DRAWING CENTER RECONSIDERS MOVE TO GROUND ZERO
After coming under fire for showing -- gasp -- political art, the Drawing Center is reconsidering its plan to move to a new facility at Ground Zero, according to a report in Crain’s New York (and following a similar story published here last week). "We would never be able to accept censorship," said Drawing Center executive director Catherine de Zegher. In any case, according to the story, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, which is overseeing the site, has decided to raise the $350-million cost of a 100,000-square-foot World Trade Center memorial before moving on plans for a museum and performing arts complex.

It almost goes without saying that the controversy over the Drawing Center’s "unpatriotic" art -- for details, see Artnet News, July 13, 2005 -- was entirely fabricated by the right-wing press. New York artist Amy Wilson, one of the primary targets of the attacks (for a work using an image from Abu Ghraib), said she was "disappointed" that the Drawing Center had not mounted a more vigorous defense of artistic freedom, especially on its website, which contains no trace of the controversial works. Following the fracas, Wilson herself posted an image of the entire painting in question, which is titled A Glimpse of What Life in a Free Country Could Be Like (2004).

http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/news/artn...netnews07-20-05.asp

SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT
CNN to Profile Project Rebirth
July 21, 2005

Tomorrow, Friday night, July 22, CNN is doing a story on Project Rebirth. The story will be on “Newsnight with Aaron Brown” at 10pm (Eastern Time). The story features exclusive interviews with Director/Producer Jim Whitaker and John Cahill, Governor Pataki’s Chief of Staff who was recently appointed to oversee the redevelopment in Lower Manhattan. Additionally, Project Rebirth’s time-lapse cameras will be shown along with some of the actual time-lapse footage.

On Sept. 11, 2001, a terrible tragedy befell Eunice and Lee Hanson: they lost their beloved son, Peter, daughter-in-law Sue and 2-year-old granddaughter, Christine.
The young family was headed for an exciting and fun vacation on United Airlines flight 175 when terrorists flew it into one of the towers of the World Trade Center.
  
In the years since, numerous companies and organizations have memorialized Peter Hanson's family, from the Time Trade Corp. (Peter Hanson was Vice President of Sales) to the Beardsley Zoo in Bridgeport (a bench is named in Christine's honor, and Lee and Eunice Hanson donated $150,000 toward the zoo's Hanson Exploration Station in honor of their loved ones).

Yet, the town in which the Hansons have resided for more than 20 years - and which Lee Hanson has served in various volunteer capacities - has yet to formally honor their child's memory.

There is a proposal to name the new Staples Elementary School gymnasium in memory of Peter Hanson, but before that can happen, the school board must first approve a "policy on memorials" during a special meeting tonight at 6 p.m. in the Helen Keller Middle School media room.

While some residents have suggested that politics may have been a factor in the long delay to erect a memorial, Lee Hanson, a prominent Republican and member of the Board of Finance, recently told the Courier he believes the problems were caused by simple miscommunication.

Though he indicated he regretted the complications, he maintained that he is "pleased" with the proposed gym dedication.

Hanson's view is a very optimistic one. Hopefully, the memorial policy will be approved and the project can finally move forward.

Next month, Easton Police Chief Jack Solomon plans to erect an American flag with the names of all 3,000 Sept. 11 victims superimposed over it, as well a family photo of Peter, Sue and Christine Hanson in the police station lobby.

Bravo!

With nearly four years having passed since the terrorist attacks, Easton is long overdue in this honor for its lost son.

http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?BRD=134...98785&PAG=461&rfi=9

Under Cover

With Friends like these…

Friends of Community Board 1 has decided it is no longer, well, friends of Community Board 1. Last week, the nonprofit’s board of directors voted to change its name to Friends of Lower Manhattan, a first step in what may be a pending divorce from the board it was created to support.


The organization, created in 2001 to raise money for the financially strapped board, has come under heavy fire from several C.B. 1 members who accuse the organization of acting without consulting them and not representing their interests.


Losing Friends could prove costly for the community board. The nonprofit reported nearly $550,000 in gross revenue in 2003, according to its tax return, and funds the salary of one C.B. 1 employee. Last week it won a $71,000 grant from the American Red Cross to pay for a fulltime C.B. 1 employee to work at the Lower Manhattan Construction Command Center.


“This would be a tragedy if some animosity were to develop between C.B. 1 and the organization that was created to raise money for it,” said Ray O’Keefe, member of C.B. 1 and Friends, at recent C.B. 1 task force meeting held to discuss Friends.


