The Freedom Tower

Just for the record:
This is just in from the Canadian International Real Estate Guide.
Steve Watson, the Infowars columnist, says there has seen a cornucopia of news come pouring forth with regards to what happened to World Trade Center, Building 7 on September 11th 2001. The catalyst for this has been the discovery that the BBC reported the building had collapsed a full thirty minutes before it actually fell on 9/11.
The BBC, instead of attempting to explain how it could have reported this, has attempted to both evade and cloud the issue. The truth is that no one could have possibly predicted the building would collapse and here’s why.
Aside from the fact that previous to 9/11 no steel framed building in history had ever collapsed due to fire damage, Building 7, otherwise known as the Salomon Brothers building, was intentionally designed to allow large portions of floors to be permanently removed without weakening the structural integrity of the building.
In 1989 the New York Times reported on this fact in a story covering the Salomon leasing of the building which had been completed just two years earlier.
Salomon had wanted to build a new structure in order to house its high-technology operations, but due to stock market crash in 1987 it was unable to. The company searched for an existing building that they could use and found one in Larry Silverstein’s WTC 7.

Just for the record:
This is just in from the Canadian International Real Estate Guide.
Steve Watson, the Infowars columnist, says there has seen a cornucopia of news come pouring forth with regards to what happened to World Trade Center, Building 7 on September 11th 2001. The catalyst for this has been the discovery that the BBC reported the building had collapsed a full thirty minutes before it actually fell on 9/11.
The BBC, instead of attempting to explain how it could have reported this, has attempted to both evade and cloud the issue. The truth is that no one could have possibly predicted the building would collapse and here’s why.
Aside from the fact that previous to 9/11 no steel framed building in history had ever collapsed due to fire damage, Building 7, otherwise known as the Salomon Brothers building, was intentionally designed to allow large portions of floors to be permanently removed without weakening the structural integrity of the building.
In 1989 the New York Times reported on this fact in a story covering the Salomon leasing of the building which had been completed just two years earlier.
Salomon had wanted to build a new structure in order to house its high-technology operations, but due to stock market crash in 1987 it was unable to. The company searched for an existing building that they could use and found one in Larry Silverstein’s WTC 7.

This is one of those unforgettable stories. A Kentucky woman told a reporter for her local newspaper she was suppose to die on Sept. 11. In an interview with the Marion (Kentucky) Daily Republican, Joyce Olver  said she would have perished aboard American Airline flight 11 from Boston to Los Angeles in 2001 were it not for an accident. Oliver was a flight attendant who was scheduled to work Flight 11 … the second plane to hit the World Trade Center on 9/11. But a week before the flight, Oliver was hurt when a 500-pound passenger stepped on her foot. On Sept. 10, Olver said a doctor ordered her off the foot and said the foot needed to be reset and she needed a cast. The Federal Aviation Administration grounded the flight attendant and she was relieved of her duty in Chicago.
Someone else had died in her place and she couldn’t get over the feeling that it should have been her, she told the newspaper.

“During the next few months she underwent five surgeries on her foot. She was on leave from flying and doing her best to recuperate. She attended her church regularly but couldn’t shake the guilt about someone else having died in her place.”

The Americans and the Brits are fighting again. This time, American developers of the World Trade Center are suing their British insurers over unpaid claims and damages from the September 11 terrorist attacks.
Developers, including the Port of Authority of New York and New Jersey and Silverstein Properties, are suing Royal & Sun Alliances and its American partners for at least $1 billion. They filed suit in New York State Supreme Court last month. The claim was filed before the Brits sold off its U.S. unit to Arrowpoint Capital Coropration. Silverstein objected to the sale. The plaintiffs are claiming that Arrowpoint would not be be able to pay off Silverstein’s claims.
In October, Silverstein won a battle when a U.S. appeals court ordered some of the insurers, including Royal & Sun, to pay an additional $1.1 billion to the developer because there were two separate attacks, not just one, according to the British news agency, Reuters.
Reuters says Royal & Sun, along with Allianz Insurance Company, is still disputing these payments because of an agreement that Silverstein has with the Port Authority.

This is a compelling tribute … photographs set to sound, New York Times photographer Keith Meyers tell us about photographing the World Trade Center’s twin towers for decades prior to their fall in Elegy for an Icon. The New York Times originally ran the collection of photos in September 2006 as a Photographer’s Journal feature.

