The Freedom Tower

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.”