The Red Cross grant has quickly become a litmus test of how Friends will interact with the board now that Friends president Madelyn Wils is no longer chairperson of C.B. 1. The board’s district manager Paul Goldstein — who is also vice president of Friends — informed several board members recently that the staffer he had in mind for the construction center post was C.B. 1 assistant district manager Judy Duffy, who also happens to be on the board of Friends.


But C.B 1’s newly elected chairperson Julie Menin put the kibosh on Duffy’s new gig after the city’s Conflicts of Interest board and the general counsel for Borough President C. Virginia Fields advised her that it may not be kosher to use grant money to fund a city official working at another government office. A new hire will go in her place.


Although the grant money is under Friends’ control, Menin is confident the nonprofit won’t rescind the cash. “There is no desire on the part of Friends to do that,” said Menin in a telephone interview. “Friends will pay for the individual [to represent C.B. 1 at the center.]”


The growing rift between the two organizations comes in the midst of a changing of the guards. Menin was elected chairperson in June after the seat opened up when Fields unexpectedly decided not to reappoint Wils to the board last March, in the middle of her final term as chair.


As one of her first orders of business, Menin established a task force to examine Friends, which operates out of the board office. At the task force’s inaugural meeting, board members grilled Goldstein for an hour about the workings of the organization and voiced frustration about the organization’s relationship with the board, indicating that they hoped to secure greater control over the organization.


“Friends has a right as an independent organization to do what it wants,” Goldstein said at the meeting. “That’s the dilemma.”


The following night, Friends took Community Board 1 out of its name, despite a plea from Menin to wait until after the board offered up a list of recommendations. Menin, a new Friends member, abstained from the vote.


“It was not a friendly move,” said task force chairperson Bill Love in a telephone interview with UnderCover.


The board might establish a new nonprofit arm, one with more direct community board control, Love said.


Goldstein referred all calls on the matter to Wils who did not return calls for comment.


In a conversation shortly after Menin was elected as chairperson of C.B. 1, Wils told UnderCover, “We’ve [Friends] spent the last couple of years advocating for the community board, if the community board should not want that support, we certainly would not want to give it.”

http://www.downtownexpress.com/de_115/undercover.html

A Return Engagement for a Ground Zero Oasis

By GLENN COLLINS
Published: July 23, 2005
It could never be just another park renovation.

For when it is completed next spring, the $8 million reconstruction of Liberty Plaza Park, across from ground zero in Lower Manhattan, will signal more than just the return of a cherished oasis in the forbidding canyons of the financial district. It will also mark the rebirth of another significant fixture of the neighborhood torn asunder by the attack of Sept. 11, 2001.

Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times
Liberty Plaza Park in Lower Manhattan will be finished in the spring. Litter is strewn at the site now.
 
Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times
Liberty Plaza Park was a place where office workers could watch street jugglers and backgammon players while wolfing down lunch.
"This is the final piece of the puzzle for us, the last thing that was destroyed that we can put right," said Ric Clark, president and chief executive of Brookfield Properties, which owns the park.

Brookfield has finally won approval to refurbish the 32,756-square-foot space, which is bounded by Broadway, Cedar Street, Liberty Street and Trinity Place.

Last Monday, construction barriers closed the park. When they are removed next spring, the formerly bare-bones, concretized park will be shaded by a canopy of 54 honey-locust trees above granite seats, tables, planters and pavement. At night, the park will be illuminated by 500 white fluorescent lights flush with the ground.

Then the park will also celebrate the return of the lifelike "Double Check," the bronze sculpture by J. Seward Johnson Jr. of a fellow with a briefcase that inhabited the original plaza for decades. The sculpture, coated with toxic dust, was undamaged by the collapse of the World Trade Center and, bedecked with mementos, it became an emblem of survival.

Its rededication will be "a gesture of renewal toward ground zero," said Sabrina Kanner, vice president of design and construction at Brookfield, who added that the park would be the future home of "Joie de Vivre," a 70-foot-tall, red-painted sculpture of welded and bolted steel by Mark DiSuvero. It will be the first permanent public installation of one of the 72-year-old sculptor's works in Manhattan.

The park "is the right place to celebrate the joy of life," Mr. DiSuvero said, referring to the title of his work, which will be situated in the southeast corner.

For decades, the park provided a vital timeout for office workers who sat on the steps, lined up at Sam's Falafel and the other carts on Broadway, and checked out the street jugglers and backgammon amateurs while wolfing down lunch. Its celebrated chess and checker games were spectator sports.