Google Elegy for an Icon

Unique might apply here.

The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation has suspended posting hourly camera images of Ground Zero.
The agency turned on web cameras two years ago to show progress in the rebuilding of the World Trade Center projects. The cameras came down March 1 because reduced traffic on the agency’s website no longer justifies the cost of hourly photo updates. Ironically, activity at Ground Zero has increased and the site is busier than it has ever been but curiosity online has slacked off since the 9/11 attacks. Concrete footings are being poured around the twin towers’ footprints to support the memorial, steel columns are rising for a 1,776-foot skyscraper, a transit hub is under construction and officials are preparing land to 
build three more office towers.


This is might be one way to get the attention of bureaucrats who always wait too long to respond to obvious needs – especially when the liability for wrong-doing looms large.
More than a thousand New Yorkers who sought treatment for health problems related to the collapse of the World Trade Center are being treated at Bellevue Hospital.
As the number of people who wanted and needed this treatment grew, it gradually became evident that a lot of people who were enveloped by the dust clouds created when the Twin Towers collapsed were suffering from common aliments related to the disaster.
Molly Kroon of NY1 filed this report:
“A program that treats health problems that may be related to the World Trade Center disaster has doubled its size to help not just first-responders, but people who lived and worked near Ground Zero.
“Isabel Castillon says she worked in a building near ground zero for five months in a job that she says ultimately took a toll on her health,” Kroon’s report says.

“I’ve had a lot of problems with asthma, allergies,” Castillion said.

“She’s one of the more than a thousand New Yorkers who have sought treatment at Bellevue Hospital for health problems they believe are related to the collapse of the World Trade Center – a program that’s grown as more people come down with health problems that may be connected to exposure to toxic dust and fumes more than five years ago.
“The program has yet to get any money from the federal government, but Bellevue used $16 million in city funding to open the World Trade Center Environmental Health Center a couple of weeks ago, adding more physicians and doubling its size and scope, as the program continues to receive an average of 400 calls a day.”

One of the snags hiding just beneath the surface of  reconstructing  the World Trade Center surrounds whether or not the many projects going up at the site will be able to be insured.
A hearing last week was held to determine whether the federal government would extend its terrorism property insurance program. That program expires at the end of the year.
It is called the federal Terrorism Risk Insurance Act. It was enacted 14 months after the Sept. 11 attacks. It reimburses insurers up to $100 million if foreign terrorists attack again. The government is considering extending the insurance for 15 years. So, the government is in the insurance business, the real estate business, the public relation business, just to name a few ventures. They’re not good at any of this, so stay tuned.

I first saw what has come to be modern architecture way back in 1976 when the Renaissance Center was put up on the riverfront downtown in Detroit. The hotel complex was surrounded by high concrete walls – massive bunkers really. It was a message to the city — keep out. This complex is for the safety and comfort of our visitors, not the host city that was then called the Murder Capitol of America.
Little did we know then that this kind of construction was a wave of the future.
“After 9/11, a craving for the solidity of walls reasserted itself. And the wars on terror, and fractious peaces, enforced it,” the Times said today. “The Green Zone in Baghdad, Jerusalem’s separation barrier, the concrete bollards that line corporate headquarters on Park Avenue — all are emblems of an unintended new mentality.
“The most chilling example of the new medievalism is New York’s Freedom Tower, which was once touted as a symbol of enlightenment. Designed by David Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, it rests on a 20-story, windowless fortified concrete base decorated in prismatic glass panels in a grotesque attempt to disguise its underlying paranoia. And the brooding, obelisk-like form above is more of an expression of American hubris than of freedom.”

The Continuing Committee for a Reasonable World Trade Center has been running ads in New York newspapers criticizing the Freedom Tower project as too expensive, poorly planned and conceived in haste. The ad started to run right after Gov. Eliot Spitzer made it clear that he would do nothing to interrupt construction of the Freedom Tower.
The complaining ads claim the tower’s architecture, security, rent rolls, height, the name, and any number of other things were all disasters.
One thing the ad fails to mention is the fact that two of the signers whose names appear at the bottom of the full page ads are developers who stand to lose millions of dollars if it is built. They are developers Douglas Durst and Anthony Malkin. The two have major stakes in the Empire State Building and the Conde Naste Building in Times Square… two of the most desirable addresses in the city.
This is all about business, not ill conceived architecture, planning or any of the other thingsDurst and Malkin are complaining about…