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The alliance of 15 major 9/11 family groups calls upon the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation and its chairman, John Whitehead, to move forward with Governor George E. Pataki’s historic mandate that the World Trade Center Memorial and memorial quadrant be solely devoted to honoring the victims and heroes of September 11, 2001 and telling the story of that day and of those who came to our aid, as well as the story of the first attack on the Trade Center in 1993.15 major 9/11 family groups want the memorial quadrant...
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We urge the LMDC to give the American people what they want, deserve and are contributing to by their tax dollars and private donations: a memorial which honors the lost, tells the true and inspiring history of that day and conveys a message of hope which survives the survivors. We believe that story would fill several Snohetta buildings. Further, we urge the LMDC to turn over all curatorial decisions pertaining to the memorial quadrant to the institution responsible for building, operating and paying for the memorial: the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation.
via tbtm
s for santiago? i noticed the serpentine foundation forms from the path train yesterday. just one thing:
There is a potential snag, however. A lawsuit filed last month by the Coalition of 9/11 Families seeks to halt the project on the ground that it violates a federal law requiring that historic sites not be used for transportation projects unless there are no feasible or prudent alternatives.
"He used... sarcasm. He knew all the tricks, dramatic irony, metaphor,
bathos, puns, parody, litotes and... satire. He was vicious."
the highest form of humor: PUNZ
For a time, the dust seemed to be everywhere, from the insides of downtown apartments to the very air that New Yorkers breathed. It is suspected of causing respiratory problems and may have long-term effects on health.
Most of the dust was swept up long ago, but small amounts of it doubtless remain, tucked in nooks and corners. Federal environmental officials had planned to test living and working places in Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn this year to make sure they are not still contaminated.
But the project has been stalled in part because even though the dust was seen, smelled or inhaled by millions of New Yorkers four years ago, there is no consensus about how to identify it today.
Lincoln Park West [Jersey City] is an area badly in need of tidying up, said Fred Mumford, a spokesman for the DEP. Mumford explained that the wetlands on the edge of the park were used for decades as a dumping site for solid, liquid and hazardous waste. Invasive plants ran rampant in the wetlands, smothering natural growth and the water, he said.
In addition, the wildlife and plants in the 31-acre marsh have been contaminated by several oil spills in Newark Bay, such as the Exxon Bayway spill in the Kill Van Kull in 1990, which released 567,000 gallons of oil into Newark Bay and into the marshes.
Some $500,000 in remediation money from that and other polluters that went into the New Jersey Responsible Polluters fund provided the initial funding to clean up the wetlands.
While the Lincoln Park clean-up is still in its early stages - design drafts have just been drawn and Jersey City will seek bids for a contractor early next year - the plans are ambitious.
"We will be flushing tidal water into the creek system and building new tidal channels," said Carl Alderman of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which is assisting with the clean-up. "We will be rebuilding a wetlands site that had previously been used as a landfill . removing landfill debris, planting salt grass."
Hudson County also has plans to revitalize the PJB landfill at the edge of Lincoln Park.
asymptote (click to launch pop-up - like thats a good thing?)
Is the LMDC Getting the Boot?\\via TBTM
The NY Times article regarding Tom Bernstein’s resignation seems to suggest that something may be in the works regarding the LMDC’s role in decision making for the memorial quadrant.
calling it what it isnt :
The Center would have addressed slavery and other human rights issues not directly related to the craven attacks on the World Trade Center. Novelist Vladimir Nabokov had a word for the kind of political correctness behind the center: poshlost, a Russian term meaning fashionable, Philistine, clichéd, bogus nonsense. The instance he gave in the late 1940s, in which Philistinism tumbled over the edge into evil, was: “We all share in Germany’s guilt.” The subtext at the Center was: “We all share in radical Islam’s guilt. They killed many Americans, but we had slaves; there was genocide in Western Europe; whose hands are that clean, anyway?”
75 years in the ghost busters building on cpw
via nym real estate section
schnabel towers
two young golden rain trees after about eleven months in JC soil
anyone know anything about the flypen?