As one of the few oases in Lower Manhattan, and the midpoint between City Hall Park and Battery Park, "it was a very-well-used public space, though its esthetic may have been hard-edged," said Suzanne O'Keefe, vice president of design for the Alliance for Downtown New York, the local business-improvement district.

And its role as a pedestrian traffic corridor to the financial district was so vital at the morning and evening rushes that "trying to walk in the opposite direction was like being a salmon going upstream," Ms. Kanner said.

After 9/11, the park was covered with debris and more than a foot of toxic dust. Immediately, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the New York City Department of Design and Construction established it as a staging area, since the raging fires at the trade center site made the park one of the few safe open spaces.

In 2003, the city and federal crews returned the property to Brookfield after patching the site with concrete, cleaning it up and installing lighting and temporary benches. Now treeless, it reopened. "We thought we'd be able to jump right in then and put in a new park," Ms. Kanner said.

But renovation plans were put on hold while potential uses for the park's below-grade space were studied. Ultimately rejected were plans for underground parking, a Verizon cable vault and a subway entrance.

The rescue crews' heavy construction vehicles extended sinkholes on the property because the original park had been built over the back-filled foundations of demolished buildings. The debris settled, creating voids. And so, the contractor, the Turner Construction Company, will have to excavate from 8 to 20 feet below grade to prepare the new park's foundation.

...

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/23/nyregion/23park.html

July 24, 2005, 10:45 AM EDT


NEW YORK -- Developer Larry Silverstein has signed his first lease for the nearly completed 7 World Trade Center, one month after state legislators passed an incentive plan to help downtown buildings, according to a published report.

American Express Financial Advisors, a unit of the credit card company, is negotiating a 15-year lease for about 20,000 square feet at the 52-story tower just north of the main trade center site, Crain's New York Business reported for Monday editions.

 http://www.newsday.com/news/local/wire/new...ny-region-apnewyork

From Ground Zero to Pomona, biking for a cause
By CATHERINE WILDE
SPECIAL TO THE JOURNAL NEWS
(Original publication: July 24, 2005)


Krucker's Grove was filled with the roar of hundreds of motorcycles and the enthusiasm of their riders yesterday as the fourth annual New York City Ground Zero Independence Ride concluded at the park.

"It was beautiful," Shannon Bohal of Scotch Plains, N.J., said of her Harley-Davidson ride from the World Trade Center site to Rockland.

"The food, the place, the escort were all great. You can definitely count me here for next year."

The event was the brainchild of Gregg Nolan, who was a supervisor with the International Union of Operating Engineers and worked at Ground Zero after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. He and Willie Love of the Dockbuilders Union originally thought the ride would be a reunion for everyone involved in the Ground Zero cleanup.

"We became a brotherhood," Nolan said of everyone who aided in the cleanup. "This is a healing experience."

Love described the gathering as therapeutic and added that he and Nolan would have organized the ride with or without the money from sponsors.

It was only after they realized what a following the event accrued that they thought of using proceeds to benefit charities.

The proceeds from this year's event will go toward the Worldwide Children's Foundation, which provides life-altering or life-saving surgery for children in need around the world. Benefiting for the first time this year is the Anderson House, a halfway house for women recovering from alcohol and drug addiction.

Nolan's wife, Diane, was a residential aide and counselor in training at the Anderson House before she died in a motorcycle accident shortly before last year's ride. Because of her passion for her work, her husband chose the halfway house as one of the beneficiaries this year.

"She was so dedicated, caring and compassionate," said Jan Holmstrup, development director for Anderson House, who worked with Diane Nolan. "I always got so much from her."

Diane Nolan had also supported her husband at Ground Zero and with the rides in the following years.

"It took about an hour and 10 minutes," Gregg Nolan said of the ride up from downtown Manhattan. "It was fantastic; the weather was great."

He mentioned that last year's ride did not have as big a turnout due to inclement weather.

Nolan said that each year the event grows in size and that more than 300 people participated yesterday. The riders are predominantly from New York and nearby states, but there also were riders from Phoenix, Los Angeles and Seattle yesterday.

The entry fee of $50 included live entertainment from the Danny Lawson Band, and free food and beverages. A raffle and T-shirt sales helped raise money.

http://www.thejournalnews.com/apps/pbcs.dl...7240301/1019/NEWS03

Can you spare
a dime - or $500M?
 
Huge WTC fund drive
 
By DOUGLAS FEIDEN
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
 
 
A 6-ton carbonized mass of crushed concrete, pulverized steel and melted furniture that was found among rubble at Ground Zero is in JFK’s Hangar 17.
 
Reach for your wallets and tell your kids to crack open their piggy banks: The $500 million campaign to build a world-class memorial at Ground Zero has begun.

