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The horrors of Sept. 11, 2001, are still vivid for many Americans, especially the families of the victims. So it is tragic that on this Sept. 11, when family members, politicians and visitors go to the ceremonies at ground zero, they will be gathering at an unfinished place.
Instead of the two memorial pools designed by the architect Michael Arad, visitors will see their barest outlines. Instead of a circle of skyscrapers, the steel for the tallest tower stretches only five stories high. There are just the first skeletal signs of Santiago Calatrava’s magnificent transportation hub.
Why is it taking so long? That is a question that has been asked every Sept. 11. For the first few years, there were too many feuds — the architects Daniel Libeskind versus David Childs, the families versus the designers and builders, the community versus the demolition squads, the developer Larry Silverstein versus the insurance companies. Even now, Mr. Silverstein is locked in arbitration with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the owner of the site, because he wants more of the authority’s money to build more office towers.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who now supports Mr. Silverstein’s excessive demands for public funds, once recognized the hazards of overbuilding office space in the area. In December 2002, a year after the attack, he bluntly acknowledged that “the twin towers’ voracious appetite for tenants weakened the entire downtown real estate market” — a possibility that today’s real estate experts fear if Mr. Silverstein builds too precipitously.
Maybe the best news about Ground Zero on this September 11th, eight years after the September 11th, is that the world no longer seems to rise and fall on what happens there. That’s good, because eight years later, so few of the promises made for the redevelopment of the site have been kept. Yes, the memorial and its related museum are progressing, slowly but surely, at high cost but reasonably close to the original design, and there is even a chance that they will be finished in 2011, in time for the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks. And the huge skyscraper that, thankfully, no one any longer seems to call the Freedom Tower is rising, to almost no one’s admiration or gratitude. Now named 1 World Trade Center, it is a banal building designed, it would seem, more by security consultants than by its architect, David Childs, of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. (The fifty-two-story tower across the street from Ground Zero, called 7 World Trade Center and finished in 2006, was also designed by Childs, and is proof that he can do much better when he is left alone.)
As for the rest of the place—the office towers by Fumihiko Maki, Richard Rogers and Norman Foster, the transit hub by Santiago Calatrava, and the performing arts building by Frank Gehry—almost everything is on hold, thanks to a combination of money and political problems. So is another office building by Kohn Pedersen Fox that is to replace the damaged Deutsche Bank building, whose problem-ridden demolition has taken far longer than its construction did in the early nineteen-seventies. (Then again, the whole rebuilding looks like it is going to take at least twice as long as the original World Trade Center took to build.) Nobody can agree on who is going to pay for all these office towers, which in this economy are the last thing Lower Manhattan needs. So the fighting isn’t a matter of who is going to profit from these new buildings—the state, the Port Authority, or the developer of the site, Larry Silverstein—as it is a question of who is going to bear the cost of having them empty. That’s what all the high-minded ambition for Ground Zero has come to.
Sadly, the wisdom of these two works has not rubbed off on the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site in New York. There, more than seven years after the Twin Towers were destroyed, the public and private bodies involved in the site are still wrangling over fundamental aspects of the reconstruction. Two of the mighty towers planned for the site are in danger of being shrunk to a mere 25 storeys. The astoundingly expensive National September 11 Memorial & Museum has had its projected completion put back so that it is now due to be finished, just in time for the tenth anniversary of 9/11, in 2011.
The Freedom Tower, the emblem of the rebuilding, is now rising towards its symbolically significant height of 1,776 feet (to recall the year of independence), and it is due for completion in 2014, but it has lost its resonant name. It was recently announced that it would be called One World Trade Center for marketing reasons. 'We will ensure that the building is presented in the best possible way,' said the chairman of the Port Authority, which is building it, evidently believing that commercial tenants would rather not rent space in a symbol. The news has provoked outrage: 'Freedom is out of fashion at Ground Zero,' said the New York Post.
The reconstruction of Ground Zero,in other words,once intended as a defiant riposte to terrorists, as a demonstration of the invincible might of American freedom, has turned into something else. It is now a demonstration of the baroque manoeuvres in which New York specialises when it comes to large-scale construction schemes. It shows what can happen when political, commercial and architectural egos tangle.
But more often than not, what you feel is the immense strain Mr. Calatrava and his clients are under to try to justify the hall’s existence. Retail space has been added along the base of the great hall and along a second-floor balcony, which should draw a few visitors but risks transforming the entire space into one of the world’s most excessive shopping malls.
And in a particularly perverse decision PATH riders won’t be able to get from the train platforms directly to the street. Instead they will have to walk halfway along the hall’s upper balcony and past dozens of shops before exiting into one of the flanking towers — a suffocating experience no matter how beautiful the spaces turn out to be.
These problems are amplified by Mr. Calatrava’s seeming refusal to disturb the sculptural purity of his creation. Some have already pointed out that only two small entries, at each end of the dome, connect the main plaza to the hall, as if the architect were afraid of exposing his inner world to the chaos outside. I noticed something else on my visit to the show: a ring of marble benches now surrounds the base of the glass dome, so that standing in the plaza you will be able to see only a small segment of the great hall below. Instead the eye is drawn up to the grandeur of Mr. Calatrava’s structure. Life is secondary.
All of this would be discouraging enough given the number of other worthy transportation projects in New York City. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority had to redesign its new Fulton Street station to keep within its tight budget, even though it will serve thousands more passengers a day. Despite years of planning, Pennsylvania Station’s cramped dehumanizing spaces remain one of the most shameful chapters in the city’s architectural history, partly because authorities can’t find a way to pay for a renovation.
Mr. Calatrava’s design also embodies a deeper, more troubling history: the toxic climate of those first years after the Sept. 11 attacks. While the city grieved, politicians were vowing to rebuild as fast as possible, as if that would somehow accelerate the healing process. Practical considerations were set aside. Jingoism ruled. Egotism dominated over softer, gentler voices.
Under such conditions it should surprise no one that what once promised to be one of ground zero’s most triumphant architectural achievements is hollow at its core.
Lopate: Not to get us too depressed, but can we talk about ground zero?
Huxtable: The first piece I wrote predicted what was going to happen. People thought I was clairvoyant. No, I’d just been watching the city for a long time. We all knew! The strange thing that came along was this small group of bereaved families, who really knew how to operate, and who did not speak for the rest of the group at all, but who began to roll over the politicians.
If there’s anything a politician will roll over for, it’s this kind of grief. After all the good things they vetoed or interfered with, cultural institutions like the Freedom museum because they were worried something unpatriotic might be exhibited there, they now have this memorial, and nobody has any concept how overscaled it is. A huge memorial, and these profit-making towers. Daniel Libeskind’s original architectural inspiration has been stripped away, and the developer, Larry Silverstein, got everything he wanted.
It is a horrible failure, as far as I’m concerned. We missed the chance to make a 21st-century Rockefeller Center.
The colossal cast-iron rings embedded in the eastern slurry wall at ground zero were — if such a thing can be imagined — the birthmark of the World Trade Center.more here on the hudson tubes
They were the last visible remnant of the Hudson & Manhattan Railroad, a commuter line that New Jersey officials insisted in 1962 that the Port Authority take over, before they approved the trade center project in New York. (The H. & M. was renamed PATH.) The rings marked the railroad’s route into the old Hudson Terminal, whose location determined where the twin towers would be built, since the trade center was designed to incorporate a new PATH terminal.
