself, I would have done it differently,” he said.

After numerous delay and haggling over the design, plaques, the museum and where the names of victims should appropriately be displayed at Ground Zero, construction of the Freedom Tower finally began in April. “The arrival of giant easth movers at the site was hailed as turning the page on the bitter disputes over who will build what, where, when and at what cost,” the news agency said. “Added to the mix have been the emotive voices of the September 11 victims’ relatives, as well as those of concerned New Yorkers – all with very precise design ideas of their own.

“There is not a single part of this project that is uncontested. There is no single element that is not subject to great controversy,” Libeskind said. “But then, this is New York. It is only natural that in a democracy, the turmoil of these pushes and pulls takes place,” he said. “My role is not to build all the buildings. There are many architects. My role is to make sure that all the elements respond to the original idea of the master plan,” he said. “It is more like writing a score and conducting an orchestra. You are not the player, but there to make sure there is harmony between all the different pieces.”

The new tower design has also lost perhaps the most conspicuous feature of its predecessor: the high-rise wind farm. A bold and innovative use of unoccupied space, the forest of wind turbines served as a message to the public that sustainability was a major aspiration of the developers and designers. However these massive machines inevitably resist moving air, undermining the aerodynamic nature of the building’s design. The circular motion of these components may also incite vibrations in the frame of the building - a phenomenon that at once may cause discomfort to occupants and instability in the structure.

Although the wind farm has disappeared, the redesigned structure promises to retain the ideals of “green buildings” for, as Silverstein has put it, “the tower will have all the bells and whistles of sustainability and then some.” These environmentally conscious systems take modest forms; most will likely remain invisible to the eye of the observer. However these systems, when combined into a single structure, have the potential to reduce building energy consumption by a magnitude at least comparable to the foregone wind farm, which itself was expected to generate up to 20% of the building’s annual power needs.

Instead of harvesting large amounts of energy, the building will be designed to approach sustainability through conservation. Ultra-clear glass will allow more natural light into the building, reducing the consumption of electric energy for lights. “Outside air ventilation” strategies will assist in naturally regulating the climate, curbing the need for air conditioning.

But perhaps the most significant renewable system announced by the design team is the inclusion of rainwater collection devices. In a city where overwhelming seasonal demand for purified water puts tremendous strains on an aging supply system, this inclusion illustrates that sustainable building technology can be more than mere “bells and whistles” when the natural limitations of the surrounding environment are considered. Collected rainwater, often referred to as “grey water,” is typically used in supply systems for restroom toilets and fire sprinklers.

Jennifer Philbin
New York, New York

I’ve lived in Manhattan since I was nine years old. As it happened, in 2001, I had just rented a small apartment in LA where I was thinking of relocating for work. I planned to fly back from LA to NY on September 10th, after an impromptu weekend trip my boyfriend had planned for me, but I had to extend my stay to deal with flood damage in my apartment from a minor earthquake that had just occurred.

I woke up the morning of September 11 a little after 6 AM west coast time to the non-stop beeping of my cell-phone. I had sixteen messages from friends who assumed I was in NY. I had no idea what was going on. After the flood, they’d cleared everything out of my apartment, so I had nothing—no TV, no Internet access, no landline phones. I tried on my cell to reach my family and friends in NY but all I got was the all circuits busy message. I knew virtually no one in LA and was there all alone. I went into the courtyard and a neighbor, who I’d never met, told me that we’d been attacked by terrorists and brought me to her apartment to get more news. For hours, I watched and heard about people trying to evacuate the city, doing anything they could to leave Manhattan, when all I wanted to do was get back there.

I took one of the first flights back to New York from LA on the evening of Friday, September 14th. We were told to arrive at the airport several hours in advance. Security was intense; we went through one-by-one, and inside we weren’t allowed any utensils for dinner. We didn’t know up until practically the moment we boarded whether our flight would take off, but no one complained. There were about fifty of us in the small Long Beach airport and we sat in the airport bar together for hours. Like strangers everywhere, we shared an immediate bond. But we also shared a sense of uncertainty. As much as we wanted to get home, we couldn’t deny the fear we inevitably had to be among the first back in the air since the attacks, especially on a cross-country trip. We all made a lot of calls to our family and friends as we waited; we didn’t acknowledge even to ourselves that they were potentially to say goodbye.

The plane approached New York City at sunrise on September 15th and the pilot announced that he would fly low over the World Trade Center site so that we could see it from the left side of the plane; he actually let the people on the right side of the plane walk over and have a seat, so we could all share in a moment of silence and say a prayer. He knew we were all New Yorkers coming home. The fires were still burning and smoking below; I had seen nothing but this image on TV for the last three days, but flying over it in person, seeing a firsthand birds eye view, was when it hit me. The person next to me, who I’d known for less than twenty-four hours, took my hand.