Students and stockbrokers, firefighters and financiers, baseball fans and business barons will all be asked to pony up in one of the greatest fund-raising challenges in New York City history.

The goal: during the next four years, raise $300 million from corporations and fat-cat donors and $200 million from the general public for the World Trade Center memorial and museum.

By reaching out to working people as well as the megarich, organizers are mounting a grass-roots appeal that hasn't been seen since 1885 - when city schoolchildren gave their nickels and dimes to pay for the pedestal for the Statue of Liberty.

"The task is to tap into that classic, uniquely American vein of generosity to tell the story of 9/11 - the story of those who died, those who helped and those who cared," said Gretchen Dykstra, president of the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation.

Moneymaking plans include an effort to get the biggest Wall Street companies to donate a portion of their trading profits on Sept. 11, 2006, the five-year commemoration of the attacks, the Daily News has learned.

"We want to honor, remember and respect all the innocent people we lost, and we need to be directly involved in the memorial," said Marc Lackritz, president of the Securities Industry Association, whose member companies lost 749 employees on 9/11. "It's under discussion."

A possible marketing partnership with Major League Baseball also is being explored, insiders say.

Pegged to the World Series, it would get the foundation's Web site - www.wtcmemorialfoundation.org - splashed across national TV and build on a $1 million gift that MLB and the Baseball Players Association gave the memorial last year.

The National Football League and other professional sports leagues also have held preliminary talks about promotional alliances.

"Fund-raising opportunities are endless at sporting events," said NYC & Co. Chairman Jonathan Tisch, who is raising cash for the memorial. He ought to know - his family owns 50% of the New York Giants.

"I don't know if we'd pass the hat, but revenues could be derived on everything from receptacles for loose change to sales at vending stands," Tisch added.

The streetcorner bell-ringers of the Salvation Army also will be asked to solicit funds on future anniversaries of 9/11, according to one initiative.

And the proud Internet geeks at EchoDitto Inc., who ran Howard Dean's hugely successful online fund-raising campaign in 2004, will be Web masters for the memorial. Planners hope to collect $100 million in cyberspace, based on an average gift of $100 from a projected 1 million donors.

"The Dean campaign showed that citizens could organize and raise significant small-dollar contributions online," said Nicco Mele, CEO of EchoDitto.

"But the online response to the tsunami - $1 billion in 30 days - showed how the Internet can spur enormous charitable giving globally, and that's the model for the memorial."

In addition, dozens of potentially lucrative marketing tie-ins are being sought - with NASCAR, the Country Music Association Awards, unions in both the public and private sector and the 165,000 volunteer firefighters in New York, organizers say.

Also on the wish list: the sale of Lance Armstrong-style bracelets - forget-me-nots that would be funded by Avon or its foundation - with proceeds donated to the memorial.

"Some 500,000 people volunteered their time after 9/11, and they all made America proud," Dykstra said. "The challenge now is how to tap into that spirit."

At stake is Reflecting Absence, the World Trade Center Memorial to the nearly 3,000 slaughtered innocents that will be the heart and soul of Ground Zero, and the Memorial Museum, which will show 9/11 artifacts and relate the horrors of that day. Both are expected to open in 2009.

Located in a forest of soaring oak trees, the memorial's centerpiece will be two voids ringed by a curtain of water that cascades into reflecting pools below. It includes a tomb for unidentified remains, a contemplation room for family members and a Memorial Gallery lined with the names of the dead.

The 6-acre "memorial quadrant" also will include a 110,000-square-foot, 70-foot-high subterranean museum between the footprints of the twin towers, providing access to both the bedrock and the original slurry wall.

The memorial complex, along with the more controversial cultural facilities, the International Freedom Center and the Drawing Center, yards away on Ground Zero, are expected to cost $800 million.

Gov. Pataki has directed $300 million in federal funds to the memorial project, which leaves a half-billion dollars in private funds still to be raised.

Meanwhile, a bill sponsored by Rep. Vito Fossella (R-S.I.) would let federal taxpayers donate $1 to the memorial by checking a box on their income taxes. If it becomes law, and if a mere 20% of 120 million tax filers gave a buck a year, it would generate a $24 million annual windfall.

"It's an opportunity for the American people to step up to the plate and get directly involved in the future of Ground Zero," Fossella said.

A similar measure pushed by Pataki would create a memorial checkoff box on New York State tax returns.
 

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/local/story/330779p-282711c.html

Flight 93 film
to air on 9/11
 

 
By ADAM LISBERG
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
 
 
Dramatization of Flight 93 passenger uprising on 9/11 in Discovery Channel's film 'The Flight That Fought Back.'
 