She agreed and tugged at her son to come inside, when the reporters hollered at her to wait. She held up her hands. "Please don't take pictures. I don't look decent." They aimed the lens at her. She crossed her arms over herself. "Please."
The cameras clicked and clicked. She stopped asking and pressed her mouth into a grim line. They would not give her the dignity she asked for because degradation sells papers. The most valuable thing she had was her tragedy.
Would those photos haunt her? Would she be reminded of her helplessness? Before coming to New Orleans I was surrounded by images of myself that scared me. During the summer my own reflection scared me. I saw a man whose ex-girlfriend would not take his calls, whose family was broken by pride and silence, whose mother was dying from overwork while he wrote poetry. I thought the time and money and sweat I gave to the poor would return an image of me as a decent man. It would be my reward. Instead I saw how small a part of their burden I could carry.
It is in fact Warhol who drew me to Pittsburgh. I was lured here by a Web site launched in May by the Andy Warhol Museum. The site (www.warhol.org/tc21) is itself a form of cultural time travel; it makes the contents of one of Warhol's Time Capsules accessible to Internet users. Largely unknown until the artist's death in 1987, the Time Capsules were the 612 cardboard boxes that he filled with the stuff that he accumulated--the by-products of art, life, and fame. Warhol used to keep a box by his desk and toss things in: correspondence, receipts, newspaper clippings, photographs, and gifts. Some of the things were so minor that anyone else would have simply thrown them away. One capsule, archivist Matthew Wrbican tells me, contained hunks of insect-infested pizza dough. Why? No one knows. Some things were so significant--letters from Mick Jagger, a paint palette used by Salvador Dalí--that anyone else would have put them carefully away, but Warhol dropped his overflow in cardboard boxes that were each taped shut, dated, and placed in storage by an assistant.
proud mary (the recording contract from hell)
"You know, maybe it happens in 'Cinderella,' but it doesn't in real life, where those people buy a company and then turn around and give it away," he said, "even though I am the main inventor of the property that generates all that wealth. I'm the guy that wrote and sang all those songs, and arranged and produced the records. So sometimes there's a lot of irony within my being. It's like, 'Gee, everybody's all excited about something that basically came out of one guy - me!' "
He builds houses out of sand, beer crates, even paper - and he's just been chosen to create the Pompidou's new outpost. Steve Rose meets Shigeru Ban.
Shigeru Ban is not your average architect. You can tell this before you even open the door to his Paris office, because to get to that door, you have to ascend to the top of the Pompidou Centre and out on to the roof terrace. There, Ban is stationed in a sort of elongated covered wagon, which clings to the high-tech structure like a parasite. Inside, the office reveals itself to be the near-opposite of its host building: rather than industrial steel and giant ducts, it is made of synthetic sheeting, timber and cardboard tubes.
"I just asked the president of the Pompidou Centre as a joke if he would lend me the roof terrace for my temporary office," Ban calmly explains. "I needed to rent space somewhere in Paris, and it's good to be close to the client."
more current emailed image files from jim louis in new orleans's fourth ward
looks familiar yet different
The Pumpkin House
16 Chittenden Ave. at 186th St.
© Douglas Elliman
Differing accounts exist of the origin of this unique three-story brick townhouse, known as the Pumpkin House. The AIA Guide to New York City (3rd ed., p.466) states that it was the guest house of the former Paterno estate. However, according to a New York Times report (12/5/99 Real Estate p.7), the land on which this house stands was in the estate of James Gordon Bennett, the original publisher of the NY Herald. Bennett is said to have sold the tract in 1923 to a Cleveland Walcutt, who had the house designed by Franklin Pagan and Harold Verna. Construction on the house, its the steel-framed base cantilevered far over the Henry Hudson Parkway, finished in 1925. The windows of the west façade, reflecting the orange light of the setting sun, bring to mind a jack-o-lantern. The house offers breathtaking views, from the Manhattan skyline to the south, across the Hudson RIver to the Palisades to the west and the Tappan Zee Bridge to the north.
elmhurst's jamaica savings bank
Samuel H. Gottscho
at the old print shop