The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon left us with a total of 2,933 people recorded dead. Liberally speaking, that could mean that as many as 10,000 or 15,000 parents and children and siblings might be inclined to stay involved in the rebuilding of ground zero—this, not including the thousands of survivors of the attacks, the dozens of first responders who made it out alive, and all their families.


In reality, it’s more like 30. Not 30,000, but 30. It’s only 30 people like Ielpi who have kept their hands in the game by regularly attending planning meetings, helming Websites, filing lawsuits, and fighting political battles—over the security of new skyscrapers, the burial of unidentified remains, the separate placement of the names of firefighters among the lists of the dead, the size of a memorial. When rallies are held—like the one last month to preserve the human remains from the site that are still stored at Fresh Kills—these 30 people draw at most a few hundred.


Of the 30 hard-core activists, just half are part of Take Back the Memorial. It’s these fifteen people who have come to stand, in the eyes of the public, for the views of all 9/11 families—even though many 9/11 family members supported the IFC and other ground-zero development as well. “I personally do not represent the families,” says Paula Grant Berry, who lost her husband, David, on 9/11, and is the only family member to have served on the panel that chose Arad’s memorial design. “No family member can. I wouldn’t know where to begin. Just because you’re a family member doesn’t mean you can’t be manipulative. And just because you’re a family member doesn’t mean you can’t be manipulated by other family members.”


No one, not even the Take Back the Memorial members’ most bitter opponents, denies the families their grief and the substance of at least some of their arguments. But however heartbreaking their stories—and however relevant the concern that future generations remember what happened that September morning—the Take Back the Memorial members are far from the only interested parties at ground zero. Thousands of people who live and work downtown are still waiting for shops and services. Thousands of workers—many of them survivors, too, who saw bodies fall and ran for their lives as the towers collapsed—are pained by the still-gaping pit and are waiting for a new center for international commerce to curb the loss of Wall Street jobs. The entire city, it could be said—the country, even—is still waiting to heal this wound with a bustling neighborhood that builds a future while honoring the past.

But the Take Back the Memorial families long ago decided their need to honor their loved ones at ground zero comes before anything else: “Families,” as Ielpi says, “are number one.”


Now, by scuttling a major part of the redevelopment, they’ve touched off a bitter conflict with other ground-zero stakeholders and sent the already dysfunctional rebuilding process into a tailspin. Large components of the plan are again unsettled. Major donors and fund-raisers have been alienated. And the threat of a family veto—and more charges of anti-Americanism played out on editorial pages—hovers over every component of downtown’s potential rebirth, threatening to scare off any politician who dares cross the families. All of which raises a question: 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?


Ironically, says a former top ground-zero official (furious, but like many of the opponents, unwilling to be named), the families may have overplayed their hand. At this point, even the memorial may not get the money it needs to be built. “To be cute about it,” he says, “have the families put the zero in ground zero?”


Take Back the Memorial never really represented all family members. What it did was draw together a number of activists around the anti–International Freedom Center cause. Even before Take Back the Memorial was formed in June, many of its members had already been working for another group called the Coalition of 9/11 Families. That group was formed by Anthony Gardner, a prime mover, along with Ielpi, behind the effort to preserve the Twin Towers’ footprints as landmarks. Many other members of the group had specific causes of their own. Monica Iken had been pushing for a park for the site; Bill Doyle signed on to a class-action lawsuit against nations said to sponsor terror; Howard and Edie Lutnick run the fund for Cantor Fitzgerald’s victim families; Kurt and Diane Horning have pushed to relocate human remains from Fresh Kills; Charles Wolf exposed the vagaries of the Victim Compensation Fund; Rosaleen Tallon has lobbied for a listing of firefighters’ names separate from other victims at the memorial; and Sally Regenhard campaigns for skyscraper safety and famously held a sign reading LIES at the 9/11 Commission hearings.

