The Freedom Tower

My singular fondness for clichés almost found it’s way into The Times, America’s newspaper of record but The Times rescued its own reputation by asking the question, “is imitation the sincerest form of architecture?”
I’m sure I do not have to remind the editors of The Times that the hackneyed phrase they meant to honor is “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.” I would have had no problems using it myself, because I think highly of the judicious use of the well places cliché.
So, I’m no stranger to trite phrases that still do the job of newer versions of the likes of “the early bird gets the worm,” or “in for a penny, in for a pound” phrases. I’m also no stranger to getting beat on stories since I gave up being a newsman years ago in favor of writing longer pieces that sometimes turn into books on obscure or neglected subjects like the long-dead savings and loan scandals of the 1980s. So, who gets the story first these days is a very hard nut for me to crack in these times of so-called instant news. News is a relative commodity and it seems as if everybody is claiming to be on first, even Fox, a network that hasn’t bothered to let the facts ever get in the way of a good story.
But I digress.
The Times story a year ago about whose design ultimately is what’s going up at Ground Zero and mine of a few days ago, may one day become the centerpiece at dinner parties in posh quarters of lower Manhattan where “whose on first” has become a burning question related to the design of The Freedom Tower. The Times brought up the question about design elements of the tower first when the ruling was first handed down a year ago. My version of events suggested it was a recent event, the lawsuit I mean. My bad. The question over whose drawings came first, has still become part of the mosaic of this downtown oddessy.
Thomas Shine, a 2000 graduate of Yale, alleges that architect David Childs at least borrowed design elements of a building Childs saw in drawings Shine showed him years before the World Trade Center attacks. Childs denies the claim.
“In architectural copyright cases, juries usually determine whether or not substantial similarities exist between two designs based on the impressions of an ordinary observer rather than an architecture expert,” Robert Brauneis, the co-director of George Washington Law School’s Dean Dinwoodey Center for Intellectual Property Studies, told the Yale Daily News.

There is widespread disagreement about the value of closing the doors of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation. Is it really a good idea?
Some are saying the agency’s decision to shut down is a simple case of cut and run.
This is a simple minded view of a much more complicated problem.
“Now that the Freedom Tower has been fully built and rises magnificently out of what was once an ugly, empty, forlorn pit, it’s fitting that the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. is set to close up shop,’ the New York Post said. “Thank goodness the LMDC officials were able to get the World Trade Center’s insurers to avert further legal action and cough up all the money needed to fund the tower.
“What a miracle that the agency got all the sparring parties to agree on an acceptable, affordable plan for a cost-saving memorial and museum at the site.”
That’s tabloid sarcasm.
The agency explained the decision in its own words.
“The LMDC had a mission, and we’re nearing the end of the mission,” an agency spokesman said. The agency notified the 54 employees of the agency last month.
LMDC President Stefan Pryor says the real job of the $2.5 billion agency had always been temporary.
“The greatest accomplishment of a public agency such as ours is to successfully work itself out of existence,” he told reporters. The unfinished jobs will be passed around to other agencies more suited to make sure the work is completed.
No one, from the very beginning of this morass, has had all of the answers when it came to this project. Diversify is an old axiom of business. It might work in this business too. Who knows?

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.

They’re the color of gold, says the Daily News, but what looks like gold, and sounds like gold, is fodder for fools.
An outfit called the National Collector’s Mint of Port Chester, New York is hawking sets of commemorative coins colored to look like gold with silver looking inlays shaped like the Twin Towers. They are “made of 15 mg. of 24-kt gold and 15 mg. of .999 pure silver’ they claim were “miraculously recovered from a bank bault found under tons of debris at Ground Zero. They sell for $29.95. Another newspaper, the Journal News, had the metal analyzed and found the metal in these coins is worth about 32 cents.
These same hustlers were caught two years ago trying to sell Freedom Tower medallions as the real currency of the Northern Mariana Islands. The islands don’t have any currency of their own. They trade and use American money as legal tender. “And the supposedly pure silver in the coin - the same miraculously recovered silver - was hair-thin and worth about 1.4 cents,’ the News said. “State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer’s office sued, and a judge fined the company $370,000. Spitzer’s investigation was unable to confirm whence the silver came.”
The new scheme is even more offensive, if that’s possible. This so-called mint is linking the coins to charities called Tuesday’s Children, the World Trade Center United Family Group, the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation and the Families of Flight 93 National Memorial. The charities do exist, but are not run or operated by the makers of these almost worthless coins.