And the rings offered a lesson in scale. Seen from across West Street, they did not look much larger than a water pipe. But in fact, they formed a tube large enough to enclose a railroad tunnel 15 feet 3 inches in diameter. Visitors to ground zero who knew that could marvel at the dimensions of the slurry wall into which the rings were set.
This month, the rings vanished.
Tourists still flock to the World Trade Center site, almost seven years after the attacks of September 11. What they find when they get there is not a scene of destruction but a busy construction site. While I’m grateful to see Ground Zero filling up with fresh concrete and steel, there’s something about the utter normalcy of the scene that makes me long for that heady period in 2003 and 2004 when the planning process for the site, a grand public pageant bursting with visionary zeal, promised to generate a place brave and powerful enough to heal the city’s wounds. But as the concrete hardens, I can almost see the banality setting in. The only person speaking with any frequency these days about his “vision” for the site is its developer, Larry Silverstein. Lately, he’s been giving what amounts to a stump speech, promoting the vitality of Lower Manhattan and touting his revised schedule. “The buildings will reach street level approximately one year after the start of construction, and Towers 3 and 4 will top out in mid-2010, with Tower 2 following in 2011,” Sil verstein told the Downtown Association in April. “Can you count on this schedule? You bet.”
Manhattan had long lost its crown as the world's skyscraper capital when Mohamed Atta smashed American Airlines Flight 11 into the first of the Twin Towers. Yet that dramatic, appalling moment triggered a defiant reaction. A slew of new towers is now appearing, on screens and on the ground.
Renzo Piano's diaphanously corporate New York Times Tower has just opened to rapturous reviews; Ground Zero is hosting towers by Foster, Rogers and Fumihiko Maki, and slick condo towers are springing up everywhere like minimalist fungus. But the latest proposal is by far the most surprising. French architect Jean Nouvel has proposed the most radical and striking skyscraper to trouble New York's low-drifting clouds in a generation.
The design for the tower, neighbouring the Museum of Modern Art, is a piercing, dangerous-looking spike, an anorexic contemporary version of the soaring twin spires of St Patrick's Cathedral, which dominated the city's skyline until the advent of skyscrapers in the early 20th century.
The proposal, at 53 W. 53rd St, commissioned by real estate firm Hines, comprises 75 storeys of accommodation and, at 350m, pierces the skyline at a height between the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings. It will embrace 5,000 square metres of extra accommodation for MoMA, which will expand into its lower floors, above retail provision, while the upper floors will house a seven-star hotel sharing services with the 120 or so (extremely) top-end condominiums above.
Herbert’s contribution to architectural criticism has not been fully measured. His opinions were often hyperbolic; his prose outrageous; the path of his thinking inimitably complex. Unforgettable samplers would have to include his comparing Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao to the “reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe,” and calling Zaha Hadid’s Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati “the most important American building to be completed since the end of the cold war.” Famously, he wrote positively in September 2002 that Daniel Libeskind’s tower proposal for Ground Zero “attains a perfect balance between aggression and desire,” only to switch allegiances five months later. As a newly converted partisan of the proposal by the team THINK, he wrote, “Daniel Libeskind's project for the World Trade Center site is a startlingly aggressive tour de force, a war memorial to a looming conflict that has scarcely begun.” A close reading—and no one more deserves a closer re-reading than Herbert—reveals that he has not really contradicted himself here but refined his opinion. To many, his views were inflammatory, even dangerous to architecture. “Whoopee,” he might have said. Has anyone else stirred up so much heated passion about cold bricks?
Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s appointment last week of two top officials to a development corporation that had been considered all but dead appears to set the stage for yet another power struggle at ground zero.
In a way it also seems to be a rebuke for the city’s recent solo announcement that the Joyce Theater would be the sole occupant of a performing arts center planned for the former World Trade Center site. Many of those involved in planning Lower Manhattan now wonder whether the center, to be designed by Frank Gehry, will become the focus of a long tug of war.
The revival of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation is perhaps the clearest sign that the Spitzer administration is determined to take back the reins, or at least strengthen its grip, on the center. Having chosen a master plan and a memorial design and allocated federal money for cultural programs, the development corporation said last summer that its work was done. The agency had already been defanged by George E. Pataki, then the governor; he had bowed to criticism from relatives of 9/11 victims and eliminated the Drawing Center and an International Freedom Center from the site. Yet last Monday Governor Spitzer announced that he had appointed Avi Schick as chairman of the development corporation and David Emil as president. Mr. Schick is also president of the Empire State Development Corporation, the state’s economic development agency, and served as a deputy attorney general under Governor Spitzer, who was then attorney general. Mr. Emil owned Windows on the World, the restaurant at the top of the World Trade Center, and is a former president of the Battery Park City Authority.
An American flag plastered on the first steel column for the Freedom Tower at ground zero was removed Wednesday after the builders realized the stars and stripes were on the wrong side of the flag.
The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey removed the decal on the 31-foot column after The Associated Press and other media questioned the display of the flag, with the 50 stars on the right side instead of the left. Readers also called the AP after seeing the news agency's photograph of the column in Wednesday newspapers.
"It's painted backwards," said Bill Dolphin, 73, of Ocala, Fla. "When it's laying down, it's correct. When it gets lifted up into the air, the blue field should be on the other side."
Hundreds of pieces of mail destined for the former trade center still arrive every day at a post office facing ground zero -- the relics of the unfinished lives of Sept. 11 victims.
Telephone bills, insurance statements, wine club announcements, college alumni newsletters, even government checks populate the bundles of mail. Each bears the ZIP code once reserved exclusively for the twin towers: 10048.
''I guess sooner or later they'll realize the towers aren't back up,'' said letter carrier Seprina Jones-Sims, who handles the trade center mail. ''I don't know when.''
Some of the nation's most recognizable companies and organizations, from retailers to research hospitals, are among those sending the mail. Much of it seems to result from businesses not updating their bulk mailing lists, said U.S. Postal Service spokeswoman Pat McGovern.
The postal service declined to identify the senders and recipients of the letters according to policy. Several companies formerly housed in the towers also declined comment.
The trade center mail meets varied fates once it arrives at the Church Street station.
A handful of companies pay for a service that forces the post office to hold the mail until a messenger picks it up. The rest of the mail travels various routes. Some will be returned to the sender, some will be forwarded to the company's current address and some will be sent to a Brooklyn recycling firm to be destroyed.
That the Postal Service is even forwarding mail from a nonexistent address five years later is rare. ''Normally we'd only forward mail for a year, but we're making an exception here,'' McGovern said.
The trade center's mail used to travel from the Church Street post office and up through the towers. It would start on the ground tucked in the letter carrier's bag and continue up higher and higher -- to the 68th floor, the 89th floor, the 104th floor.
The morning's mail never made it through the flames and smoke on Sept. 11, 2001. It stayed put with the letter carriers, who silently observed the chaos that unfurled outside the post office.
Flying debris blew out most of its windows. After a three-year restoration, its doors officially reopened in August 2004.
Rafael Feliciano delivered mail to floors 78 through 100 of the south tower for three years. He watched the tower collapse on television from a bar several blocks away with a co-worker.
''He turned to me and said, 'You just lost your route,''' Feliciano recalled. When the dust cleared, he spent weeks identifying office workers who came to pick up their mail, searching for familiar faces to see if they had survived.
