WTC wreckage exhibit at new Forsyth public safety building
Exhibit in Forsyth County's new public safety building will let visitors touch the wreckage of the World Trade Center

By MARCIA LANGHENRY
Lifelessly cold, gritty and rough.

This chunk of metal weighing as much as a man is not a pretty thing, but already it has become the most precious possession of the Forsyth County Fire Department.
  
"It's just a piece of steel, but touch it and, oh, my gosh," said Chief Danny Bowman.

Unlike this 15-by-25-inch piece of scrap, some of the wreckage of the terrorist attacks Sept. 11, 2001, on the World Trade Center was released early on by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Cities, churches and other organizations have incorporated pieces of metal in memorials from Sacramento to Boston.

This piece of history, brought from New York to Cumming just before Christmas, came with even greater significance to firefighters.

The Port Authority allowed the Fire Department of New York to claim a small amount of scrap steel as its own, according to Lt. Brian Gary of Forsyth County.

The steel in Cumming is from FDNY's cache, and it's only the second piece that FDNY has given to an outside organization, said Gary, a fourth-generation New York City firefighter who has been with the Forsyth County department eight years. When Bowman suggested his idea for a 911 memorial in the foyer of the county's public safety building under construction on Settingdown Road, Gary put out the word to his New York colleagues.

It looked positive.

Bowman then wrote to

FDNY Chief Salvatore Cassano on Dec. 9, requesting the "sacred artifact."

"Should you approve," Bowman wrote, "the plan is to place the artifact on display where every person who enters our facility cannot escape its presence. To be able to experience this awesome piece of our heritage, would keep the supreme sacrifice of our brothers fresh in the memory of all who are honored to be in its presence."

The request was granted, and 10 days later Gary was on his way to pick it up.

Forsyth County's piece is a slice of an I-beam from which FDNY had already cut business card-size medallions to give to the survivors of the 343 FDNY firefighters who died in the attack and its aftermath.

"The biggest thing to them [FDNY] is that people from all walks of life get to touch it," Gary said.

When the Forsyth County Public Safety Center opens this spring, the memorial will be the first thing visitors see when they enter.

Expected to open in May, the center on Settingdown Road will house the sheriff's office, Fire Department, emergency management agency and 911 operation.

Plans for the memorial design are incomplete, but Bowman said it will be in place when the building is dedicated.

The steel may be set in Georgia marble with a bronze plaque explaining its origin, Capt. Jason Shivers said.

When Bowman told him the county had received the "important piece of history," County Manager Jeff Quesenberry said he gave immediate approval to integrate it into the new building.

"It will be an item of significance for generations to come for both residents and visitors alike," Quesenberry said.

The public will be able to view and touch the steel during regular business hours, Shivers said.

Video monitoring and card-key entry after hours will help secure the piece, he said.

For FDNY and for Bowman, the physical connection is a must.

Bowman said the feeling he got when he first touched the steel was like the spiritual experiences he had touching the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia and visiting Lincoln's deathbed in Washington.

"I honestly did not know what to expect from myself emotionally the first time I laid my hands upon the I-beam," said Bowman, who has not flown since the 9-11 attack. "I literally had my breath taken away."

He hopes for the same experience for everyone who visits.

Among those who have already touched the piece is Jason Early, a county firefighter and member of the Georgia National Guard's 48th Brigade deployed in Iraq, who saw the piece during a recent furlough.

"He said, This is what our mission is all about,' " Gary said.

http://www.ajc.com/metro/content/metro/nor...0106/19forsyth.html

9/11 Health Risks”

will air tomorrow (Wednesday - January 18th, 2006)

 American Morning on CNN around 8:30am.

 Sincerely,

Cheryl Y. Bronson

Assignment Editor, CNN New York

212-275-8037

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Families of New York firefighters killed at the World Trade Center on September 11 failed Tuesday to persuade the Supreme Court to allow them to go forward with a lawsuit against New York City and Motorola for supplying the rescuers with faulty radios.

The high court let stand a decision by a lower appellate court. The lower court dismissed a lawsuit blaming the city and Motorola for supplying firefighters with handheld communications devices that prevented them from hearing evacuation orders while they were in the north tower trying to rescue people.

A three-judge panel of the 2nd Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals said the families had waived their right to sue when they accepted money from the September 11 Victim Compensation Fund.