Heavy equipment called loaders and excavator thundered across the southwest corner of the World Trade Center site today. The big rigs belong to E.E. Cruz & Company, the contractor hired to prepare the site for the World Trade Center Memorial.
The machines picked up truck-length pieces of steel, timbers and debris. This phase of construction carries a $17 million. The excavators will be drilling, blasting and digging holes, cubes that go down 10 feet deep.
“Merely organizing all of this construction will be a nightmare. For one, there will be immense traffic coming in and out of the site delivering workers, steel, cranes, newly mixed concrete, and so on,” Newsweek Online said. “The Command Center and construction management firm Liro Group have developed a master timetable and 3D model of the development process to help time it all. They meet with all the construction team on a monthly basis.”
Like yesterday, I’m inclined to use another cliché today to describe what’s going on at Ground Zero now except I can’t think of one that could compare the construction on Greenwich Street to the building of the great pyramids of Egypt centuries ago. Its our Miracle on Greenwich Street.

The hope that the buildings on the site of the World Trade Center will rise, now lies in the future, not with the past any longer.
Late next month, the Port Authority holds a board meeting where it is hoped that a binding agreement for redevelopment of the new World Trade Center is expected to be signed.
The PA will be expected to juggle lots of balls all at the same time. These include construction of the Freedom Tower, a WTC memorial, the Memorial Museum and the Visitor Education and Orientation Center. It has pledged to put up nearly $200 million to support the Memorial Foundation projects.
Meanwhile, the PA and the states of New York and New Jersey await insurance payments from insurers who are still withholding funds, saying transferring ownership of the building site toppled all existing agreements. Other insurers have abandoned this stance and have agreed to pay up.
At the same time, there is major construction to build a transportation hub beneath the Freedom Tower while the site is being prepped for construction of Towers 2, 3 and 4 along Greenwich Street.
So, there is more than just hope rising downtown.
Perhaps we should start calling all of this the Phoenix project. I know this is a cliché, but sometimes these little chestnuts like this work best when other words fail to express what could be called our little Miracle on Greenwich Street.

There is trouble of another variety on the horizon for the Freedom Tower design.
A Massachusetts architect named Thomas Shine has claimed that a design of the tower by architect David Childs resembled an earlier design done by Shine when he was a student at Yale.
Earlier this month, a federal judge said Shine could sue Childs for infringement of a drawing or a series of drawings Shine did of a twisting tower with a façade which Shine showed to Childs in 1999.
In a ruling on August 10, U.S. District Court Judge Michael Mukasey said that some “might find that the Freedom Tower’s twisting shape and undulating diamond-shaped façade make it substantially similar to Olympic Tower, and therefore an improper appropriation of copyrighted artistic expression,” the judge is quoted as saying by Architectural Record. “It is possible, even likely, that some ordinary observers might not find the two towers to be substantially similar because as defendants note, there are differences between the Freedom Tower and Olympic Tower.”
Childs is with Skidmore Owings and Merrill. A spokesman for the firm says Shine’s claim is bogus and the firm will defend itself if the case proceeds. She said Shine’s claims were once rejected by the court earlier because three images of Shine’s towers “had been doctored.”
Nevertheless, it looks like Shine will get his day in court.

