The Freedom Tower

The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, the agency set up to rebuild downtown Manhattan and specifically Ground Zero, is apparently closing its doors.
Too little, too soon?
Much remains left to do. Freedom Tower is going up but far from finished. There is still contamination that has to be removed. The memorial and museum is still in the early planning stages. The money needed to complete most of the construction still has to be raised.
Market Place on PBS weekend radio compared shutting the LMDC to America’s sudden and abrupt pull out of Vietnam in 1975 when Saigon fell.
“What they’re doing right now reminds me of that suggestion back in the ’60s that the way out of Vietnam was simply to declare that we had won the war and leave,” said architecture critic for the New Yorker, Paul Golberger. “LMDC has sort of declared that it’s won and is disbanding. But, in fact, it hasn’t won anymore than we won in Vietnam. “It’s, in fact, leaving a very incomplete, uncertain project behind that’s in a lot of chaos and confusion.”
The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation was created in the aftermath of September 11, 2001 by Governor Pataki and then-Mayor Giuliani to help plan and coordinate the rebuilding and revitalization of Lower Manhattan, defined as everything south of Houston Street.
In a nation and a city where burdensome bureaucracies like the now overweight, bloated Department of Home Land Security are created, blow up and spread like the wide behind of an old ox that no longer pulls its own weight, an agencies that gets things rolling, then puts itself out of business might truly be a sign of progress.