All along at ground zero, there has been a gapingly wide philosophical divide between those who want to build anew and those who want strictly to memorialize. For every Larry Silverstein, who laid plans for a new fortresslike phalanx of office towers before the fires even went out, there was a Rudy Giuliani, who wants nothing there in perpetuity but a park. The man with the real power downtown, George Pataki, avoided making a choice by setting up a buffer agency, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, that was to select a master planner for the sixteen acres, a designer for the memorial, and institutions for the cultural sites. As the LMDC deliberated, Silverstein aggressively asserted his right to rebuild 10 million square feet of commercial space. Eventually, the governor embraced Daniel Libeskind’s master plan, which found spots on the sixteen acres for the Freedom Tower and four other commercial skyscrapers, a sizable cultural center, a performing-arts venue, and a new PATH terminal. At the center would be a park that would house a 100,000-square-foot memorial to September 11—the site that was eventually designed by Arad with the reflecting pools and underground waterfalls in the outlines of the towers’ footprints. When it came time to find tenants for the cultural building, the LMDC settled on the Drawing Center, which was looking for a larger space, and a new institution born of 9/11 that would celebrate American freedom.


By early 2002, Bernstein had fleshed out his idea for the IFC with Peter Kunhardt, a co-creator of the PBS series Freedom: A History of Us, and then took his case to the governor and Lou Thomson, then the head of the LMDC. Right away, Pataki warmed to the idea, and Bernstein assembled a bi-partisan board of directors including former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky, Holocaust Museum director Sara Bloomfield, and Richard Norton Smith, who at different times has headed the Reagan, Ford, Eisenhower, and Hoover presidential libraries.


For a time it seemed that the IFC would be the companion museum to the WTC Memorial designed by Arad. But by the spring of 2004, state officials had promised the memorial a museum of its own, around the Towers’ footprints, and so they ordered the IFC to remove any material about September 11 from its plan. It made things a little awkward, but it still could have held together conceptually: The IFC would follow the quest for freedom in the wake of the tragedy, while the WTC Memorial and Museum would honor those who had been lost and tell the story of what happened that day.

Feature
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?

Even now, four years later, Lee Ielpi has the melancholic demeanor of a man sifting through rubble. Ielpi, a retired firefighter whose son Jonathan, a firefighter too, vanished in the south tower of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, is sitting in his office on the twentieth floor of the Century 21 building at the eastern edge of ground zero. Three months to the day into the recovery effort, Ielpi carried his son’s remains from the pit and returned right away to keep looking for others. Now Ielpi has turned honoring the memory of 9/11 victims into a full-time job.


Working out of his Cortlandt Street office, which is partly paid for by a charitable group, he sits on the boards of two redevelopment organizations and regularly leads prominent visitors on tours of the site, recounting the awful events of that day and ticking off statistics he long ago committed to memory: 20,000 body parts recovered after the attacks; only 292 intact bodies found, including Jonathan’s. His natural gravitas has made him one of the media’s go-to experts among victims’ family members; whenever a dose of moral clarity is needed on virtually any issue relating to the tragedy, it seems, he gets a call. Ielpi has railed against the tastelessness of Paul McCartney’s shilling his single inspired by the tragedies of that day, decried the vulgarity of eBay’s peddling sculptures made of steel from the towers, taken umbrage at the Saudi royal family’s offer to donate a racehorse to the victims’ families, scolded the president for not appearing at the site for the annual reading of names, and fumed openly at those who wanted to protest the Iraq war on the streets of Manhattan. Along the way, he’s helped place the name of his son on several different memorials on Long Island. Yet all the while, Ielpi was keeping his eyes on the prize: ground zero.

Ielpi is a member of Take Back the Memorial, an alliance of family members that recently succeeded, after a loud and heated public battle, in derailing the International Freedom Center. Inspired by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., the IFC was meant to be a companion piece to the proposed World Trade Center Memorial and Museum—the Michael Arad–designed complex with the immense twin reflecting pools intended to honor those killed on 9/11. The IFC would have been housed in a shimmering glass cultural center along the eastern edge of ground zero, sharing 250,000 square feet of space with the Drawing Center, a visual-arts museum that, like the IFC, was eventually pressured off the site. Just to the north will be a Frank Gehry–designed performing-arts center and the David Childs and Daniel Libeskind Freedom Tower.