The world is again on alert in the wake of the thwarted terrorist attacks in the United Kingdom, this time trying to use diabolical liquid bombs to frighten, maim and kill innocent people.
Just weeks before the fifth anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks, British intelligence found and interrupted the mid-air attacks planned for U.S. bound planes by a band of terrorist cells in Europe. As construction of the Freedom Tower continues still at a snail’s pace, speculation about where or when the next terrorist plot will be discovered run wild in every direction.
Everyone sees themselves as the next target and pundits have again taken to the air waves to argue over whose best guess is best.
Meanwhile, the whole world awaits and applauds the mere idea of our Freedom Tower rising ever so slowly, brick by brick, one steel beam at a time.
“I think the design is amazing, says Alyssa Bailey of Great Britain. “It will be a great memorial and a sign that America will never live in fear. God Bless you all,” she says on a blog called Glass, Steel and Stone.
As a pilot that flew out of New Jersey Airports everyday, the first thing thing I would look for just after take off were the Twin Towers,” said Paul Stone. “I loved those towers! Rebuild them Please!!! Building a structure with almost the top half as just a glass structure is a cheap tribute and that does not heal the American heart,” said Stone, an American. “The twin towers were like two brothers leaning on each other for support in this tough world. Lets see that strength again with similar twin towers!”
A blogger named Sue wrote: “The Twin Towers were not originally welcome by New Yorkers. We grew to love them. To duplicate the architecture would be too emotional to view. I approve of the Freedom Tower, and hope we all grow to love it too.”
“I think this building is beautiful. It symbolizes that we are moving forward … towards a brighter future.”
“When completed, this will be one of the most important buildings of the early 21st century. It is significant in stature, in design, in its politics, its symbolism, and for the reason it was built,” report these bloggers whose site rates the buildings they love or hate. To date, 50% approve of the Freedom Tower.
In many ways, it has become the world’s Statue of Liberty, an ideal that has more strength and power than all the brick and mortar any terrorist cell can try to destroy with hate. We’ll see them all in hell first.

All the recent headlines about renewed freedoms in Cuba amid rumors of Fidel Castro’s demise, brings to mind the rise of an earlier version of the Freedom Tower – this one in Miami more than 80 years ago.
Miami’s Freedom Tower is an office building completed in 1925 for the Miami Daily News and Metropolis. It was a majestic high rise then that was used as the newspaper’s office until the 1950s until 1974 when it was used as the Cuban Refugee Center. That’s when it was renamed the Freedom Tower, a symbol of the new found freedom Cubans sought political asylum and found it when they took refuge in the United States. The building was constructed in the Mediterranean Revival style with a 225 foot tower made in the style of the Giralda bell tower in Sevilla, Spain.
The twelve story tower has a long and cherished history in Miami. Designed by New York architects Schultz and Weaver to resemble the Giralda Tower in Seville, Spain. In 1959 it was leased by the U.S. government as the primary processing center for Cuban refugees fleeing Fidel Castro. Not only is the treasure tower a monument to Old Miami, it is also a sentimental and emotional symbol of liberty for the members of Miami’s Cuban community.

As the fifth anniversary of the World Trade disaster rapidly approaches, perhaps the most fitting tribute to the victims is the continuing effort at “the job site” to rebuild. The few workers who now come to the site daily to move the remnants of debris, blast holes to sink the new footings to support the new buildings rising on the site, have kept a daily vigil to remember those who died here. Slowly, the Freedom Tower is rising.
This year, Mayor Michael Bloomberg says the moving roll call to mark the passing of each person who died will be led by the significant others, the spouses and partners of the victims.
In past years, brothers and sisters of the dead read the 2,479 names. In earlier tributes, the parents and grandparents of the victims read the names. The children read the names in 2003. On the first anniversary, relatives, politicians and well known celebrities and dignitaries read the names. This year, the ceremony will be marked by silence, pierced by the ringing of church bells and four pauses that will begin at 8:46 a.m on Sept. 11. At sundown, two beams of light will shine up in the sky to symbolize the twin towers as a “Tribute of Light “ memorial.