Still, Arad and Walker’s design remains at least partially intact. The cultural buildings—a museum by the Norwegian firm Snohetta and a performing-arts building by Frank Gehry—have fared far worse, and may never get built at all. Their nemesis hasn’t been cost or security but the ability of a highly vocal group of victims’ families to force political decisions. The group objected to the fact that the cultural component of Ground Zero was to include the Drawing Center, a respected arts institution that had occasionally shown works that some felt were less than patriotic, and the International Freedom Center, a new venture that planned to tell the story of struggles for liberty in other cultures and other periods, an idea that some objected would dilute the message of the Ground Zero memorial. They urged the Governor to send the Freedom Center and the Drawing Center packing, and the Governor, oblivious of the irony of censoring cultural institutions on a site intended as a monument to freedom, agreed. The Drawing Center has had to look for other quarters, and the Freedom Center has decided to go out of business altogether. Meanwhile, security experts determined that the Freedom Tower should be set atop a base of solid concrete nearly two hundred feet high. It may, sadly, be a necessary precaution, but nineteen nearly windowless stories in a building called the Freedom Tower is hardly a good advertisement for the virtues of an open society.
After four years of public debates, political infighting, posturing and stalled momentum in the rebuilding of Lower Manhattan, the next five weeks promise to be among the most critical since the towers fell.
Gov. George E. Pataki set the stage for a March 14 showdown at ground zero shortly before Christmas when he gave the developer Larry A. Silverstein 90 days to work out his longstanding differences with the Port Authority over the rebuilding process.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg upped the ante recently in language certain to incite the developer, when he called on him to set aside his financial interests and "do the right thing": cede two proposed buildings and a major portion of the site to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey so that rebuilding can go more quickly.
[...]
"It's long overdue, but very welcome," Mr. Yaro said. "Ending up with a see-through Freedom Tower and the rest of the site vacant, while the developer gets a half billion in his pocket and the public is stuck with billions in obligations, doesn't sound like a particularly attractive outcome."
[Republican] Christie Whitman, when she led the Environmental Protection Agency, made "misleading statements of safety" about the air quality near the World Trade Center in the days after the Sept. 11 attack and may have put the public in danger, a federal judge found yesterday.
The pointed criticism of Mrs. Whitman came in a ruling by the judge, Deborah A. Batts of Federal District Court in Manhattan, in a 2004 class action lawsuit on behalf of residents and schoolchildren from downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn who say they were exposed to air contamination inside buildings near the trade center.
The suit, against Mrs. Whitman, other former and current E.P.A. officials and the agency itself, charges that they failed to warn people of dangerous materials in the air and then failed to carry out an adequate cleanup. The plaintiffs are seeking monetary damages and want the judge to order a thorough cleaning.
In her ruling, Judge Batts decided not to dismiss the case against Mrs. Whitman, who is being sued both as former administrator of the E.P.A. and as an individual.
As a legal matter, the ruling established that the suit's charges were well-documented and troubling enough to meet a legal standard to go forward. But Judge Batts also criticized Mrs. Whitman's performance in the days after the collapse of the towers unleashed, by the E.P.A.'s estimates, one million tons of dust on lower Manhattan and beyond.
"The allegations in this case of Whitman's reassuring and misleading statements of safety after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks are without question conscience-shocking,"Judge Batts said.
Calls to the Whitman Strategy Group, Mrs. Whitman's current business, and to Glenn S. Greene, the Justice Department lawyer who is representing her and the E.P.A. in the case, were not immediately returned. Mrs. Whitman, a former New Jersey governor, was administrator of the E.P.A. from 2001 to 2003.
Mrs. Whitman knew that the towers' destruction had released huge amounts of hazardous emissions, Judge Batts found. But as early as Sept. 13, Mrs. Whitman and the agency put out press releases saying that the air near ground zero was relatively safe and that there were "no significant levels" of asbestos dust in the air. They gave a green light for residents to return to their homes near the trade center site.
"By these actions," Judge Batts wrote, Mrs. Whitman "increased, and may have in fact created, the danger"to people living and working near the trade center. Judge Batts said that Mrs. Whitman was not entitled to immunity because she was a public official. Judge Batts allowed the suit to proceed on some counts against the E.P.A. She dismissed claims against Marianne L. Horinko, an assistant administrator of the E.P.A. at the time.
Lawyers for the plaintiffs were "very gratified that the court has recognized that the E.P.A. failed in its obligation to protect the residents of downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn," said Justin Blitz, a lead lawyer on the case.
In a statement yesterday, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton called the E.P.A.'s conduct "outrageous."
"New Yorkers were depending on the federal government to provide them with accurate information about the air they were breathing," she said. "I continue to believe that the White House owes New Yorkers an explanation."
About 2,000 tons of asbestos and 424,000 tons of concrete were used to build the towers, and when they came crashing down they released dust laden with toxins. After an expert panel failed last year to settle on a method for organizing an E.P.A. cleanup, the agency said it would proceed anyway with limited testing and cleaning of apartments in downtown Manhattan below Canal Street.
Take Back the Memorial Launches Campaign to Claim Snohetta Building for an Above Ground 9/11 Museum
Governor Pataki’s promise that the 9/11 memorial quadrant at Ground Zero would be reserved for 9/11 exclusively following the withdrawal of the IFC and Drawing Center left people asking: “What will happen to the Snohetta building now that it has no tenants?” The prevailing logic was that Snohetta would not be built, primarily because fundraising for the memorial was in disarray. Earlier this month, however, Governor Pataki announced he would set aside $80 million dollars to build a smaller version of the Snohetta building. This is surprising considering that the Governor himself has yet to make a donation to the 9/11 memorial. Not that we blame him. The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC) has allowed the design process for the memorial and museum to run amok.
James Zadroga spent 16 hours a day toiling in the World Trade Center ruins for a month, breathing in debris-choked air. Timothy Keller said he coughed up bits of gravel from his lungs after the towers fell on Sept. 11, 2001. Felix Hernandez spent days at the site helping to search for victims.
All three men died in the last seven months of what their families and colleagues say are persistent respiratory illnesses directly caused by their work at ground zero.
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The New York Daily News has learned that an additional 22 men, mostly in their 30s and 40s, have died from causes their families say were accelerated by the toxic mix of chemicals that lodged in their bodies as they searched for survivors or participated in the cleanup after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
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Zadroga was far from alone, of course, at Ground Zero. Thousands of others, from across the city and across the country, had arrived at the smouldering crevice in Lower Manhattan to do the same, in what was a long, long clean-up and debris-trucking process. How many of them are ailing now? How many of them might die because of illnesses attributable to the contaminants they inhaled, or the particles absorbed into their skin, at a time when many frantic responders weren't even wearing proper protective gear or respiratory apparatus?
[....]
One survey, of 1,138 responders, from the period of July to December 2002, showed 60 per cent reported lower airway breathing problems and 74 per cent reported upper airway breathing problems.
Federal employees were told not to participate in the Mount Sinai program, that a separate monitoring agency would be established for them. But such an agency appeared and disappeared with fewer than 600 people seen, according to one of the 9/11 civilian watchdog groups.