Where the World Trade Center Memorial and Museum is meant to honor 9/11 victims, the IFC’s purpose was supposed to be broader. The IFC was the brainchild of Tom Bernstein, a friend of George W. Bush’s and a partner in the Chelsea Piers complex who has made much of his fortune investing in movies. Bernstein, who is also on the board of the Holocaust Museum, came up with the idea in late 2001. He and the rest of the IFC’s planners didn’t initially articulate exactly what the museum would be, but their plans included a gallery devoted to the world’s sympathetic response to the attacks, an exhibition on freedom-related political documents like the Declaration of Independence, and a salute to freedom fighters around the world. All of this was supposed to counter the terrorists’ notion of America as an immoral, nihilistic society: Freedom would be put forward as the goal that all civilizations should aspire to, and the museum, built at this most symbolic of spots, would stand as a shining symbol of that ideal.

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?).

If all goes according to plan, the Take Back the Memorial version of ground zero will be less of a neighborhood and more of a monument—some opponents say a graveyard. Is there any spot where Take Back the Memorial members might be comfortable welcoming another institution—something to complement the Arad memorial, to give rise to new life downtown?

Kuo thinks for a moment, then points to the southeast corner of the site.

“I’d boot one of the commercial towers,” he says. “There’s one planned here that’s so cramped.”

http://newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/news/sept1...s/15140/index1.html

Mayor, gov back PA to helm 9/11 memorial

BY DAVID SALTONSTALL and PAUL D. COLFORD
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS
 
Mayor Bloomberg and Gov. Pataki moved closer to a consensus yesterday on letting the Port Authority quarterback the $500 million 9/11 memorial project.
Bloomberg noted the giant agency has "a long history of building, and I think it is certainly something that we should take a look at, absolutely."

Hours later, Pataki said in a statement, "If the Port Authority can offer the ability to guarantee costs and provide greater efficiency . . . we think this proposal merits serious consideration."

Pataki added he still wants to ensure the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation remains the "client, overseer and keeper" of the memorial design conceived by Michael Arad and landscape architect Peter Walker.

The foundation has raised more than $100 million toward a goal of $500 million to build the memorial.

The organization, also charged with overseeing construction, was expected to begin a search for a construction manager in the next few months.

However, the one-two punch from Bloomberg and Pataki is likely to focus attention on whether the Port Authority's involvement would result in greater savings.

The agency, which answers to the governors of New York and New Jersey, owns the 16-acre World Trade Center site and operates area airports, bridges and marine terminals.

Bloomberg, who has vowed to play a more active role at Ground Zero in his second term, noted the agency is already taking on "an awful lot of the infrastructure for the memorial."

It is building the PATH rail hub at Ground Zero, finalizing plans for an underground vehicle security center and developing stores along the Church St. side of the site.

"The Port Authority suggested that it might make sense to look at whether they should do the entire construction project," the mayor said, "and one of the things that they have offered to do is to guarantee no cost overruns \[on the memorial\]."

That possibility makes it "very attractive," he told reporters.

Pataki's statement followed a meeting between John Cahill, his czar for downtown reconstruction, and representatives of the Port Authority and Lower Manhattan Development Corp.

Foundation Vice President Lynn Rasic said afterward the organization "is committed to doing what is best for the memorial. We will study the Port Authority's proposal and evaluate whether it serves the project's best interests."

 http://www.nydailynews.com/news/local/story/367943p-313142c.html

9/11 panel makes recommendations for DNA-based identification after mass disasters

Only days after the Sept 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, the National Institutes of Justice (NIJ) convened a panel of experts from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other institutions, asking them to serve as an advisory panel to develop a process to identify victims using DNA collected at the site of the tragedy. Today, in an article published in the journal Science, the panel reports that DNA-based efforts led to the identification of more than one-quarter of those reported missing. The article also makes recommendations to improve DNA identification in event of future terrorist attacks or mass disasters.