A made-for-TV movie about doomed United Airlines Flight 93 will re-create how passengers fought with their 9/11 hijackers - preventing them from crashing the plane into another landmark. It will air on the fourth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.
"The Flight That Fought Back" was made with the cooperation of the airline and the families of many of the 40 crew members and passengers who died when the plane crashed in an empty field in Shanksville, Pa.

"It's incredibly hard to watch, but ... I want this story to be shared, and I want people to be put on that plane," said Sarah Wainio, whose sister, Elizabeth Wainio, was a passenger, and who supports the Discovery Channel film.

Elizabeth Wainio, 27, was a manager for Discovery Channel's stores and was traveling on company business when Flight 93 was hijacked after taking off from Newark International Airport.

Passengers and crew members used cell phones to call authorities and loved ones. They learned that other hijacked jets had been flown into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

So they apparently tried to storm the cockpit and retake the jet - forcing the hijackers to crash the plane in the Pennsylvania field, preventing its reaching a target such as the U.S. Capitol or the White House.

Alice Hoglan, whose son Mark Bingham was on Flight 93, said she is glad the film will show how he and other passengers foiled the terrorists' plan.

"Flight 93 was about the only bit of good news that came out of Sept. 11," said Hoglan, of Los Gatos, Calif., whose son called her from the plane. "I'm going to do everything I can to help people who want to tell that story."

Pamela Gould, whose father, Patrick (Joe) Driscoll of Point Pleasant Beach, N.J., died on Flight 93, said she isn't sure how she'll react when she sees the film.

"We'd all love it to be over, but it's never going to be over," said Gould, who lives in Allendale, N.J. "It's a big part of history, and it should be told. I wish it was just TV - but it is real life."

The 90-minute film is half documentary material and half dramatization, but Discovery says only a few lines of dialogue are invented.

The rest came from eyewitness accounts, interviews and phone calls made by passengers and crew on the doomed plane - including actual voice mails that will be played in the film.

A three-minute clip shown to critics this month showed scenes of passengers making phone calls from the plane, consulting a Bible and later trying to storm the cockpit with a food-service cart.

"This is going to be as accurate and comprehensive a retelling as currently possible," said executive producer Andrea Meditch. "We have stuck to the facts because this is a story that needs no embellishment."

United allowed the producers to film operations in Newark, and authorities in Shanksville cooperated with filming - even reenacting a police honor guard for family members visiting the crash site.

Discovery said it tried to contact all victims' families to alleviate their concerns about the film, and will hold advance screenings for them - including one in New York yesterday.

"We've had very positive reactions so far," Meditch said. "Some families may not ever wish to see it, but we want those who do to have the opportunity to see it first."

The network will run appeals for donations to the memorial planned for the field where the plane went down. Proceeds from the DVD version of the film will be donated to the memorial as well.
 
http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/s...30858p-282768c.html

As Lane strode down W. 33rd St. in Manhattan in February 2002, a construction barrier at a Safeway site - which Lane contends should have been secured - flew on top of her. Her companions had to find help to get it off, and she suffered neck injury as a result.

"It was so avoidable," she said Friday. "I was so angry that a few months later I started doing some research."

What she learned upset her and inspired her to file suit against Safeway and a related company, Big Apple Wrecking. She said she was ecstatic that the 7-month-old girl pinned under the supermarket collapse had survived, but she hopes some good may come of that near-tragedy.

"People will never forget that," said Lane, whose suit is still pending. "Now maybe they'll shine a light on that company."

Safeway already had been under scrutiny from authorities, and the supermarket collapse has intensified that. Safeway is the subject of multiple investigations, from the Manhattan district attorney to the city's Department of Investigation.

The Buildings Department slapped Safeway with three violations and is looking into whether the upper West Side supermarket was overloaded when a Safeway Bobcat began working on the roof minutes before the July 14 collapse.

The Daily News has learned that the DOI is probing Safeway's ties to a mob-connected felon, Harold Greenberg, according to two sources familiar with the probe.

Greenberg, identified by the FBI as a Gambino crime family associate, owns Big Apple Wrecking on Commerce Ave. in the Bronx.

Safeway is located at the same address as Big Apple, and leases its equipment from a Greenberg-controlled firm, Dynamic Leasing, sources say. The Safeway Bobcat involved in the supermarket collapse belongs to Dynamic Equipment.

Greenberg also has loaned Safeway money, which is still being repaid, sources told The News. That's an issue because the city hired Safeway to take down two incinerators under the promise that Greenberg would receive no financial benefit, sources said.

