You know, Bill, I've been trying to answer that question myself recently.
In the months after 9/11, I and thousands of other New Yorkers - many of us who work in the financial district - attended meetings that purported to gather opinions of what should be done with Ground Zero, what form new buildings would take, etc.
The first six or eight architectural proposals the WTC site planning board unveiled last summer were insulting and pitiful, involving buildings half the size of the formers (which is to say, as high as those around them) and, in some cases, no buildings at all - just a massive memorial area/park. I can't see how any of those proposals reflected, in any way, the comments I'd heard at those sounding board meetings. Our good mayor, Mr. Bloomberg, was underwhelmed - he, like most of us, sought a more equitable balance of commercial and memorial space and in any case, something more visually striking; more structurally formidable.
Same thing this time around, except I'll permit that the proposals seem to reflect some of the comments I heard, and made...metaphysically, only.
So, Bill, I believe that either New York's compiled ideas with respect to the WTC II haven't reached the planners or that having seen them, they've been summarily discarded. (I suspect it's the latter.)
It's discouraging. If we wind up with some artsy eyesore or cowed stump of a building there, it will really, really piss a couple of million people off. And it will feed an additional measure of victory to the bags of filth who perpetrated this act, and perhaps embolden those who aspire to undertake similar ones.
imaginenewyork.org
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