In their Science paper, panel members report that they have been able to identify about 850 of the 2,749 people reported missing after the World Trade Center attacks based solely on DNA results. In conjunction with New York City's chief medical examiner, the panel has determined that no further identifications can be made at this time using the DNA samples collected.

The Kinship and Data Analysis Panel (KADAP) included two senior investigators from the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), part of the NIH. Leslie G. Biesecker, M.D., a medical geneticist and the first author of the paper, provided expert advice about kinship analysis, communicating relevant information about genetic testing to the families, and human subject issues. Joan E. Bailey-Wilson, Ph.D., a statistical geneticist, furnished the team with the statistical expertise necessary to reduce the risk of misidentifications.

"This effort presented the group with some overwhelming challenges in the face of such an unprecedented tragedy, but they came together at this time of national crisis and developed a process that provided better results than many would have expected. We owe them a debt of gratitude for providing the scientific expertise and compassion needed to help families and friends identify their loved ones," said NIH Director Elias A. Zerhouni, M.D.

KADAP was organized and funded by the NIJ, the research, development and evaluation agency of the U.S. Department of Justice, based on a request from New York City's chief medical examiner. The New York State Police Forensics Identification Center was responsible for analyzing any reference DNA samples and several private laboratories tested samples from the World Trade Center site. The final identifications were made by the Office of Chief Medical Examiner of New York City. The panel included experts in forensics, bioinformatics, molecular and medical genetics, and statistical and population genetics.

"It was a significant challenge, but the group was dedicated to the difficult task at hand. Our motivation was to help the medical examiner return to the families physical remains of their family members who perished in the World Trade Center attacks to assist them in the long and difficult process of grieving," said Dr. Biesecker.

"I'm very proud of the NHGRI researchers who contributed their time and scientific expertise to this effort during our nation's time of need," said NHGRI Scientific Director Eric D. Green, M.D, Ph.D.

In addition to NHGRI, KADAP had members from NIJ ; National Center for Biotechnology Information, NIH; New York City Office of Chief Medical Examiner; New York State Police; University of Central Florida, Orlando; Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston; Federal Bureau of Investigation, Quantico, Va.; National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, Md.; Carleton University, Ottawa; Indiana University School of Medicine, Indianapolis; University of North Texas Health Science Center, Fort Worth, Texas.; Yale University, New Haven, Conn.; Myriad Genetics, Salt Lake City; Niezgoda Consulting, Annandale, Va.; Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, Washington; Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore; NewYork State Department of Health, Albany, N.Y.; and DNA Technology Consulting Services, Fairfax Station, Va.

Most of the identifications were made using a standard testing method used in forensic science. However, because some of the DNA samples were not in perfect condition, several technical improvements had to be made to provide more useful DNA samples. In addition, other methods of DNA identification were used to assist in the effort.

The panel also makes suggestions on how to improve DNA-based identification efforts in the event of any future mass disasters or terrorist attacks. KADAP members recommend that, based on their experience with the World Trade Center effort, similar panels should identify the criteria for determining when an identification effort should be concluded, especially if it is deemed that no further progress can be made. Other recommendations include: conducting more research to develop more sensitive forensic DNA typing systems; improving software to integrate analytical, database and workflow functions; and designing processes to test and validate novel identification procedures as they are being developed.

At the time of the Sept. 11 attacks, no infrastructure existed for the rapid identification of large disasters with more than 500 victims. Previously, many mass fatality identification efforts, such as those following airline crashes, began with a finite list of victims. However, in the case of the World Trade Center attacks, the exact number and identity of the victims was unknown.

More than 20,000 tissue fragments were collected at the site - all of which had to be catalogued and analyzed. Researchers found that the DNA derived from the tissue fragments was often mixed with inorganic building material. In addition, much of the DNA was compromised due to exposure to horrific conditions at the disaster site, including temperatures exceeding 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit. Complicating matters further was the need for reference DNA samples to compare with DNA from tissue found at the World Trade Center site. Panel members moved rapidly to develop the forms and kits needed to enable the medical examiner's office to collect reference DNA from victims' previously stored medical specimens, such as blood; victims' personal effects, such as hair brushes; or from the blood or cheek swabs of their next of kin. The kit included a brochure, "How DNA Can help Identify Individuals," which was developed by NHGRI and NIJ, and adopted as part of the President's DNA initiative, a five-year, $1 billion commitment to improve the nation's capacity to use DNA evidence. This brochure has been utilized by other state medical examiner offices and in foreign countries.