In the 10 days immediately after 9/11, the Environmental Protection Agency put out five press releases reassuring the public that air and soil samples indicated no heightened levels of cancer-causing agents in the air or soil anywhere beyond the immediate Ground Zero area. Some EPA officials have since admitted those assurances were unfounded and may have been influenced by political pressure. Certainly the Sierra Club has alleged a cover-up of what was clearly an acute environmental disaster, even though the environment was hardly foremost in people's minds at the time, as relatives searched for loved ones and the White House planned a military response. What became quickly known as the "WTC cough" was prevalent among emergency responders. A later study undertaken by a private environmental firm — at the behest of a company contracted to perform some of the cleanup — found more alarming developments, with positive tests for significant asbestos levels. That firm suggested the sheer force of the tower explosions shattered asbestos into fibres so small they evaded the EPA's ordinary testing methods.
Ground Zero inhalation tests of ambient air showed WTC dust consisted predominantly (95 per cent) of coarse particles and pulverized cement, with glass fibres, asbestos, lead, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and polychlorinated furans and dioxins.
A federal judge on Thursday dismissed a lawsuit charging that the city's Office of Emergency Management helped cause the collapse of Seven World Trade Center on 9-11 by storing diesel fuel for its emergency generators in the 47-story building.
The Port Authority and developer Larry Silverstein are still on the hook in the suit, which was filed by insurers for Con Edison, which had a substation under WTC7 that was severely damaged.
The city Law Department hailed the ruling, which it says is the last property damage claim against the city related to 9-11. A statement from the department says the move by District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein "allows New York City to better plan for events like September 11th without being subject to liability based on hindsight."
WTC7 was the last building to fall on 9-11. No one was killed there. Compared to the twin towers it was a relative nobody among New York skyscrapers, but it has enjoyed posthumous notoriety because of the mystery of why exactly it fell. Thanks to the neat and sudden collapse of the building, WTC7 is central to alternative theories about what happened on 9-11—and particularly to the notion that the buildings in lower Manhattan were brought down by planned demolitions.
Mainstream inquiries also find puzzlement on WTC 7. The national investigation of Ground Zero building collapses has yet to issue its final report on building seven. An earlier study by the Federal Emergency Management Agency punted on trying to explain the collapse definitively. Not struck by planes, WTC7 appears to have collapsed solely because of fire—apparently a first for a steel-framed skyscraper. The diesel fuel was the most likely culprit, even though FEMA said this "best hypothesis has only a low probability of occurrence." The city's OEM command center used a 6,000-gallon diesel tank; this was one of several in the building. Hellestein's ruling doesn't delve into whether the diesel fuel caused the collapse, or if it was a particularly bright idea to have it there, but finds that the city is immune under a state law, the New York Defense Emergency Act:
A young police detective who spent nearly 500 hours sifting through rubble at Ground Zero has died of a lung disease connected to his cleanup efforts, police union officials said yesterday.
James Zadroga, 34, who died Thursday at his parents' New Jersey home, retired from the NYPD in July 2004 because of his deteriorating health. He is the first emergency worker to die from constant exposure to the Sept. 11 wreckage at the World Trade Center, said Michael Palladino, president of the Detectives' Endowment Association. ......................................................................................................................................................
Health studies indicate that many if not most of the thousands laboring at Ground Zero received neither proper respiratory masks nor warnings about airborne hazards. A survey of exposed iron workers by New York’s Mount Sinai Medical Center revealed that in the first week, 74 percent had only disposable dust masks or no protection at all. A survey by New York City Fire Department of 319 firefighters showed that on the day of the disaster, nearly 80 percent had similarly inadequate protection.
While more firefighters obtained proper respiratory gear over the next two weeks, about half said they wore it only rarely. According to environmental scientist Paul Lioy’s report on the government’s emergency response, Ground Zero workers -- lacking proper training and accurate official safety information --had little incentive to wear the "uncomfortable and unmanageable" respiratory gear.
urban blogger misrepresentation attended this meeting and provides lucid commentary :
And there is no doubt that is the case. A fascinating moment of total implosion occurred when a family member came up and read mostly disingenuous statement that seemed like it came directly from the Machiavellian mind of Debra Burlingame. We heard the usual garbage talking points about “it’s not about the arts, but the kind of the arts” followed by a litany of projects that, absent the loaded emotional context from which they were drawn, would have resulted in pained eye-rolling from most everyone there (and probably still did for some). There were glimmers of a viable argument, via pandering to positioning these examples of outsider art (that might be welcomed at places like MAD or the American Folk Museum), or terms that might indict the clannishness of the arts we were lamenting the exclusion of. But no one rose to point out that the some 30-odd examples offered, from a traditional curatorial viewpoint, were infinitesimal for an institution that needs to fill programming for a century (MoMA has what, 100,000 items in inventory?), and the Memorial is already slated to have something on the order of 200,000 sf of display space. I'm not aware of anyone recommending that the Memorial Center -- or whatever we are calling it nowdays -- not include such times. But, true to form, no one wanted to attack a family member by pointing any of this out, or, worse, the awkward, polite disinterest indicated that, yes, this is even less a dialogue than anyone presumes.
Controversy Still Clouds Prospects at 9/11 Site
By ROBIN POGREBIN for nyt
Published: December 14, 2005
A sense of despair about the prospects for cultural activity at ground zero pervaded a panel discussion on the issue on Monday night, even as some speakers suggested that the idea could be resurrected.
"Is there hope?" asked the artist Hans Haacke, one of five panelists on the dais in an auditorium packed with 250 people at the New School. "I would say no."
"Culture is never unideological," he added. "There is no one culture that everybody agrees on."
The two-hour event, centering on the question "What's Happening to the Arts at Ground Zero?," was organized by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and the New School's Vera List Center for Art and Politics. (cont.)
While developer Larry Silverstein rethinks his bid for over $3 billion in taxpayer-sponsored Liberty Bonds to help fund development at the World Trade Center site—N.B. Silverstein quote yesterday: "You cannot build apartments at Ground Zero"—bigger news breaks: they're going to turn off the memorial waterfall in winter, according to Downtown Express. Why? Explained the LMDC's memorial design director, "The visitor experience will not be a pleasant one. You will not only be cold, but wet. The wind will blow water into the galleries." Not like this hasn't been pointed out before by a passel of critics, but hey: common sense! Awright!from curbed
Meantime, for those looking to make sense of the current WTC chaos, architecture blogger Miss Representation offers one of his trademark Very Long Blog Posts on the state of the game at Ground Zero. Recommended read.
As for ideas, plenty of experts are spouting them already. Immediately after Hurricane Katrina, the American Institute of Architects warned about the dangers of isolating temporary housing far from services and infrastructure. Other national organizations of planners and historic preservationists have weighed in and are sending volunteers to New Orleans to help. And in architecture schools across the country, disaster recovery has become a hot topic this term. Students at the Rural Studio at Auburn University in Alabama have just designed a prototype for a temporary shelter made from shipping containers (there are thousands of empty ones along the Gulf coast), which can be adapted for habitation for $2,500 each. They hope a representative of FEMA will come check them out next week. And at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, architect Frederic Schwartz switched the subject of his studio to New Orleans just as the term began; he plans to take his 12 students to the Big Easy next month for research. Schwartz brings a special perspective to his course: he spent more than a year working on proposals for Ground Zero in Manhattan. “The lesson from that is don’t let political people decide to make the rebuilding their legacy, as [New York Gov. George] Pataki did,” says Schwartz. “It isn’t anyone’s legacy. And beware when it gets taken over by real estate.”