The fund was created when Congress passed the Air Transportation Safety and System Stabilization Act, which was designed to keep airlines from being ruined financially and sending the nation's economy into further chaos.

The firefighters' families argued that the lower courts had misinterpreted the law and Congress' intent.

The families accused New York and Motorola of entering into a fraudulent, no-bid contract that supplied firefighters with ineffective radios that city and company officials knew for years did not work in high-rise buildings.

The September 11 Commission, created by Congress to investigate the government's performance leading up to the attacks, devoted a portion of its report to the communications problems.

The equipment carried by firefighters on September 11 was the same model that had been used by rescuers during the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993. It didn't work then, the commission said, and it didn't work on September 11.

In court filings, Motorola didn't address the complaints about the radios but argued that Congress had given the families a choice of filing a lawsuit or accepting money from the fund. By opting for compensation from the fund, the company said, the families "waived their right" to sue.

New York's Fire Department lost 343 members on September 11.

http://www.cnn.com/2006/LAW/01/17/scotus.firefighters.ap/

9/11 memorial appears closer in Montgomery Co.


A peace sculpture with steel from the World Trade Center appears ready to have a new home in Montgomery County. The Rotary Club is hoping to turn the twisted steel beams into a place to reflect and remember.

The group is awaiting final approval from the Board of Supervisors to put the artwork at the county's Government Center. The metal will be placed upright and a bell made of scraps will be added to the top.

The club originally wanted to put the sculpture in front of Virginia Tech's Cranwell International Center, but the university decided that any external group's project, no matter how worthy the cause, should not go on campus. That's when project supporters turned to supervisors for a location outside the County Government Center.

http://www.wdbj7.com/Global/story.asp?S=4369423&nav=S6aK

NYT: No Free Speech at Ground Zero Because Left-Wing Museum Had to Move?
 
A Saturday New York Times editorial, “A Home for the Drawing Center,” celebrates the fact that a left-wing museum, originally to be located at Ground Zero, has found a new home in Manhattan, and accuses opponents of the project of opposing free speech.

“The Drawing Center, of course, was once part of other plans to rebuild Lower Manhattan. It was going to inhabit a planned cultural center at ground zero, until, in a memorable spasm of apparently unscripted patriotism, Gov. George Pataki made it impossible for the center to remain. If nothing else, the battle over culture at ground zero made it perfectly clear that Governor Pataki favors free speech, but only if it takes place in another part of town.”

The Times doesn’t mention that its heroine Sen. Hillary Clinton has joined Pataki in opposing the plan.

“The real question is what ground zero has lost by losing the Drawing Center. The answer depends on many things, especially the perplexing fate of the memorial design and the character of the inchoate memorial museum. At best, ground zero has lost the ability to stand for freedom of speech, that most American principle. At worst, it risks becoming a deeply fragmented place, divided between mourning and shopping.”

This isn’t the first Times editorial to hail the Drawing Center while attacking its opponents as anti-free speech -- or worse.

On July 29, the paper hit out at Debra Burlingame for leading a fundraising boycott of the left-wing cultural center at Ground Zero. The Times didn’t bother noting that Burlingame is a family member of a 9-11 victim (her brother was a pilot on the plane that was flown into the Pentagon).

“It is a campaign about political purity -- about how people remember 9/11 and about how we choose to read its aftermath, including the Iraq war. On their Web site, www.takebackthememorial.org, critics of the cultural plan at ground zero offer a resolution called Campaign America. It says that ground zero must contain no facilities 'that house controversial debate, dialogue, artistic impressions, or exhibits referring to extraneous historical events.' This, to us, sounds un-American."

Burlingame had the audacity, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, to question what left-wing activists had in mind for the Ground Zero space, including the Drawing Center:

"The public will have come to see 9/11 but will be given a high-tech, multimedia tutorial about man's inhumanity to man, from Native American genocide to the lynchings and cross-burnings of the Jim Crow South, from the Third Reich's Final Solution to the Soviet gulags and beyond. This is a history all should know and learn, but dispensing it over the ashes of Ground Zero is like creating a Museum of Tolerance over the sunken graves of the USS Arizona."

http://newsbusters.org/node/3614

Many Believe Toxic Ground Zero Site Responsible for Growing Number of Deaths among Cleanup Workers
 
Last week we reported on the death of James Zadroga, a 34-year-old homicide detective who was believed to be the first New York City police officer to die from a respiratory disease caused by exposure to dust and toxic debris during his hundreds of hours of rescue and cleanup efforts at ground zero.