Safeway officials did not return calls seeking comment. Safeway's lawyer also did not return calls.

Before the supermarket collapse, Safeway seemed to be a company on the rise.

In Brooklyn, Safeway was awarded $7 million in city contracts taking down abandoned Sanitation Department incinerators.

The Lower Manhattan Development Corp. supervising Ground Zero cleanup had voted the very morning of the collapse to hire Safeway for a $3 million cleanup of the Deutsche Bank building.

And Safeway was plugging away on several projects for Extell Development, a megadeveloper that had just announced it would compete against Nets owner Bruce Ratner for development of the Brooklyn railyards.

Since the supermarket collapse, DOI probers have gone back to reexamine Safeway's arrangement with the Sanitation Department, sources say.

On Friday, DOI spokeswoman Emily Gest confirmed the agency was looking into whether Safeway was adhering to its agreement with sanitation officials. She declined further comment.

As a result of the collapse, some public officials have questioned whether Safeway should have been hired for work at Ground Zero.

"Any company performing work on the Deutsche Bank building must do so with exquisite care," said Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-Manhattan). "Is hiring a firm that has a record of serious violations, including its most recent one involving a building collapse, the most prudent choice for this project?"

LMDC spokeswoman Joanna Rose said Safeway will not be doing structural work and added that the contract has not been finalized.

Extell spokesman Bob Liff said it was too early to say whether Extell would hire Safeway for the Brooklyn railyards project, if it wins the bid

http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/331016p-282736c.html

Dramatization of Flight 93 passenger uprising on 9/11

Going to bat for Sept. 11 memorial
 
BY KAI MA
STAFF WRITER

July 24, 2005


Standing on burnt-orange dirt, Chief Richard Sandiford of the Jericho Fire Department pitched a florescent yellow softball, flinching as the crack of a metal bat knocked it to centerfield.

In a softball game yesterday between the Jericho and Greenlawn Fire Departments at Mitchel Athletic Complex in Uniondale, the "Jericho Bachelors" lost 17 to 2. Yet shouts of encouragement soared.
 
 Four years ago, these teams rallied behind each other in a different way. Most were volunteer emergency responders at the World Trade Center immediately after the 9/11 terror attacks.

Sandiford spent four 15-hour days at Ground Zero after the towers fell. The night he returned to his Jericho home, he said, "it was so calm and quiet, so different from what I'd just witnessed. It was during that silence that I realized what had happened."

In all, 16 softball teams made up of local police officers and firefighters, Port Authority police and the Secret Service are changing into looser uniforms to compete in a two-day tournament to raise funds for the construction of a 9/11 Memorial in Eisenhower Park in East Meadow. The memorial is scheduled for completion on Sept. 11 this year.

The goal is to raise $100,000 in team fees and donations for the project, said Steve Kunker, the tournament director. The memorial will feature two aluminum towers and a wall with the names of 281 victims who lived in or had ties to Nassau County.

One of those victims is "Bronko" Durrell Pearsall of Hempstead, a firefighter for New York City and a volunteer firefighter for Hempstead Village who died at the World Trade Center on 9/11. Lt. Chris Ahearn of the Hempstead Village Police Department said the tournament is to pay tribute to heroes like Pearsall, who he had known since he was 3 years old.

When Ahearn arrived at Ground Zero on Sept. 13, he said "there was a sea of police and firefighters that stretched a quarter of a mile, each wearing dust masks and passing buckets of rubble onto a pile on the street."

"You could see the smoke from Hempstead," Ahearn said. "The people who died in the Twin Towers are no different than us - they were people who were just doing their job."

The tournament, which is open to the public, continues 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. today at the Mitchel Athletic Complex.

"Firefighters are good at softball," said Mike Zeis, 40, a Greenlawn firefighter and team pitcher. "We can't play baseball; we're too old."

http://www.newsday.com/news/local/longisla...ny-linews-headlines

New WTC memorial planned
By RANDI WEINER
rweiner@thejournalnews.com
THE JOURNAL NEWS

NANUET — Sept. 11's horrors are fading for many people, replaced by quiet remembrance and private mourning.

So a memorial to be built in the fall on the grounds of Nanuet's A. MacArthur Barr Middle School is being planned as a place to sit and peacefully recall the terrorist attacks and the nine people with ties to the school district who never made it home from the World Trade Center that day.

"I think it's nice that they still remember," said Grace Lum, whose son, William Jr., 45, was a 1974 graduate of Nanuet High School. A senior claims specialist at Marsh & McLennan, he died when the towers collapsed. "We're honored. It's very thoughtful of them."