On Monday, December 5, the 9-11 Public Discourse Project—a private group formed by 9-11 Commission members after their official mandate lapsed in 2004—held a wrap-up press briefing in Washington, signaling the last gasp of official inquiries into the attacks four years ago. The National Institute of Standards and Technology also recently completed its final report on the twin towers. Already gathering dust are a Federal Emergency Management Agency study, the joint inquiry by Congress, the McKinsey reports on New York City's emergency response, probes by federal inspectors general, and other efforts to resolve the myriad doubts about the hijackings.
Some questions can't be answered: People who lost loved ones will never know exactly how the end came, if it hurt, what the final thoughts and words were. But other questions are more tractable. Here are 10 of them:
1. Where was the "National Command Authority"?
2. Who gave the order to try to shoot the planes down?
3. What exactly were all those firefighters doing in the towers?
4. Did anyone think the towers would collapse?
5. Why was Giuliani's command bunker at ground zero?
6. Why did 7 WTC fall?
7. How did the twin towers fall?
8. How dangerous was—and is—the air at ground zero?
9. What exactly did Zacarias Moussaoui plan to do?
10. What's on those blanked-out pages?
Ground Zero developer Larry Silverstein is being urged to speed up his rebuilding effort - or lose some public funding, sources said yesterday.
The behind-the-scenes push comes as Mayor Bloomberg and Gov. Pataki suggested publicly that some of the $3.35 billion in tax-free Liberty Bonds Silverstein is counting on could go to other developers.
Silverstein, who leases the site from the Port Authority, is finishing one office tower, plans to start the 1,776-foot Freedom Tower in the spring and hopes to erect four more office buildings. But questions have arisen about whether he can line up the prospective tenants he needs to keep the projects moving.
"There are a variety of projects [the bonds] could be used for," the mayor said. "Some are Silverstein projects, some are other projects."
Pataki said a bigger role by the Port Authority and "private-sector investors" might be best.
Sources said the Port Authority wants to renegotiate its lease with Silverstein so the agency can move up development of two Church St. sites.
Real estate developer Larry Silverstein, who holds the rights to build on Ground Zero, is asking the state and city for permission to sell $3.3 billion worth of so-called Liberty Bonds to help finance the office towers that are supposed to rise on the site. He must be required to make some very big promises to get them.
Gov. Pataki and Mayor Bloomberg must use every bit of leverage they can apply to persuade Silverstein to surrender his near total control over building the mega-project. And, critically, they must insist that Silverstein forfeit the bonds if his development scheme doesn't meet the tightest possible schedule for construction.
Created by the federal government after 9/11, the bonds are a critical economic development tool that must not go to waste. If Silverstein falters for a minute, he must lose them. And there is great concern he will falter because his plan to build 10 million square feet of office space in five buildings around Ground Zero is economically dubious, even if he does receive all the proceeds of the insurance he had on the World Trade Center.
Philip Johnson is gone, but not forgotten. A slick sales campaign by real estate marketing firm The Sunshine Group tells us that the Urban Glass House, a vestige of the final projects designed by the late, renowned architect, is rising as we speak in a fast-changing urban industrial outpost at the western edge of SoHo and just north of Tribeca.
The neat marketing package belies a convoluted backstory: First, this isn’t the building Johnson intended as his last legacy (in fact, it is more of a tribute design than one of his own.) Second, the man who dreamed up the project and hired Johnson’s firm-restaurateur-turned-developer Nino Vendome, who after 9/11 turned his nearby restaurant into a home-away-from-home for thousands of rescue and recovery workers at Ground Zero-has all but vanished from the project as well.
"How did a group of 9/11 families go from being seen as the entirely sympathetic victims of perhaps America’s greatest tragedy to being viewed as a self-interested obstructionist force that could hold up ground zero’s progress for years, banishing any sign of cultural life downtown—except, perhaps, for the culture of mourning?"The Grief Police - No one says the 9/11 families aren’t entitled to their pain. But should a small handful of them have the power to reshape ground zero?
What Bernstein and his IFC colleagues hadn’t counted on was the families. Ielpi and other family activists had long ago come to believe that the memorial for the September 11 victims should be much larger and more prominent than ground-zero developers had envisioned. They saw the IFC as competition—not just for land but for the public’s attention and, not least, charitable donations. In private meetings, they argued that the IFC would take the emphasis away from what happened to their loved ones—and would even use some of the artifacts from the disaster, like Fritz Koenig’s Sphere sculpture from the Twin Towers’ plaza, that they wanted for their memorial. The IFC was meant to be aboveground, the memorial below; the families complained that visitors to ground zero would be distracted by the IFC and its street-level cultural center before they descended to the memorial.
When their lobbying didn’t succeed, they took the battle to another level. In June, a Wall Street Journal op-ed by a 9/11 family member named Debra Burlingame all but accused the IFC of being a left-wing Trojan horse, suggesting that intellectual elites were trying to sneak a blame-America museum onto sacred ground. Under the Take Back the Memorial banner, the family members made the rounds on cable talk shows, appeared before Congress, and were cheered on by right-wing blogs. The PR battle was fought until September, when Governor George Pataki, who had once called for an array of cultural institutions to rise from the ashes, yanked the IFC from the plan for downtown that he largely controls. Burlingame and Take Back the Memorial were victorious.
Now Ielpi, clearly emboldened, makes it plain that the IFC’s defeat was just the beginning. With him on the twentieth floor this morning is Michael Kuo, whose father, Frederick Kuo Jr., perished in the south tower and who is using his master’s degree in urban planning to help Ielpi with his latest project—the establishment of the Tribute Center, a tiny family-initiated visitor center opening soon, next door to the shrouded Deutsche Bank building. Staring out at a stirring, unobstructed view of the pit, the two men present their long-term wish list for all sixteen acres. First, they and the other members of Take Back the Memorial want a memorial that, unlike the current underground Arad design, would dominate the revived site, an unmissable reminder to all Americans of Ielpi’s and the other families’ darkest day. To that end, Take Back the Memorial would like to commandeer the proposed cultural building, or at least its parcel. If the group is successful, that would inflate the exhibition space for the World Trade Center Memorial and Museum to about four times that of the Holocaust Museum.
That’s not all. Next, Ielpi points out the outline of the Twin Towers’ foundations, which the families are fighting in court to have completely preserved, like a Roman ruin; to win that one, they would have to stop construction on the new Santiago Calatrava–designed PATH Terminal, which broke ground this month. To the northeast is the Gehry performing-arts-center site; some family members are uncomfortable with the idea of, as some have put it, dancing on the graves of victims. Then there’s the surrounding scheme for 600,000 square feet of retail space, which some families would like to screen for taste (no Victoria’s Secret, thank you)—and Larry Silverstein’s five planned commercial skyscrapers, including the Freedom Tower, the tenants of which the families may also have something to say about (Middle Eastern businesses, on ground zero?).
the jazz church at citicorp is the kind of multi/non denominational sacred space that i would envision for the ground zero memorial. no propaganda. just a place to pray and no one telling you what to play.
The new St. Peter's church building is shaped abstractly like two hands held together in prayer, with large vertical windows offering passersby glimpses into its interior and the Erol Beker Chapel that contains a large sculptural wall by Louise Nevelson. The church was well known for its jazz programs under the Rev. Ralph E. Peterson, and those programs have continued after its rebuilding.