Now, however, the New York Daily News is reporting that 22 other relatively young men may also have died from respiratory-related illnesses caused or accelerated by their exposure to the same toxic environment while aiding in the post-9/11 cleanup.

Like Zadroga most of the 22 men were only in their 30s and 40s. According to their families, they have died as a result of the deadly mixture of chemicals they were exposed to as they searched for survivors in the ruins of the World Trade Center or aided in the clean-up efforts in the days and weeks following the terrorist attack.

While the attack was immediately responsible for killing almost 3,000 innocent victims who were in and around the WTC, it now appears 9/11 has had, and will continue to have, far reaching effects on possibly thousands of other individuals who responded to the catastrophe that day and in the weeks that followed as part of the massive rescue, recovery, and cleanup efforts, without any regard to their own personal safety.

Many medical experts have already expressed serious concern that the first responders, rescue and recovery workers, volunteers of all kinds, and construction workers at the scene will inevitably suffer significant, if not fatal, health consequences as a result of their protracted exposure to all types of dust, debris, toxins, and other dangerous substances that polluted the WTC disaster site for several months following the collapse of the WTC buildings.

More than four years later Detective Zadroga, who devoted some 400 hours to searching for victims died of a respiratory disease that the Detectives’ Endowment Association (DEA) believes was caused by his exposure to dust and debris at the disaster site

Zadroga developed black lung disease and mercury on the brain according to Michael Palladino, president of the DEA. For a month after the collapse of the towers, Zadroga worked up to 16 hours a day on rescue and recovery efforts.

Several months after 9/11 Zadroga developed shortness of breath and other respiratory problems and, as a result, he retired on disability in 2004.

Among the additional 22 who have died are private employees, a sanitation worker, a correction officer, a utility worker, transit workers, firefighters, and police officers. Some, like Zadroga, suffered from black lung disease, while others died from cancers of the esophagus and pancreas.

David Knecht, a Lucent Technologies employee, worked for two months to re-establish communications at businesses near Ground Zero. At 35 he was diagnosed with lung cancer and died in March 2005, leaving behind two girls, now ages 3 and 4.

His wife Cathleen Knecht, 38, of Berkeley Heights, N.J said "He was a nonsmoker and a swimmer."

Knecht was one of many who have claimed to have been sickened with debilitating and potentially deadly ailments related to their presence at the WTC site. Thousands are sick and suffering from respiratory illnesses. Nearly 400 firefighters and paramedics have left the job because of career-ending illnesses that followed their work at Ground Zero.

David Worby, the attorney for approximately 5,200 Ground Zero workers says that rescue and clean-up workers were not properly protected for the dangerous job they had to perform. "This was a toxic waste site. People should have been walking around in moon suits."

He anticipates there will be many more deaths and illnesses from worker’s exposure to deadly waste at ground zero. It is estimated that as many as 40,000 people worked at the site in the months after 9/11.

Worby's firm has filed a class-action lawsuit, which is pending in United States District Court in Manhattan. The suit alleges that government officials and construction contractors negligently exposed workers to dangerous levels of toxins at the cleanup site.

Presently, attorneys for the City of New York deny any direct medical link between exposure to debris and the respiratory illnesses and cancers. Doctors treating Ground Zero workers are also skeptical because cancers resulting from toxic exposure can take up to 15 to 20 years to develop.

They are disturbed, however, by the substantial number of young people who have died or become ill following similar exposure to the same environmental conditions.

"It's still too early to say if WTC responders are at increased risk for cancer," said Dr. Robin Herbert, director of the World Trade Center Health Effects Treatment Program at Mount Sinai School of Medicine. "But we remain very concerned."

Another death involved Bob Shore, a city correction officer, who worked at the makeshift morgue at Ground Zero for at least two weeks, wearing only a paper mask. At the end of his first day handling body parts, Shore climbed into the shower fully dressed and cried for two hours.

Shore, a 53-year-old father of two died last August from pancreatic cancer. His doctor attributes his disease, which caused the once 300-pound bodybuilder to waste away to 110 pounds and to have his gallbladder, spleen and pancreas removed, to his work at ground zero.