Shortly after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, members of the Nanuet Board of Education agreed they wanted to create a memorial to honor the former students, parents, children and others connected to the district who were among the 86 people who died that day who lived in or had ties to Rockland.

About a dozen people were invited to join a memorial committee, including family members of those killed, school representatives and interested parents. In two meetings, they decided to place a memorial between Nanuet's middle and high schools.

Plans went on hold because the area was going to be dug up during a districtwide construction project that is nearly complete.

Sometime during this past year, Superintendent of Schools Mark McNeill, who sits on the committee, mentioned the memorial to Kevin Sawyer, construction manager for the districtwide project. Sawyer not only joined the committee, but he also offered his expertise and professional connections to get things moving again, McNeill said.

"We wanted a place to sit and reflect. That was the idea," McNeill said. "The committee could only go so far and then Kevin came on board and his knowledge of engineering, architecture and materials allowed the committee to come to a consensus of what they wanted."

The planned memorial includes a circular stone plaza with benches, a five-segment monument in natural red, white and blue marble, a stone-paved winding path, trees, bushes and lighting. Organizers would like to include a waterfall on the side segments; the nine Nanuet names would be carved in the center stone.

The estimated cost is $75,000 to $80,000.

To pay for the memorial, members of the grass-roots Friends and Neighbors of Nanuet offered to coordinate fundraising and hold a golf tournament. The group envisions a 10-day community fundraising effort beginning Sept. 10 and including individual and organized projects to help pay for the memorial, said Frank Politano, a founding member.

"One of the victims I have a personal connection to," Politano said of New York Police Department rescue specialist John D'Allara, who was a childhood coach and role model for Politano. "We wanted it to be something positive."

In general, people who live in the area said they were pleased to hear about the memorial.

"I think it's a good idea because I know a lot of people lost their loved ones, and we need to let them know that we also care about what happened," said Denora Harris, 46, of Nanuet.

Mort Rosen, 65, of New City said any remembrance would be welcome, whether a marble pillar or a tree. Steven Dornbush, 21, of Blauvelt said he had no objection to a memorial if it would be acceptable to those who lost family members. Eric Zyla, 44, of West Nyack, said Sept. 11 needed to be remembered because more people died in the attacks than died in Pearl Harbor.

"It's not like it's a one-time thing. It could happen again," said Anil Padiyedathu, 22, of West Nyack. "It's good to remember. It's something to remember that things like that happen, and it's good to make a memorial for it."

Some, however, said they believed another Sept. 11 memorial was unnecessary, especially because there were at least 15 other memorials in Rockland already.

"The memorial should be out at the World Trade Center, not 50 miles away," said Joseph Sokolowski, 19, of Nanuet. "I just don't think it's the best use of the money."


http://www.thejournalnews.com/apps/pbcs.dl...7250347/1024/NEWS08

The roots of healing grow with artist's Sept. 11 memorial

BY WALTER F. NAEDELE

Knight Ridder Newspapers


PHILADELPHIA - (KRT) - Steve Tobin thinks big.

His West African termite mounds, as tall as 12 feet, graced the lawn of the American Museum of Natural History in New York in 2000 and 2001.

He plans to exhibit other large, nature-inspired sculptures on the grounds of Stonehenge, the prehistoric site in Britain, within two years.

Now, Tobin is at work on a 15- to 18-foot-tall, 20-foot-wide sculpture to be installed within sight of Ground Zero in New York to mark the fourth anniversary of the Sept. 11 tragedy.

"They knocked down our towers," Tobin said of the al-Qaida terrorists, speaking recently at his warehouse studio. But they failed ultimately, he said, because "they uncovered the strength in our roots, our connectedness."

On Sept. 11 and after, as visitors walk under and through his sculpture - the bronzed replica of the root system of a historic tree - that is what he hopes to inspire.

Tobin's sculpture memorializes the roots and stump of an aged sycamore, knocked over by debris from the falling towers of the World Trade Center.

"I really wanted to be associated with this healing" on this anniversary of Sept. 11, he said. "The sculpture is an uplifting story."

Linda Hanick said the tree stood at St. Paul's Chapel, where emergency personnel rested, directly across from the northeast edge of Ground Zero. Hanick is vice president of communications for St. Paul's parent, Trinity Church, two blocks southeast of Ground Zero.

"The stump comes from the tree at St. Paul's to the north," Hanick said, but Tobin's sculpture will be "on display at Trinity, which is to the south."