A new information technology infrastructure had to be established to optimize data transfer between the state police and medical examiner's office, as well as to interconnect the databases and analytical tools used by panel members. In addition, a data repository was established at the National Center for Biotechnology Information of the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Md., which could be used by analysts outside of the medical examiner's office. Software companies were hired to create new tools for matching the DNA fingerprints of victims' samples to those of next-of-kin or other reference samples. There was a low tolerance for errors and the group set stringent statistical thresholds to make the identifications with high confidence.

The NIJ plans to publish its own report outlining lessons learned from the work of the panel to serve as a model for other mass casualty DNA investigations. Authorities have already used the report to help identify victims of last year's South Asian tsunami and of hurricane Katrina.

NHGRI is one of the 27 institutes and centers at the NIH, an agency of the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS). Additional information about NHGRI can be found at its Web site, http://www.genome.gov.

Geoff Spencer
spencerg@mail.nih.gov
NIH/National Human Genome Research Institute
http://www.nhgri.nih.gov

Mayor, Governor Insists Their Differences Over The WTC Site Are Small

They might not agree on what to build at the World Trade Center site, but Governor George Pataki and Mayor Michael Bloomberg really do get along. That was the message of the day from City Hall Monday.

“We’ve never had a problem with the governor,” said the mayor. “he governor and I don't always agree on every single thing, but I’ve always thought, and I’ve said so many times, I don’t think anybody appreciates how difficult a job this is and what a good a job the governor has done.”

Bloomberg is trying to shake up the planning process downtown. He wants apartments and a hotel, not just office buildings.

But Pataki is holding firm. He says office buildings are on the only way to make sure Lower Manhattan is the world's financial capital.

“I’m perplexed by the fact that after four years of tremendous effort there’s any need for any public discussion beyond what occurs in the normal circumstance,” Pataki said on NY1’s “Road To City Hall” last Friday.

Bloomberg and Pataki agree on the big projects downtown, including the Freedom Tower, a transit hub and a memorial. They disagree only about a small portion of the World Trade Center site - the eastern portion across from the Century 21 department store.

Bloomberg hopes the governor will come around to his view that downtown simply won't need 10 million square feet of office space anytime soon.

“What I have urged is that we take a look and see whether the marketplace is in fact changing, and whether or not we should make adjustments,” said the mayor.

A brand new 7 World Trade Center will soon become the first office building to open since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. So far, the building has no tenants.

Over the last four years, Pataki has taken the lead downtown. As his second term approaches, Bloomberg clearly wants a much bigger role in his second term.

But, for now at least, Bloomberg wants to avoid a public showdown.

http://www.ny1.com/ny1/content/index.jsp?stid=3&aid=55113

  Norwegian company to build WTC Museum
Vision alone was good enough for the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation when it decided the company that will build the new museum on Ground Zero. The Norwegian architechture firm Snøhetta got the job without presenting so much as a drawing.

10/13/2004 :: The Norwegian firm beat 60 other architecture offices for the important and prestigious job of creating a memorial museum at the highly symbolic site. It is estimated that the construction will cost around $200 million.

"Big boost"
The museum will be built in what is known as the footsteps of the former World Trade Center.

The land whwere the Twin Towers stood until September 11, 2001 has been declared a protected area, and the museum will be one of only two buildings placed on the Memorial site itself. The other building, a theater, will be designed by the architechts of Gehry Partners.

"This is unbelieveable," exclaimed Snohetta CEO Ole Gustavsen when the Norwegian newspaper VG called him with the good news on October 12.

"This is incredible news and a big boost for our company," he continued.