Shore's widow, like many families of 9/11 recovery and rescue workers, says she now faces the impossibility of paying the medical bills, as much $200,000 for all her husband’s treatments.

Nevertheless, Michelle Shore remembers her husband’s selfless contribution to the recovery efforts: "He never regretted doing it," she said "He was my hero, the city's hero."

http://www.newsinferno.com/storypages/01-16-2006~002.html

Family Member Group Press Release
January 12th, 2006
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
January 12, 2006
MEDIA ONLY - Contact: Anthony Gardner
(973) 216-2623

Alliance of 15 Major 9/11 Family Groups Calls on Governor Pataki to Stop the LMDC’s War Against 9/11

New York, NY - January 12, 2006 - Hoping to counter criticism of mismanagement, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC), at Governor Pataki’s behest, is moving forward with its misguided plans for Ground Zero. LMDC plans to break ground on the 9/11 memorial March 13 regardless of the fact their botched process and mismanagement has resulted in a poorly thought out and unlivable memorial design, one that is unwisely being expedited in the hopes that the end, however poor will justify the means. (See Anna Papageorge’s Public Lives, NY Times, January 6, 2006.)

But the facts cannot be ignored.

FACT: If LMDC proceeds with this design, the footprints of the towers at bedrock will be obliterated.
FACT: We do not know what the LMDC is building.
FACT: We do not have the money to pay for its construction.
FACT: We do not have the money to maintain it.
FACT: We do not know if it will provide for the safety and security of visitors.
FACT: What is being offered to the public as the 9/11 Memorial is NOT what the LMDC’s jury selected.
FACT: Governor Pataki has the power to stop this before America is stuck with a bargain basement memorial.

It is only because of public pressure that LMDC will now run the memorial’s signature waterfalls year round. That they even contemplated shutting them off for several months a year shows how out of touch they are. The current LMDC plan: obliterates the tangible remains of the twin tower footprints; has visitors pay homage to an empty box (symbolic mortuary vessel); and it aggrandizes a rock wall (slurry wall) that may very well be structurally unsound and will require huge sums of money to fix. LMDC will quarter the North Tower footprint at bedrock into rooms to house infrastructure, exhibit and office space. This act will rob future visitors of the ability to grasp the true scale of the Towers and the enormity of the attacks. The planned underground Memorial provides the visitor a claustrophobic and potentially life-threatening experience as they look for randomly placed names that cannot be found without a map or guide. All this, LMDC proposes, for the unseemly price tag of $500 million dollars.

In 2001, Governor Pataki gave the LMDC two tasks: redevelop lower Manhattan and build a dignified and respectful memorial to those killed on September 11, 2001. Enough time and money has been squandered in the name of “process”. Pouring concrete in two months is fiscally irresponsible, will do irreparable damage and will do nothing to further the complimentary goals of redevelopment and remembrance. We understand the desire to show tangible progress, but just for its sake, LMDC cannot be allowed to build an empty Memorial founded on empty promises. The design problems must be solved by LMDC before construction commences. Build the Memorial chosen by the jury, or admit the problems cannot be fixed and go back to the drawing board. In either event, a step back must be taken before more good money is thrown after bad and America ends up with a bargain basement memorial that dishonors the memory of the 9/11 dead.

For more information on our efforts and the Take Back the Memorial alliance, visit www.takebackthememorial.org.

After 9/11, here is new york


By PATRICIA C. JOHNSON
Copyright 2006 Houston Chronicle

On Sept. 12, 2001 — the day after 9/11 — Mike Shulan installed a single photograph of the World Trade Center in a storefront 15 blocks away from Ground Zero.

That single photo was the beginning of here is new york, a photographic memorial that grew into more than 7,000 images by both professionals and amateurs.

This month, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, received a cache of 494 digital prints from that collection.

Here is new york donated the 7,000-plus digital-image archive to the Library of Congress, and more than 1,500 prints to the New York Historical Society. The gift from the nonprofit (501c3) hiny came with a string attached: The library and historical society would in turn present 10 sets of print images, selected by hiny and duplicated for the purpose, to the 10 museums hiny designated — among them, the MFAH and the Museum of Modern Art and International Center of Photography, both in New York.

Charles Traub, a photographer and co-founder of hiny, said the 10 sets are similar, "give or take an image or two."