Governor George Pataki removed the International Freedom Center last month before L.M.D.C. or the public could weigh in on the museum’s content. Pataki’s decision — a response to calls from some victims’ family members to limit cultural activities in the memorial quadrant — evoked the resignation of L.M.D.C. board member Roland Betts.this new term "memorial quadrant" seems to be part of a recent re-branding of the "foot print" or "the basin" identification of the area formerly known as ground zero. this has all the looks of a common land grab. extending the boarders of the ground zero memorial to include the entire basin as sanctified land and an attempt to restrict who has a say about what happens there driven by a small but aggressive conservative group identifying them selves as "an alliance of 15 major 9/11 family groups" under the voodoo charm of debra burlingame and her take back the memorial website (and who ever else that entails).
Betts, one of the original — and most influential — members of L.M.D.C. board and a close friend of President George W. Bush, quietly handed in his resignation letter last week. At his final L.M.D.C. board meeting, Betts told fellow board members, “There’s no question that L.M.D.C. has been deeply wounded here,” according to the New York Times.
L.M.D.C. has been hemorrhaging employees since president Kevin Rampe resigned last May. The new L.M.D.C. president, Stefan Pryor, wields far less power than Rampe because on the day Pryor was promoted, Pataki appointed his right hand man, John Cahill, as Downtown redevelopment czar, a position that reports directly to the governor.
Since the spring, many of the key staffers surrounding the 130 Liberty St. deconstruction have bowed out, including Amy Peterson, who directed the deconstruction plans, L.M.D.C. spokesperson Joanna Rose, who took a post as Pataki’s spokesperson and Kate Millea, who developed the controversial community action plan.
There are some who will perceive a confounding desire to gloss over the apocalyptic anxieties that grip the American consciousness, from ground zero to the Gulf Coast. But the show's focus on formal aesthetics does plant it firmly within the Modern's tradition. When Philip Johnson, the founder of the museum's department of architecture, first introduced the International Style to an American audience in the 1930's, he famously stripped the movement of its social and political meanings.
That agenda continued through the cold-war era, when critics charged, with some justification, that the museum's support of abstraction fit neatly within a broader government agenda to project a progressive image to the world.
But in some ways, the show also brings to mind the bent-plywood furniture of Charles and Ray Eames, which became alluring emblems of the postwar American dream. "Safe" seems to be shaped by the innocent belief that good, clever designs can lead to a more enlightened world.
Today, that notion seems naïve. It's hard to remember a time in American history when the unnerving effect of world politics on daily life has been more palpable. A sign in the subway alerting passengers that the police are checking bags and knapsacks triggers a sequence of emotions: fear, repression and, finally, denial. That sign - mounted on a cheap board, with simple lettering - is more likely to leave a lasting imprint than the most beautiful objects in this show.
good bye public planning process. the taking of snohetta at ground zero 1, 2, 3
"We worked very closely to meet the call of the L.M.D.C.," Mr. Bernstein said in an interview. "There was a reason we were picked. This is what they were looking for."gratuitous use of emotion button pushing city names : grand rapids, portland, tallahassee and then bangladesh. (!?) geez, thats cold.
Neither the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation nor Governor Pataki, who was in Shanghai, had seen the report yesterday.
Stefan Pryor, the corporation president, said, "Any judgments that are made prior to the I.F.C.'s submission would be premature."
A leading critic of the museum, Debra Burlingame, whose brother Charles was the pilot of the airliner that crashed into the Pentagon, said there was nothing the International Freedom Center could do to make itself palatable as a tenant at ground zero. "They don't belong there," she said yesterday.
Her criticisms began with the opening gallery. "So the very first experience that the visitors will get when they come from Cedar Rapids, Portland, Ore., and Tallahassee, Fla., was not how we experienced 9/11 but how the people, say, in Bangladesh experienced it?" she asked.
There has been no healing, really. Four years have passed since the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, and the road to recovery at ground zero looks bleaker than ever. A rebuilding effort that was originally cast as a symbolic rising from the ashes has long since turned into a hallucinogenic nightmare: a roller coaster ride of grief, naïveté, recriminations, political jockeying and paranoia.
Rendering by Lower Manhattan Development Corporation
The only project at ground zero whose future is not in danger of being dumped is the transportation hub, designed by the architect Santiago Calatrava.
The Freedom Tower, promoted as an image of the city's resurrection, has been transformed into a stern fortress - a symbol of a city still in the grip of fear. The World Trade Center memorial has been enveloped by a clutter of memorabilia.
And the promise that culture would play a life-affirming role has proved false now that Gov. George E. Pataki has warned that freedom of expression at ground zero will be strictly controlled. ("We will not tolerate anything on that site that denigrates America, denigrates New York or freedom, or denigrates the sacrifice and courage that the heroes showed on Sept. 11," he has said.) The Freedom Center, the Drawing Center, the performing arts center that would house the tiny Signature Theater Company and Joyce Theater - all now risk being dumped, either because they are viewed as lacking in sufficient patriotism or because officials were only toying with them in the first place.
[....]
I suppose that Governor Pataki and the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation could regain a measure of credibility by starting to scale back plans for development at the site. They could solicit proposals for an interim plan, say, that offers a more realistic time frame for rebuilding - not just in economic terms, but in psychic terms as well. The point would be to allow the site's meaning to evolve over time, from a place for grieving to a place where architecture reasserts the value of life.
But none of this will be possible without shifting the emphasis back to what is most important at ground zero: the cultural and public spaces that could be emotionally transformative. It would require some patience and humility. Until then, aesthetic judgments are all but irrelevant.
When a federal judge ruled this month that a lawsuit brought by Thomas Shine, formerly a student at the Yale School of Architecture, against David M. Childs, a partner at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, could proceed, the architecture world was caught off guard.
It wasn't the accusation - that Mr. Childs appropriated one of Mr. Shine's student projects in a 2003 design for the Freedom Tower at ground zero - that seemed puzzling. The surprise was that Skidmore's motion for dismissal had been unsuccessful. For once, an accusation of architectural plagiarism had taken on a life beyond cocktail party chatter and snippy blogs.
"It's truly the most vulgar thing I have ever seen in my entire life," said Jennie Farrell, whose brother James, 26, an electrician, died on the 105th floor of the south tower.
"To call it art is reprehensible, and to place it at Ground Zero is committing a second criminal act against our dead," she added.
"It's offensive, it's America-bashing, it's a despicable insult to the families of people defending us in Iraq, and I'm sick and tired of it," said Jack Lynch, who helped carry the body of his firefighter son Michael, 30, out of the rubble.
"On 9/11, the families were violated by terrorists. Now we're being violated all over again, and it brings 9/11 right back home to each of us."
congratulations to our friend and jersey city artist amy
wilson for stirring up some real shit on the front page of the daily news!
The end is drawing near for a dark, shrouded ghost of a building overlooking Ground Zero.The Deutsche Bank tower, ravaged on 9/11 and long draped in protective netting, will be examined tomorrow by bidders on a contract to erect scaffolding prior to demolition.i never understood why 130 liberty st has to come down. it sustained damage but its clearly structurally sound. its just a matter of all that asbestos but they would have to face the same environmental challenges in the demo process as with a rehab. i think it had something to do with the owners winning out over the insurers in court? i still dont get it.