Snohetta became an internationally renowned name when the Norwegian-based company were chosen to build the new library in Alexandria. The company will also be responsible for constructing the new opera building in Oslo.

No drawings
The task of building the World Trade Center Museum, one of the most prestigious architechtural contests in the world this year, only adds to the company's reputation.

"We'll head for New York tomorrow," CEO Gustavsen told VG. "We'll place eight to ten people on this job immediately."

Around 50 people, some of them American, work for the Norwegian company.

The architects have not issued a single drawing for the competition. The plans and visions they presented to the Lower Manhattan Development Group during an interview in New York was enough to get them the sought-after job.

A few details seem clear, however: The building will most likely have eight or nine floors, and its total size will lie around 25,000 square meters.

Pleased politicians
In a statement, New York Mayor called the selection of Snøhetta "another important milestone in the redevelopment of Lower Manhattan."

Governor George Pataki was no less positive:

"This cultural complex will be sure to draw millions of New Yorkers and visitors from around the world," he said.

"Building a cultural center in the heart of Lower Manhattan is a key part of rebuilding downtown and a fitting tribute to all the heroes we lost. These dynamic architects will design fitting homes for the world class cultural institutions which will be located at the World Trade Center site."
    
A memorial park will surround the "footprints" of the former WTC buildings. A museum and a theater will be the only buildings on the historic and symbolic ground.

Snohetta built the new library in Alexandria, Egypt.
Photo:

The new opera building in Oslo will also be built by Snohetta.

  http://www.norway.org/News/200405_snohetta_wtc.htm

Snøhetta in competition for Ground Zero
The Norwegian firm of architects Snøhetta is one of six international firms of architects in the running for designing the World Trade Center Museum, which is to be built on Ground Zero in Manhattan.

10/5/2004 :: A memorial site is to be built on the crater left by the attack of 11 September, and about 60 architects have shown their interest in designing the two cultural institutions that are planned for the site, a museum and a theatre.

The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation will be announcing its choice of architect in October, and has invited Snøhetta to an interview. The buildings are scheduled to be completed by 2006.

http://www.norway.org/News/200405snohetta.htm

Twin Towers, USA

Time’s running out to get a piece of World Trade Center wreckage for your local memorial.

If you’re still hoping to get your very own piece of the World Trade Center, you’re probably out of luck. That’s the word from the mayor’s office, which has only four or five steel chunks left to dole out to those wishing to use genuine wreckage in their 9/11 memorials.

Shortly after recovery efforts began at ground zero, the city started donating metal pieces, usually an I-beam section, to pretty much anyone who signed an affidavit agreeing not to profit from the piece of history and not to sue. (Recipients also have to acknowledge that the steel could include chemical contaminants.)

So far, more than 150 towns, fire departments, churches, and museums have received steel. Many pieces remain within the metropolitan area, where memorials have been cropping up at an increasing pace over the last year. But the list also includes three presidential museums; Ireland, Israel, and Portugal; Dodge City, Kansas; the Historical Center for Southeast New Mexico; a Texas firearms-training company; and a California light-rail advocacy group called Transportation Involves Everyone.

“Why wouldn’t we?” says Randy Roach, mayor of Lake Charles, Louisiana, when asked why his city wanted a piece from the World Trade Center. “I guess what I’m saying is, 9/11 didn’t just happen in New York, it happened to America.”

“We got a very nice one, one of the biggest pieces,” says an official at the Portuguese consulate here. “It went back to Portugal, and it’s in a public garden in a city named Alverca.”

One California real-estate company rejected its steel because it wasn’t large enough for a memorial sculpture in front of a planned development. “We wanted, like, a fifteen-foot piece, and it was a four-foot piece,” says Edie Frazier, an administrative assistant at Silagi Development and Management Inc. in Thousand Oaks.

In Nevada County in California, a piece of the Trade Center has been rotated though local schools and drew huge crowds at the county fair. “We had a sign on it that said PLEASE TOUCH,” says Diana Ely, assistant to the schools’ superintendent.