Anne Wilkes Tucker, the MFAH's curator of photography, described the set of images as "truly one of the most democratic and noble attempts at telling a story about a tragedy."

The gift to the MFAH honors Houston FotoFest principals Fred Baldwin and Wendy Watriss, who presented here is new york as part of Houston's official 9/11 commemoration in 2002.

The memorial is an "outstanding example of the democratic promise inherent in the practice of photography," Watriss said. "The MFAH, because of the quality and importance of its photography collection, is the right place for this archive."

Six of the photographs are on view through Feb. 5 in the MFAH's Lower Brown Corridor of the Caroline Wiess Law Building. The complete digital archive can be seen in the museum's Hirsch Library and will be available at www.hereisnewyork.org.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ent/3583989.html

Three men who responded to the World Trade Center on September 11th have died over the last seven months of what their families and colleagues say are respiratory illnesses directly caused by their work at ground zero.

Robin Herbert, who directs a medical-monitoring program at Mount Sinai Medical Center for more than 14,000 ground zero workers, said it's not inconceivable that a person could die of respiratory disease related to September 11th.

Police Officer James Zadroga spent 16 hours a day toiling in the World Trade Center ruins for a month, breathing in the toxic air. Emergency Medical Technician Timothy Keller said he coughed up bits of gravel from his lungs after the towers fell. And EMT Felix Hernandez spent days at the site searching for victims.

Donald Faeth, an emergency medical technician and union officer, says he thinks that several rescue workers "died that day and didn't realize that they died that day.''

He added that both Keller and Hernandez, each with a decade on the job, were nonsmokers and had no previous health problems before September 11th.

Doctors running different health screening programs say it will take decades to get a clear picture of the long-term health effects of working at ground zero.

The city department of Health and Mental Hygiene, which is tracking the health of 71,000 people exposed to September 11th dust and debris, said it's too soon to say whether any deaths among its enrolled members are linked to trade center exposure.

David Worby, an attorney representing more than 5-thousand people who are suing those who supervised the 9/11 cleanup over their illnesses, said 21 of his clients have died of September 11th-related diseases since the middle of 2004.

He's not authorized to release their names, but said he represented people who toiled at ground zero, at the Fresh Kills landfill in Staten Island where trade center debris was moved, and at the city morgue.

Worby called it "just the tip of the iceberg.'' He predicted that "many, many more people are going to die from the aftermath of the toxicity.''

Congressman Jerry Nadler, whose district includes the trade center site, blames some of the illnesses on the failure to provide some workers with proper masks or respiratory protection. A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study found in 2004 that only one in five workers wore respirators to block out the dust laced with asbestos, glass fibers, pulverized cement and other chemicals.

Nadler said all the people exposed should be monitored for life.

http://1010wins.com/topstories/local_story_013160226.html

oork to demolish damaged Fiterman Hall may actually begin
x
By Ronda Kaysen

City University of New York has taken steps to demolish a contaminated building damaged in the World Trade Center disaster and will present its plans to the Environmental Protection Agency as early as this week.

Fiterman Hall, a 15-story Borough of Manhattan Community College building, has stood shrouded in black, with large gaping holes torn into its southern façade, since 9/11. Until last year, the school, a CUNY institution, had been unable to secure enough money to demolish the structure and build anew.

The community has long expressed outrage that such a contaminated eye sore has remained in their midst with no end in sight.

In May, the university cobbled together the last of $185 million it needed for the project and announced its intentions to move forward with the cleanup. Since then, the university has been working with environmental experts to hash out a cleanup and demolition plan that will meet regulatory standards.

University officials will present their plan to E.P.A. this month—possibly as early as this week, a CUNY environmental consultant said—and begin cleaning the building in May. CUNY expects to finish cleaning the building by September and demolish it by February 2007, making way for a new $125 million Pei Cobb Freed & Partners-designed structure.

“Isn’t that nice? After all this time we’re getting ready to send the plans to the E.P.A.,” said Claudia Hutton, a spokesperson for the New York State Dormitory Authority, the agency overseeing the demolition and rebuilding of Fiterman Hall.

Downtown Express photo by Elisabeth Robert
The Borough of Manhattan Community College’s Fiterman Hall, across the street from 7 W.T.C., was badly damaged Sept. 11, 2001 and work to prepare it for demolition could begin as early as this May.
   