Last August, after Port Authority officials demanded he show them a financial plan, Mr. Silverstein and consultants from the financial services firm Morgan Stanley made a presentation to the Port Authority's commissioners that was met with deep skepticism from several board members, according to officials at the authority. The commissioners questioned the rents that Mr. Silverstein projected for his new buildings. They also believed that he was overly optimistic in predicting that he would be able to fill the buildings with tenants in a relatively short time, something that would be critical to his ability to pay the agency its rent and secure further financing.
Deal Is Struck on Property Needed for Trade Center (June 5, 2005)
That lingering concern colored the Port Authority's latest exploration of how to reduce Mr. Silverstein's role at ground zero. As the security concerns over the Freedom Tower began percolating this spring, top Port Authority officials, including the executive director, Kenneth J. Ringler, the chairman, Anthony Coscia, and Vice Chairman Charles A. Gargano, discussed an informal proposal to divvy up the site, according to officials at the agency.
The idea, the officials said, would be to have Mr. Silverstein build the Freedom Tower and a second office tower across Greenwich Street. Then, in exchange for a reduction in the developer's lease payments, the Port Authority would get control of the site of two future towers on Church Street, south of the planned PATH train station at Fulton Street, which the agency is building at a cost of more than $2 billion.
That would give the Port Authority more of a free hand in developing the retail component over a large swath of the site. It would also, the officials contend, allow them to build a pair of low buildings to house some of the retail space, bring back street life and ultimately serve as the place holders for office buildings that could be erected when there is more demand for commercial space in Lower Manhattan.
IN its not-so-brief and thoroughly unhappy life, ground zero has been a site for many things: tragedy and grief, political campaigns and protests, battling architects and warring cultural institutions, TV commercials and souvenir hustlers. Perhaps it was inevitable we'd end up at pure unadulterated farce.
That's where we are as of this Memorial Day weekend. A 1,776-foot Freedom Tower with no tenants - and no prospect of tenants - has been abruptly sent back to the drawing board after the Marx Brothers-like officials presiding over the chaos acknowledged troubling security concerns about truck bombs. But truck bombs may be the least of the demons scaring away prospective occupants. The simple question that no one could answer the day after 9/11 remains unanswered today: What sane person would want to work in a skyscraper destined to be the most tempting target for aerial assault in the Western world? As if to accentuate this obvious, if frequently suppressed, psychological bottom line, news of the Freedom Tower's latest delay was followed like clockwork by a Cessna's easy penetration of supposedly secure air space near the White House, prompting panicky evacuation scenes out of the 50's horror classic "The Day the Earth Stood Still."
As a result, the major architectural players at ground zero - Mr. Libeskind, Mr. Gehry, Santiago Calatrava, David Childs, Mr. Arad and the Snohetta architects, to name the most obvious - have never sat down in a room together to discuss their growing concerns about the overall plan, let alone exchange ideas about how best to improve it.
This constitutes an enormous squandering of talent, as well as a total disregard for how the creative process unfolds. And it has essentially shut the public out of the process.
So far, such inflexibility has been justified by political calculations. Open discussion of what isn't working, and why, might slow the pace of rebuilding, the thinking goes, and send the wrong message to the world - as if indecision were somehow a sign of weakness. Given how the project has stumbled, that argument is looking more and more specious. And it ignores the fact that the city, and those of us who care about it, will have to live with the consequences of these decisions for decades.
Governor Pataki should take advantage of the most recent delays to take a big step back and rethink what has become a debased process. Planning should be open to intense public scrutiny. And by encouraging the architects to talk with one another and to the public they serve, he could finally take advantage of the talent that he has right under his nose.
Mr. Rampe's departure comes at a particularly sensitive moment for a rebuilding effort that has recently been plagued by bad news. The construction of the Freedom Tower, the site's most prominent structure, is months behind schedule, and faces even greater delays after the New York Police Department last month delivered a disturbing assessment of its security shortcomings. Larry Silverstein, the lead developer of the site, has signaled that he may need hundreds of millions of dollars from the government to address the security concerns.
The decision by the Wall Street firm of Goldman Sachs to shelve plans for building a headquarters near ground zero was another setback. And to this day, three and a half years after the destruction of the two towers, a number of the architects, engineers and designers involved in the rebuilding effort have complained privately that a lack of creativity and communication still besets the project.
Earlier this month, a sharp-eyed reporter for the New York Times noticed that the performing arts center planned for Ground Zero will be excluded from the $500 million fundraising campaign for the World Trade Center site memorial. Instead, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation told Robin Pogrebin of the Times that fundraising for the center will be part of a “second phase.” To architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable, it is clear what this “second phase” really means -- the performing arts center will probably never be built.
And thus, Huxtable wrote with obvious fury two weeks later in the Wall Street Journal, the news of the center’s exclusion was “the final betrayal” in what has been a continuing “downgrading and evisceration of the cultural components” of Daniel Libeskind’s original plan -- thanks to those who lack “the courage, or conviction, to demand that the arts be restored to their proper place as one of the city’s greatest strengths and a source of its spiritual continuity.”
This is Silverstein’s standard sales presentation. He’s uttered it dozens of times to potential tenants, a cross section of Fortune 500 America, and they’ve all taken the same tour of the building and seen the same view. But so far, Silverstein has not been able to seduce one of them. As of now, in fact, he has secured a single tenant: Silverstein Properties.
Larry Silverstein has spent nearly four years as the odd man out at ground zero, written off by victims’ families, urban planners, and the media as the guy who was too broke to rebuild. He’s been continually upstaged by a series of louder, more mediagenic characters: George Pataki, celebrity architect Daniel Libeskind, and Rudy Giuliani, who sided with calls by the families of victims for a sixteen-acre memorial. Today, Silverstein has emerged as the most important player in lower Manhattan. He has the cash and the legal right to rebuild—and with 7 World Trade Center nearly ready to rent and construction of the Freedom Tower ramping up, he’s on his way to doing exactly that. “My world has been filled with people telling me what I can’t do, what I’ll never accomplish,” Silverstein says in his halting Brooklyn baritone. That he’s made it this far can’t help but make him crow a little. It’s almost enough to make him forget that what lies ahead may be the world’s most sensitive marketing challenge: asking tenants to move to the scene of the worst terrorist attacks in history.
Ground Zero in 288 Pages
An annotated look at Libeskind’s opinionated new memoir.
By Boris Kachka ny metro
Ground-zero architect Daniel Libeskind, subject of blanket local coverage, hopes to fill in the remaining gaps in his new memoir, Breaking Ground: Adventures in Life and Architecture. One of the biggest adventures, of course, has been his very public battle with architect David Childs, chosen by lease-holder Larry Silverstein to execute Libeskind’s master plan.