It turns out there’s no way to know how many groups actually received the steel, or what’s been done with it, because the city never followed up. (When asked about the poor record-keeping, Jordan Barowitz, a spokesman for the mayor’s office, pointed the finger at the Giuliani administration.) But calls to a few recipients revealed they had almost all incorporated it into some kind of public memorial or exhibit. One exception is Walt Bigelow, a senior accountant in the finance office at Denver International Airport, who, with his boss’s permission, requested a piece of steel and was given not one, but two girder sections, which he drove back to Denver in his two-seater Mercedes in 2002.

In the end, however, the airport’s managers decided against displaying such a vivid reminder of an airline-industry tragedy in the terminal, so Bigelow donated the larger piece to a local firefighters’ museum. The smaller piece, weighing around 25 pounds, is on display on top of some filing cabinets in the finance office. One square was cut out and given to a colleague’s husband, a retiring firefighter, but otherwise it’s intact.

“I was at the Smithsonian in Washington, and they got a moon rock there that people can touch,” says Bigelow. “You feel you’re real close to the moon when you touch it, and if you touch a piece of what was the World Trade Center, it comes pretty close to you.”

http://www.nymetro.com/nymetro/news/people...ntelligencer/15157/

Partying At Ground Zero Sure Does Add An Extra Kick To The Silverstein-Sponsored Chardonnay


We swore we'd never lose our critical integrity; never be bought, only to be sold and bought again; never succumb to the seductions of free lunches and the occasional bit of swag.

It was precious.

And true only before the Architect's Newspaper sponsored our Friday night fun on the 48th (or 49th?) floor of 7 World Trade Center, developer-renamed into the completely acontextual 250 Greenwich. Got there around 7:15, walked past the monolithic (yet faceted!) base that hides the ConEd power station, into the lobby that was lit so that every single person looked like they'd come down with a horrific case of looking like shit, signed off on the list (we lied; we didn't crash), got through the metal detectors, and up to the top.

Where we got out of the elevator and thought to ourselves, you know, UnBeige, looking out the windows from back here, it looks like there's a pretty sweet view. So we went close to the windows. And looked down. And were like Oh. Right. That happened.

So we felt a little weird about it. And so did a lot of other people. But then we forgot, once we started seeing every single person who's ever looked at a mayline and lives in New York. In the order in which we can remember:

Anthony "I Run Cooper" Vidler, Andy "Big Andy" Bernheimer, Ray "I'll Take Manhattan" Gastil, Karrie "Quite Contrary" Jacobs, Philip "Sidekick" Nobel, Joanna "This Building Is Awesome" Rose, Michael "We Can Be Friends Now Even Though You Wrote That Thing" Arad, Larry "Drinks On Me!" Silverstein, Jesse "Competition" Reiser, Jason "Competitions With Reiser" Scroggin, Liz "SOM" Kubany, Nicole "CSJ" Oncina, Matt "LTL" Roman, Mary "ARO" Voorhees, Tom "The Man" DeKay, Andrew "Space Place" Blum, Anne "Constant Gardener" Guiney, Debbie "Articulate" Ganz, Kristen "ArchNewsNow" Richards, Tucker "Studio Red" Viemeister, Chee "Everywhere" Pearlman, Allan "So That's Who That Is" Temko, Bill "This Is My Party" Menking, Diana "Bill, This Is My Party Too" Darling, Cathy "This Is So Also My Party" Ho, Ari "Pundit" Kelman, Julie "ID" Lasky, Julie "Elle Decor" Iovine, Sara "Awesome" Hart, Sara "Bitchin'" Moss.

We know we're totally forgetting people, but we're remembering others that we forgot before, so we're assuming karma intact.

http://www.mediabistro.com/unbeige/parties...hardonnay_28468.asp

Whatever happened to ... the Terrorism Memorial Flag?

What began as one woman’s effort to do something after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks will soon become a stop in a National Park Service anti-terrorism memorial in Oklahoma City.

Elizabeth Barnes, the wife of a Norfolk-based sailor, was outraged after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Her parish priest convinced her to do more than complain.