The Episcopal administrators don't know how long the sculpture will stand in the courtyard at the entrance to Trinity. After a dedication on the afternoon of Sunday, Sept. 11, "it could be six, nine months," she said.

Hanick is certain there is only benefit for the church.

Not only is Tobin bearing the cost of his sculpture, but "he's giving it as a gift" to Trinity.

Steve Tobin grew up in Villanova, Pa., graduated from high school in 1974 and majored in mathematics at Tulane University in New Orleans.

"I had no interest in art growing up," he said. "I am completely untrained as an artist."

For years, he worked out of a barn on his 14-acre property in Pleasant Valley, Pa., but for the last year, his studio has been a former warehouse he owns just north of Quakertown, Pa.

To pay the 16-person team that has been working on the Trinity Church project, as well as for the material, "I just mortgaged all my property," homestead and warehouse.

Tobin had estimated the original cost of the Sept. 11 memorial at $330,000, but now "it's well beyond that," though he declined to say how much.

He is hoping for a sponsor.

Among buyers, his larger pieces are not for the faint of heart. He estimated the going prices for his bronzes to be "on the upper end, $300,000, $400,000."

Such prices not only helped him buy the 300-foot-long warehouse, but have let him dream about the railroad link out back.

"I'm going to get boxcars on the rails," he said, "and make the boxcars as galleries."

In the warehouse, there is what he calls a maquette - a small preliminary model - about one-third the height of the final version of his Sept. 11 sculpture. On the lawn outside the warehouse are two smaller versions, each different, each looking like a many-legged spider.

"I can compose the roots in any way I please," Tobin said, "to fit my artistic objective."

Recently he sent to a casting factory the last of the 300 pieces that will make up the final 8,000-pound sculpture.

How it will take shape he still must determine. He seems certain only about its intent.

"Each gesture of the root is meant to evoke protection," he said, at the same time that it offers "an invitation to gather."

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http://www.centredaily.com/mld/centredaily...nation/12216959.htm
To see more of Steve Tobin's work, go to http://www.stevetobin.com

...

Those protests prompted Gov. George Pataki last month to call on both The Drawing Center and the International Freedom Center to give "an absolute guarantee" that the exhibits and lectures sponsored there will be tasteful and won't be anti-American.

Since then, International Freedom Center chairman Tom Bernstein sent the LMDC a six-page letter, assuring critics that its programs "will not 'blame America' or attack champions of freedom."

However, The Drawing Center has not made a similar pledge. The Drawing Center's executive director, Catherine de Zegher, told Crain's New York last week that her museum "would never be able to accept censorship" and that the center might even pull out of the World Trade Center site altogether because "whatever it shows there will be subject to undue criticism."

De Zegher was out of the country and could not be reached for further comment. But Seitel said The Drawing Center has worked for years in making plans and financing to go to the site and isn't ready to pull out yet.

"In the last couple of weeks we have had very good discussions with [LMDC president] Stefan Pryor and the LMDC and they've been positive," Seitel said. "They understand what an arts institution is and the importance of freedom."

However, he expects the negotiations won't be resolved quickly because the city-state agency officials "have an awful lot of things on their plate."

In addition, the tiny Drawing Center, with just a $1.4-million budget, is usually closed for all of August.

Last week, LMDC chairman John Whitehead acknowledged that the "First Amendment rights are one of the subjects that make these discussions very difficult."

Whitehead said he is making "one last effort" to find another location for the cultural center building, but said such a move was unlikely given that it violates the Master Plan for the 16 acres conceived by architect Daniel Libeskind.

...

http://www.newsday.com/business/ny-bzdraw2...-business-headlines

Below Ground Zero, Stirrings of Past and Future


By DAVID W. DUNLAP
Published: July 25, 2005
Having endured the construction and destruction of the World Trade Center above, the 96-year-old Hudson Terminal - now a colossal underground ruin at ground zero - will soon give way to a new transportation hub.


Andrea Mohin/The New York Times
At left, on the east side of the World Trade Center site, the openings of the Manhattan-bound tunnels of the Hudson & Manhattan Railroad, the predecessor to PATH. More Photos >
The ground that is to be broken in September for a new trade center terminal on the eastern side of the site includes some astonishing infrastructure: the two-block-long passenger platform level of the Hudson Terminal, later used as loading docks; cast-iron railroad tubes that were turned into truck ramps; a vault where tons of gold and silver were stored; and structural hints - geometrically patterned flooring here, chocolate-colored brickwork there - of the once bustling trade center shopping concourse.

...


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/25/nyregion...ml?8hpib&oref=login