Replica of World Trade Center wall built at MIT as place for reflections, flowers September 15, 2001

“The Reflecting Wall at MIT,” is a 12-by-25-foot wooden replica of a fragment of the wall of the World Trade Center installed next to the MIT Chapel. It was conceived as a temporary space where people may pause to reflect on the more than 5,000 people who died in New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania after terrorists piloted hijacked airplanes.

The committee and student representatives worked side by side with Assistant Professor of Architecture John Fernandez, who was studying the blueprints and structure of the 30-year-old buildings the day after the disaster.

Fernandez proposed an actual-size wall fragment, abstracted to wood rather than aluminum, of “the icon of New York” in memory of all victims of the Sept. 11 terrorist actions. At the dedication ceremony, he said one of the images that stayed in his mind was that of the people inside who pressed against the skyscraper’s windows, trying to escape the flames.

“This is the first project I’ve ever worked on that I wish that it had never been built,” Fernandez said. “But after Tuesday, it had to be built.”

One feature that wasn’t in the original wall are the slots below the window ledges, which were requested by students for letters, notes and memorabilia.

The structure was measured, sawn, nailed, filed, sanded, painted and installed in less than 30 hours by the MIT Facilities Department, under the general supervision of Joe Vella and Robin Arena, and project supervision by David McCormick.

Carpenters working on the project were Gerry Cellucci, Tim Donaghey, Rick Hadge, Bob Stewart, Ken Winn and Ed Moore. Metal shop work was done by Neil Cunningham; Paul Desharnais and Carlos Pereira were the painters.

From the World Trade Center Foundation

A high-school student’s 9/11 story from the Midwest

For me, September 11, 2001 will always live in my memory. I was a senior at a rural high school in Western Ohio. The beginning of that school year just two weeks before 9/11 brought many happy things to my life: I was the head of the tuba section in my marching band, I was in the Art Club (to which I dearly loved doing), I was actively involved in our German Club, and I was making a good name and spot for myself at my high school. That one morning in September, however, forever changed the work in which I loved to do the most — art.

When we came back from our Labor Day vacation the week before 9/11, our art instructor (I had art 1st period of the day, which began at 7:50am) told us that she wanted us to create a picture with people in it-it could be anything we wanted, just as long as it had people in it; a “people picture.” Now I was close to my art teacher at my high school, she was a veteran art teacher for some 26 years at the time, and she said I had so much potential and her and I worked closely on developing my art skills over a couple of years at my school. I have always had a love for tall buildings and cities in general, I draw them all the time. However, unknowingly to me, this “people picture” would be different from any other picture that I would create for quite possibly the rest of my life. As it turns out, our art teacher gave her guidelines about what she wanted in the pictures that Tuesday right after our Labor Day holiday, and so that gave me a little time to sit down and think about what I was going to do. I wanted to do a city scene, which for me was nothing new at all. I wanted this one to be different, however, and as I was looking at a skyscraper book I had at home that Tuesday night, I decided to draw the World Trade Center, from the ground, complete with the Marriott hotel, and draw some people standing on steps in between the two towers.

I started working on my “people picture” that Wednesday after Labor Day (9/5/01), and worked hard on it until that Friday. After we came back from the weekend that following Monday, I finished the sketching part of the piece and began to color it. Since my art period was a “block,” I had 90 minutes each day to work on projects. That Tuesday, September 11th, I remember walking in the art room at 7:45, pulling out my picture (a couple of people commented on it, because mine was the most “vertical” picture in the room), and set down to work on it. Once the announcements for the day ended, I began to work in earnest to complete the picture. At about 8:30am, our Art teacher walked out of the room to run down to the office. I was still working hard on the picture at 8:55 when our teacher ran into our room crying saying “something has happened in New York” as she ran to turn on the tv. My classmates were witnesses-my coloring pencil just fell out of my right hand when I saw the image of the WTC on the tv. As it turns out, that would be the last marks ever made on my “people picture” of the World Trade Center-it is to me personally a living memorial to the events of that day. Now, obviously throughout the rest of that week I had thoughts as to finishing the piece, but ultimately I wanted to keep it just like it was-unfinished and incomplete. My piece was hung in the lobby display at our high school in early October, it’s incompleteness representing how quickly the events of that day happened, and how victims of 9/11 had their lives taken away so quickly-so many young lives with so many dreams wiped away with the destruction of the towers. I still have my WTC “people picture”, still the only incomplete piece I’ve ever started; it still looks exactly the same as it did at 8:55am on September 11th, 2001.