An index
Childs, David
Compared to the Jabberwocky (243)
Gives Libeskind “a warm hug” (244)
Ground-zero takeover plans compared to The Brothers Karamazov (249)
Libeskind’s “forced marriage to” (243–266)
Power-sharing arrangement compared to North–South Korea border tensions (255)
Treats wife Nina and female Libeskind CEO “like dogs,” says Libeskind lawyer Ed Hayes (255)
Storms out of a meeting (263)
Early employment
Constructs whalebone corsets for his mother, sees them as “applied Euclidean forms” (58)
Asked to perform “mindless, robotic action” as assistant for Richard Meier, quits (41)
Asked to sweep Peter Eisenman’s office, quits (42)
Eisenman, Peter
“No one has ever called him a mensch” (41)
Ground-zero developer Larry SilversteinM
Compared to Nikita Khrushchev (261)
“Not a man who cares much about how things look” (244)
Tells Libeskind, “I don’t want you touching my building” (245)
Jewish Museum in Berlin
Called an “architectural fart” by Berlin building director (134)
Opens on September 11, 2001 (13)
Philip Johnson says, “My God! It’s not possible that this building is actually going to get built, is it?” (140)
“Would not be about toilets” (6)
Johnson, Philip
Calls architecture “this queasy feeling in my stomach” (107)
“Gestured at the AT&T building and laughed—laughed at his own work!” (140)
Libeskind, Daniel
Accordion child prodigy (8–9)
Attends Cooper Union in the sixties, misses out on all the drugs (159)
Contributes a list to Rolling Stone’s “Cool” issue (156)
Labors manually at kibbutz as a child (225–226)
Late bloomer (6, 81, 98)
Lumped in with Sartre and Mao in the London Times (194)
“More cornball than cosmopolite . . . a grateful immigrant” (159)
Possibly a direct descendant of Prague’s Rabbi Loew, creator of the Golem (111)
Storms out of meetings (31, 134, 260)
Upstages a young Itzhak Perlman (9)
Upstages the New York Times’ Herbert Muschamp (31)
Work is brilliant, with human imperfections, like Mozart’s (128–130)
Libeskind, Nina
At age 20, first impression: “so beautiful she must be stupid” (105)
Single-handedly saves the Jewish Museum project (140–146)
Smooths things over with Muschamp (31)
Meier, Richard
Perry Street towers as gross violation of privacy (69–70)
Muschamp, Herbert
Comes out against Libeskind’s ground- zero proposal; Libeskind comments, “What insanity was this!” (167–172)
Has “wrapped his power around himself like a luxurious fur-lined cloak” (21)
Internal compass “swings quixotically” (22)
Keeps Libeskind waiting for an hour because he’s taking a long bath (22)
New York
A place where “nobody has said anything nasty to me” (274)
This is some good Herbert gossip (note: Aric Chen, quoted below, is the gossip columnist for The Architect's Newspaper. And this lawsuit is apparently 'the straw that broke the camel's back' with Herbert and his leading role at the Times). He is so self-destructive. I actually find it sad:
"And now, a word from Off the Record [NY Observer] architecture correspondent Gabriel Sherman:
On Sept. 12, Suzanne Stephens, a special correspondent for Architectural Record, was boarding Delta Airlines Flight 145 traveling back to New York from the Venice Biennale, and found she was seated in the same middle row as 56-year-old former architecture critic of The New York Times Herbert Muschamp.
Ms. Stephens, author of the just-published Imagining Ground Zero: The Official and Unofficial Proposals for the World Trade Center Site, and Mr. Muschamp came to blows earlier this year, when Ms. Stephens tried to include in her book architects who had contributed to a special issue of The New York Times Magazine that pulled together plans for the World Trade Center site, and which Mr. Muschamp had curated. Fellow Times reporter Julie Iovine was seated one row behind.
According to Ms. Stephens, upon realizing the pending seating arrangements, Mr. Muschamp promptly turned to Ms. Stephens and declared: "Would you mind switching seats with Julie [Iovine] so I don’t have to look at your fucking face?"
To which Ms. Stephens said she retorted, "Certainly, and may you rot in hell!"
The verbal volleys drew the attention of nearby passengers, according to sources on the flight. A woman from Croatia jumped up and said, "Well, it looks like you all know each other!" Other passengers sneaked curious looks towards Mr. Muschamp and Ms. Stephens.
"Herbert was already sitting down when I got to my row, and he turned and without saying hello, that’s when it happened," Ms. Stephens told Off the Record. "He told me, ‘Do you mind switching seats with Julie, so I don’t have to look at your fucking face?’ That’s when I answered back."
Neither Mr. Muschamp nor Ms. Iovine returned calls for comment before press time.
Eventually, Ms. Stephens and Ms. Iovine swapped seats, and then Mr. Muschamp and Ms. Iovine traded seats again before take off. Once the musical chairs between the smarting journalists subsided, the parties settled in for the flight, in which architects Jessie Reiser, Nanako Umemoto, Enrique Norten, Preston Scott Cohen, MoMA curator Paola Antonelli and director Spike Lee were also on board.
Aric Chen, a contributing editor at Surface Magazine and a design writer who has penned pieces for GQ and Elle Decor, was also on the plane, seated in the aisle across from the developing fracas.
"Throughout the entire flight, Herbert had this creepy smirk on his face. He had the look of someone who was unraveling," Mr. Chen said. "It was kind of a zombie-ish, smug little smirk."
According to a source familiar with the dispute between Ms. Stephens and Mr. Muschamp, it all began in February of this year, when Mr. Muschamp learned Ms. Stephens was preparing the book. Mr. Muschamp was reportedly furious that Ms. Stephens had contacted the architects in the Times Magazine spread—many of them his personal friends—without approaching him first. This winter, the two sides ratcheted up the legal rhetoric, with Ms. Stephens’ lawyer issuing a letter threatening to sue Mr. Muschamp for tortious interference and Mr. Muschamp threatening legal action of his own. The two sides finally reached an accord this spring, but by that time, most of the architects in the Times Magazine package declined to participate in Imagining Ground Zero.
"The Times was prevented from being represented in the book by one of their employees, and the project couldn’t show all the work of something The Times had sponsored, because of the machinations of one of their employees," a source involved in the proceedings said.
"You know, it’s funny—I guess I felt I was doing the right thing all along, no matter how horrible it got," said Ms. Stephens. "I wasn’t doing something I didn’t think was right. These architects had done a lot of work, and they deserved to be in this project." Then she added: "But I’m not confused or upset. For Herbert, it’s a power thing."
—Gabriel Sherman
via (frequent contributer to this page) Selma
"It was not very long ago -- three years to be precise -- that the debate over the future of Ground Zero began to coalesce around several distinct ideological camps. The discussion was dominated by two prominent architecture critics, Herbert Muschamp of The New York Times and Paul Goldberger of The New Yorker. Goldberger was consistently the wiser, steadier, more informed voice."
"The lawsuit is a public - and now seemingly irretrievable - declaration of a fundamental rift that officials have tried to gloss over with photo opportunities during the last year. It betrays the tumultuous business-as-usual jousting that has replaced some of the stated intent to rebuild ground zero in a cooperative, selfless spirit. And it will certainly not make life easier for Mr. Silverstein, who has been battling his insurers over the proceeds from the destruction of the trade center, money he needs to rebuild the site."
Turf war at ground zero -
The architectural machinations at Ground Zero can be treacherous
"The design as it now stands bears scant resemblance either to Libeskind’s compelling sketches or to Childs’s original concept. It is an unnatural hybrid made up of the work of two architects, each of whom believed he had the right to design the building himself."
- Goldgerg
architectural review
Disappearing Act
Daniel Libeskind’s plan for ground zero was the people’s choice, but the architect has been virtually neutralized by commercial forces.
Maya Lin talks about the Ground Zero tribute.