Commentary
What to do with Ground Zero
By Jerry Mazza
Online Journal Associate Editor


Jul 4, 2008, 00:24

In light of the fact that we are two months and 11 days shy of the seventh anniversary of 9/11, America’s greatest homeland attack, and that the New York Times reported Monday in its City Room Blog, Higher Costs and Delays Expected at Ground Zero by Charles V. Bagli, who Tuesday reported Rebuilding at 9/11 Site Runs Late, I would suggest first you read the articles, then click on Wikipedia’s World Trade Center Site.

The latter will give you a brief history of the real estate boondoggle that has left the 16-acre site with construction stops and starts, a 36-page PDF by the Port of Authority of New York and New Jersey about what went wrong, and the bottom line that the memorial to the lost of 9/11 will not be open on time for the 10th anniversary, that’s September 11, 2011, as previously announced.

As Bagli reports, “The $2.5 billion PATH station and transit hub nearby are not only behind schedule and over budget, but the final design is not even finished.

“On the south side of the site, the demolition of the Deutsche Bank tower will not be completed until sometime next year, at least 14 months behind schedule.

“For at least a year, some officials involved in the rebuilding effort have hinted that delays for any one of the 26 separate but interrelated projects on the 16 acres were compounding. But on Monday, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the site, issued a 34-page report listing the site’s problems, saying, 'The schedule and cost for each of the public projects on the site face significant delays and cost overruns.'

“The Port Authority adamantly refused to offer new schedules or cost estimates, but some officials said the delays could run up to three years. The cost overruns could extend into the billions for a project whose total cost is now more than $15 billion.”

I’ll spare you the rhetoric of the various politicians, from former Governor George Pataki to present Governor David Paterson to Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Senator Chuck Schumer, PA Executive Director Christopher O. Ward, the avaricious Larry Silverstein, primary developer;, his buddy Professor Mitchell L. Moss, professor of urban policy and planning at New York University; Julie Menin, chairwoman of Community Board 1; and Joseph C. Daniels, president of the National Sept. 11 Memorial & Museum. It’s all duly noted in the articles.

The bottom line is that they are nowhere, caught in a barbed-wire tangle of conflicting interests that needs to be cut through with a blowtorch -- the kind they used to clean the site in only nine months, as the NYT reported, when they had 30 months, creating a second round of disaster for the workers on the pile and first responders, from a variety of cancers, respiratory diseases to a profound human despair haunting these men and women. That is addressed in my articles Ground Zero illnesses come back to haunt Giuliani and 9/11’s second round of slaughter -- a review of Dust to Dust: the health effects of 9/11, a film by Heidi Dehncke-Fisher.

The “players” are now in involved in what has become a $15 billion rebuilding effort to be finished sometime in the future, with Silverstein the shadow-helmsman, followed by the memorial foundation, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, Goldman Sachs and Brookfield Properties. Sadly, as of June 2008, Wikipedia reports, that after nearly seven years the steel and core was at street level and two steel beams were 15 feet above street level. Congratulations to the various potentates. You’ve done a scurrilous job.

A modest proposal

May I humbly suggest that all construction but the train stations be ripped out down to “the washtub,” that steel and concrete reinforcement wall guarding against possible flooding from the nearby Hudson River? And may the space be filled in with earth, pure earth, and then covered with grass, leaving the footprints of the buildings, and creating a memorial park that can be visited by relatives, friends and families from all over the world to pay their respects. For after all, this hallowed ground is really some kind of graveyard, though we needn’t mimic that sad note with gravestones. A simple, single memorial stone will do, like the one for the Vietnam vets in Washington, D.C. Do you think you could handle that, guys, all you geniuses of trade, politics, and government?

I will mention that this project was haunted with corruption and Criminality from ground up on 9/11/2007, as I wrote in that article last year. Maybe that’s just the price of doing business in America, not just in New York. That said, let me return to 9/11 Park, where the souls of the gone will be honored, remembered in the simplest of settings, perhaps with comfortable benches, open space, walking paths, not more money-gulping architectural monsters, and a modicum of peace and quiet in an already over-crowded, frantic business district, edged on the west by the ever-trafficked West Street.

Let there also be more trees not more trade, and flowers, bushes, simple, beautiful-to-the-eye landscaping that reintroduces nature and the cycle of the seasons and their eternity to this area. Let there be a clear, 16-acre view of the sky, the sunshine, the rain, the snow, sleet, and clouds of all kinds floating in the sky. Let men, women and children, come to rest here from the burdens of life, and enjoy the benign beauty of the space. Let it restore them with a feeling of joy that 9/11 Park honors their living as well.

I sit here writing this with a 12.5-inch to scale metal sculpture of the Twin Trade Towers on my desk. This inexpensive artifact shows the Towers in a see-through frame of columns in four sections to the top. When you look at them and see the light flow through them, they seem to be here and not, as they are in our hearts, minds, and memories. It’s funny how architect Mies Van der Rohe was so right: “less is more,” so much more. Everyday I stop and look at these foot-high towers and I remember what is and not, what was and could be.

Personally, I would come to 9/11 Park on any given day to restore myself. And I’m sure over time millions of others from around the world would as well. Park space is a precious and much desired gift in New York City as in all our cities. For less than the cost of one of these buildings it could be accomplished. As to Mr. Silverstein’s lease, rescind it, and reclaim the land by eminent domain if necessary. I’m sure he has other fish to fry, and his own building to handle, the nefarious Tower 7 that fell by internal demolition, hit by no plane, for which he was handed a $500 million profit in insurance to rebuild a taller, wider Tower 7.

And now we are told an Emergency Official Witnessed Dead Bodies in WTC 7 due to explosions early that morning of 9/11. In an exclusive video, emergency official Barry Jennings discusses the explosions in Building 7 before the collapses of the Twin Towers. It once more indicts Silverstein and the usual suspects, those described with three little words in what really happened that awful morning. And so, let the hunt to expose the guilty, the truly guilty, the true terrorists be revealed as well. But let’s end this sacrilege, this orgy of wasted money to guild the stock market and financial area that profited so richly on that day with its obscene puts and calls orgy on what airline stocks would fall and which defense stocks would rise.

Let’s give people a place to rest, to walk, to think, to consider their lives, their families, the gift of being alive. For too quickly, we have seen, it can swept from one, anyone, rich, poor, young, old, man, woman, child, of any color, religion, or ethnicity. Let this be the place of remembrance and meditation. Not just a momento mori, but a momento vitae, where we can hear the sounds of the seagulls off the Bay of New York, grasp sight of Lady Liberty and her flickering torch, smell on the wind the faraway sea that bore us. And then, let us raise our heads to that power of creation, not lower them to the force of destruction.