So Barnes started a quilt in the form of an American flag, with each victim’s name occupying a separate panel. Others wanted to help, so her husband computerized patterns that were sent to volunteers.

More than 1,300 people around the world would join the Terrorism Memorial Flag project , cross-stitching the names of Americans lost to terrorist attacks.
 
The flag stretches more than 60 feet long and is 35 feet wide. When it was done, Barnes brought it to Old Dominion University’s Webb Center for a Veterans Day memorial in 2002 . The flag later went on the road for exhibitions, but most of the time it rested in a series of large plastic tubs at Barnes’ home.

When her husband was transferred to Italy, Barnes contacted the National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism in Oklahoma City, which had wanted to display the flag. She offered to give the institute custody.

Jennifer Butler, the grants coordinator for the organization, accepted immediately.

“I started out being a stitcher on the flag,” she explained.

She did two panels. One was for a World Trade Center victim. The second came after she took possession of the flag.

In April 2004, Barnes loaded the plastic tubs into her minivan and drove the flag to Oklahoma, meeting stitchers along the way, Butler said.

It was unclear at first where the institute would display the flag, Butler said. She was willing to store it at home and bring it out for showings, but felt it deserved a permanent setting.

Butler was supervising construction as the institute renovated its building, damaged in the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995. When Butler finally saw the entire flag unfurled, she decided that it would fit perfectly on the arching roof of the institute’s fifth floor.

So contractors built a framework, others fireproofed the fabric, and Butler found museum-quality nonreflective plastic to protect the flag from the elements. Then the staff climbed up onto the scaffolding and reverently hung it.

Butler was on her back, painting tiny pieces of frame that showed through gaps when a building inspector came in to approve the work.

“Is Cassandra Booker on this flag?” he asked.

Butler had digitally photographed every panel for the institute’s Web site, so she knew exactly where the name was located .

“That’s my baby,” he said quietly. “That’s my daughter.”

“I just burst into tears,” Butler recalled. “That’s what this is all about.”

The flag has nearly 4,000 names. Each panel has been photographed and is up on the Web site, searchable by first or last name, occupation, location or event. And each is linked to Internet tributes or information about the victim.

When Butler first heard of the flag, she asked to stitch the name of a friend’s baby killed in the Oklahoma City attack. Barnes told her that panel was already assigned, so Butler did another.

But when the flag arrived, she found that another victim with the same last name had been mistakenly memorialized twice and her friend’s son was omitted.

Butler put the flag on her knee and gently ripped out the error while preserving the work of the original volunteer. She added the correct first name.

“It was really special to me to actually get to stitch his name on the flag,” Butler said. The institute flew Barnes and her mother to Oklahoma City last November to see the flag lining the vaulted ceiling, Butler said.

The National Park Service is about to add the flag to its Oklahoma City National Memorial interpretive tours and will be bringing groups into the institute across the street to see the flag and learn its history.

Butler said she has kept in touch with the stitchers and intends to update the flag any time additional Americans die at the hands of terrorists.

http://home.hamptonroads.com/stories/story...ry=95739&ran=116936

Memorial For Rabbi Meir Kahane Held in Jerusalem

A memorial ceremony was held for slain Knesset member and radical Jewish rights activist Rabbi Meir Kahane in Jerusalem's Heichal David Hall Sunday night. Taking part in the memorial ceremony were members of the Kahane family, rabbis and students of the late rabbi.

Rabbi Kahane founded the Jewish Defense League in the United States, made Aliyah (immigrated to Israel) and served in Israel's Knesset before being banned for advocating the transfer of Israel Arab citizens as a solution to the demographic threat to the Jewish State. Last summer, the Knesset voted on the transfer of Jewish citizens of Gaza and northern Samaria, arguing that such an action was necessary to stave off the same demographic threat.

The rabbi was murdered by an Arab terrorist following a speaking engagement in New York City fifteen years ago. The terrorist went on to participate in the first bombing of the World Trade Center.
 
http://www.israelnn.com/news.php3?id=93331