The Freedom Tower

It was not too long ago, that prospects for Lower Manhattan seemed so ominous that some predicted it would not survive as a financial center. Within day of the destruction of the World Trade Center, a number of companies with offices in Lower Manhattan were searching for space in midtown or outside the city.

From the Freedom Tower to Battery Park to the East River Waterfront, construction and redevelopment taking place over the coming years will help make Lower Manhattan one of the most beautiful, livable, and economically viable communities in the country. Get a glimpse of the area’s future through articles, slide shows, animations, and a one-of-a-kind Lower Manhattan 2010 Vision Video, all found in this section.

Go to this link to see what Lower Manhattan will look like in just a few  years.

www.lowermanhattan.info/future/video/

Excuse us for saying this but Rosie O’Donnell didn’t break any taboos in suggesting that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed might have been stretching the truth a bit in admitting he masterminded every terrorist plot contained in every single folder they have at the Department of Homeland Security.
O’Donnell, hosting the ABC hot spot, The View morning show suggested our government elicited a false confession from the 9/11 suspect by using torture.
Mohammend has confessed to at least 31 terrorist attacks, according to a transcript released earlier this month.
Columnists far and wide long ago hinted that Mohammend’s confessions might have been prompted by his own vanity or he might have been motivated by tactics we are already too familiar with from the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. We know prisoners were taunted and tortured there. What O’Donnell is saying isn’t a quantum leap. While O’Donnell isn’t quoting inside sources, her rants are not the news everyone else is ranting about just because they’re having a slow news day…

A theater company that had been expected to make the Ground Zero Arts Center its home, won’t have an opening night in that Lower Manhattan venue.
Deputy Mayor Daniel Doctoroff says the Signature Theater Company will not be included as one of the companies housed at the arts center. Doctoroff said the details involved included costs and complicated logistics of having Signature and the Joyce Theater dance company share the space. The deputy mayor said Signature was dropped from the plans because having two groups share this same confined space just became too difficult.
The city is hoping to move Signature to nearby Fiterman Hall at 30 West Broadway just across from 7 World Trade Center. It is part of the Borough of Manhattan Community College, heavily damaged by falling debris on 9/11.

The New York Observer says the Freedom Tower is just the tip of an iceberg for David Childs, “his Gotham iceberg.” So why not the Child’s Tower instead of the Freedom Tower?
When asked, “Why do you keep getting chosen to do these city projects?
Childs said “Well, I love them, frankly. And I also believe that architects should be involved in the cities in which they live. So I therefore have been involved in a lot of city planning through [the Municipal Art Society]. I’ve been around and have been involved in those things. We also have a very large office that, frankly, loves to do very large, complicated projects.
When asked “What’s your secret for negotiating all the bureaucratic and political obstacles?
Childs said “Bureaucratic isn’t so bad. I’m a big believer in community review: You get some of your best insights sometimes from those types of processes.
“The most important thing that an architect does—and this was taught to me by I.M. Pei many years ago—is choosing your plan. Sometimes, in the development world, we have had some developers whose aspirations didn’t meet the project that they were doing.
And that’s the dirty work. Any great architect can do something spectacular for City Hall. Sometimes a person who owns the piece of property, you can drag them from doing a B-minus building to doing a B-plus building, and you have achieved a lot. But it is a tough thing to do.
When asked, “You have said in the past that you wouldn’t mind it if people looked at one of your buildings and never said, “That’s a David Childs building.”

Childs said: “That’s wonderful. Often, architects can have a very clear style. Frankly, I believe that there are certain fundamentals with every project, but stylistically, they vary considerably. That’s because every project is different because of its site, location and program.
I am particularly happy in a project like the World Trade Center. I think it’s kind of funny to have an architect’s name attached to it. It should be the World Trade Center Tower 1, not the Childs Tower.”

The nay-sayers have all predicted the gloom and doom about New York City’s future.
But in all of that darkness, there are optimists who are saying less than six years after 9/11, most of the people they talked to are optimistic. Jonathan Bowles, director of non-partisan think tank Center for an Urban Future, says the city is continuing to hold its place as “the most unique city in America.
This comes from Sascha Brodsky who is quoted in Resident, a slick magazine that asked visionaries what New York will be liked in a few decades. They asked historian Fred Siegel what he thought and Siegel said artists would continue to flock to New York. The magazine said the Ground Zero redevelopment would stay on track and the downtown area – known as lower Manhattan – would thrive. That means the Freedom Tower is likely to thrive too.
“The future isn’t all rosy, however. Pollution and traffic will continue to be problems and some critics say that not enough is being done to bolster the city’s economy,” the magazine reports.

WCBSTV.COM says a former contractor for the city who worked at the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island has accused the city of filling potholes with human remains from the World Trade Center.
Norman Siegel is representing some of the families of 9/11 victims suing to re-open the search for human remains. He’s produced a deposition from a contractor who sifted through the remains at the Fresh Kills landfill in Staten Island.

“They were putting the remains of people who died on 9/11 in the potholes on the roadway of Fresh Kills,” Siegel said. “This was another example not only of inadequacy but the deliberate indifference of the people running the city.”

The city stopped sifting through almost a half million tons of debris after about a year of work. But some family members maintain they stopped work prematurely.

“It’s never acceptable because of expediency, time, money or business interests to throw away the remnants of your loved ones,” said Sally Regenhard, a plaintiff in the lawsuit.

A city attorney denies that the sifting was incomplete or that remains were mishandled.

David Friend at Davidfriend.net says even after all these months, seasons, years after September 11, a “hold-on/not-just-yet” attitude is still being voiced. The one Friend notes most recently appeared in an Op-Ed New York Times piece.
Guy Nordenson is entitled to his opinion, surely. He’s a structural designer and a Princeton architecture professor. And his reservations sound valid, even prudent.
Nordenson writes: “Despite reports that Gov. Eliot Spitzer has now decided to back [the latest plan for the Freedom Tower], it is still possible to rethink the tower and make it both secure and welcoming without setting back the overall ground zero construction schedule. [The current design, with its] 20-story fortified wall around the base of a 1,776-foot tower, hardly evokes freedom – rather, it embodies fear and anxiety.”
Delay, you say? My vote, Friend says, is the opposite. Qqit the re-re-re-thinking, he says, and get on with it. Five and a half years after terrorists obliterated the World Trade Center, there is still nothing resembling an even begrudging consensus about what should rise in its place. But there is an agreed-upon blueprint … And most of the constituencies effected by the decision have had their say. This impulse of eleventh-hour reassessment, coming on the heels of years of civic stasis, not only embalms the would-be building, it also impedes the creation of the World Trade Center Memorial that will some day honor the memories of the nearly 3,000 who died that day …
We must move on,Friend writes “And moving on means settling for a plan, however imperfect, and following through with it.”

The debate over the speed with which reconstruction of Ground Zero is progressing continues. A few days ago, CollegiateTimes.com complained “so far, no progress at Ground Zero.”
Today John Havranek, a Sophomore, Aerospace Engineering, responded saying the complaint is unwarranted.
“Ground Zero is not just any old construction site, it is a grave. I challenge anyone to stand there and not feel a sense of humility and remorse as they read the names of those who died, gazing into the hole where the towers once stood,” Havranek said. “I walked around Ground Zero last year, and even four years after, when construction is going on, you can’t help but mourn those who were lost. Imagine what the people who work in the hole must feel, and then you are going to say they are working too slow?”
And sometimes, less is more!

This reflection on Ground Zero is from Ali’s Blog, a mixture
of personal anecdotes, observations…

“After visiting Liberty Island and the Statue of Liberty, it was sobering to walk back through Downtown Manhattan and visit the Ground Zero site. Now that the clean up operation has been completed and they have started to rebuild in the area, it has been renamed as the World Trade Centre site (back to its original name). Looking at the site it was hard to imagine the atrocities that happened there, it truly seemed unbelievable that such huge towers, buildings that I had visited on past trips to NY, were just no longer there.

The site itself felt very much in a renewal phase, with the train station operational again and with the commencement in April 2006 of the building of the new Freedom Tower.
In addition, construction has begun to build the World Trade Centre Memorial and Museum at the site. This is intended as a solemn space where visitors can remember the thousands of lives lost during the 2001 (and also the 1993) terrorist attacks. The memorial is scheduled to open on September 11, 2009. The museum is scheduled to follow, opening in 2010, and the Freedom Tower in 2011.
After walking round the outside of the site we visited the recently opened Tribute WTC Centre, something which I would recommend to anyone visiting that area. 
The Tribute Centre is a project of the September 11th Families Association. The Association was set up to establish a viable communications network among families of all the victims.

n 2004 the Association expanded its mission when it initiated the concept of Tribute WTC Visitor Center, a place where members of the September 11th community could connect with the thousands of visitors who come to the site daily by offering exhibits and walking tours.

It is scheduled to remain open until the permanent WTC Memorial and Museum are completed. Any tributes left at the WTC site are removed daily (for safety reasons as it is now a working building site) and some are rehoused in this centre. I found this an incredibly moving place- it documents the events of Sept 11th from the perspective of both emergency workers and people who worked in the area. All are tastefully and respectfully displayed in various medium, such as video, audio, text, personal belongings and photos. The wall of “Missing” posters and then Gallery 4, where photos of the victims are displayed, really brought home to me the enormity of the event. Before it had been about a place, the Twin Towers, but seeing this memorial personalized it, this was not about buildings, it was about the 3,000+ people who lost their lives that day. I must admit that a few tears were shed there, as I looked at the photos and saw the lives and families of those victims.

One of the most precious remnants of the World Trade Center is at the center of a swirling controversy that threatens to slow construction of the Freedom Tower.
Leon Harris of New York TV station ABC News Channel 7 says the prolonged debate over whether to preserve the 175 ton staircase that still stands at Ground Zero could halt or delay construction of the 1,776 foot Freedom Tower. The staircase has been named “one of the nation’s most endangered places by a preservation group. It is the only remnant of the Twin Towers still standing above street level.
Historians first lobbied to keep the staircase in place, and lately have lobbied to move it intact to a nearby park or plaza while officials prepare the land to build one of three office towers,” Harris wrote on the station’s blog.
The staircase sits on the footprint of a tower proposed by British architect Norman Foster. That building is one of three planned to complement the 1,776-foot-tall Freedom Tower skyscraper.
“We’re trying to save an important piece of history,” Peg Breen, president of the New York Landmarks Conservancy, said Wednesday.The Lower Manhattan Development Corp. rebuilding agency earlier this year proposed tearing down all but a few steps of the staircase, and moving the remaining portions to the Sept. 11 museum, or including a few steps in the Foster tower design.