Fiterman Hall stands on the corner of West Broadway and Barclay St., gashed and shrouded behind the new 7 World Trade Center. Its façade was damaged when the original 7 W.T.C. collapsed, blasting Trade Center debris into the building’s interior.
The building is likely contaminated with a similar cocktail of toxins that plague other Trade Center-damaged buildings: lead, mold, asbestos and dioxin. Because the building was in the final stages of a $50 million renovation project at the time of the attack, it was cleared of its own asbestos before the disaster.

For four and a half years, little has happened at the building. In the initial weeks after the attack, the gaping holes were filled in from the inside, protecting the outside environment from seeping toxins, and black netting was erected. Since then, it has become one of a handful of 9/11-damaged buildings that remain standing Downtown, a glaring reminder to residents and workers of the slow pace of the redevelopment. In 2004, CUNY settled a lawsuit with its insurers for about $90 million, but it took the university until May 2005 to secure the remaining funds necessary from the state, city and Lower Manhattan Development Corporation.

“Fiterman Hall has been the bane of my existence,” said developer Larry Silverstein, sitting on the 25th floor of 7 World Trade Center last week. The Trade Center developer has designed and rebuilt a 52-story tower overlooking Fiterman and the Trade Center site that will open before the first wall of Fiterman is wiped clean.

Silverstein has been slow to lease 7 W.T.C., renting only one and a half floors of the 1.7 million sq. ft. building since leasing began.

“The government has not dealt with Fiterman Hall,” Silverstein said, gesticulating, his soft-spoken voice rising in timbre. “In the time it took to build this building they have not been able to get that building down. Something’s wrong. There isn’t anybody who I bring to this building who doesn’t look across the street and say ‘What’s that?’ That’s really governmental failure.”

The cleanup of Fiterman will begin around the same time Silverstein dedicates a new park opening next to 7 W.T.C. “That’s pretty sad,” he said of the delay.

For nearby residents, Fiterman’s stalled demolition is a reminder of a redevelopment process that has been marred by delays and setbacks. “You’re constantly reminded of 9/11 by looking at this awful building,” said Catherine McVay Hughes, chairperson of Community Board 1’s World Trade Center Redevelopment Committee and a Financial District resident. “It’s unfortunate that Fiterman was not able to address the demolition of this building until a design for a new building was determined…. It’s too bad it’s taken this long.”

Hutton insists CUNY did what it could to move the process along — it could not begin work on a building until all the money was secured. “It’s a great disappointment to everyone how long this has taken, but we had to do the right thing and get an insurance settlement,” she said, adding. “We’ve never had a building that got hit by piece of a falling jet.”

Submitting plans to E.P.A. is no guarantee that a demolition process will happen anytime soon. The agency has to approve the plans, which could take many rounds of reviews. “We expect that the approval process will take a few reviews, it generally does,” Benn Lewis, a vice president for Airtek Environmental, an environmental consultant for Fiterman, told Downtown Express.

Similar buildings have endured a painstaking E.P.A. approval process as they attempted to secure approval. E.P.A. rejected a demolition plan for 130 Liberty St., a contaminated building on the opposite side of the Trade Center site, last February. L.M.D.C., which owns the building, didn’t receive a go ahead from the agency until September. When the corporation purchased the building in August 2004, it had intended to begin demolition within the year. And developer Haysha Deitsch, owner of 133-135 Greenwich St., two buildings near the site, had his demolition permits revoked last spring after the city Department of Environmental Protection deemed his cleanup plan inadequate. Deitsch received E.P.A. approval in November.

CUNY will select a contractor in March. Whoever is chosen must also submit a plan to E.P.A. for approval. The cleanup will begin after that plan is approved.

Fiterman will likely come down in a similar fashion to 4 Albany St., a privately owned building that was cleaned and demolished early last year. Scaffolding will be erected around the building, and then it will be cleaned from top to bottom. Once it is fully cleaned, Fiterman will be dismantled floor by floor, making way for a new building. “We’re going to clean it, and once it’s cleaned and tested and cleared, then we’ll take it down,” said Lewis.

http://www.downtownexpress.com/de_140/worktodemolish.html

Remaking a landmark

90 West St., the Cass Gilbert building facing the World Trade Center site, was tapped as the “Project of the Year: Adaptive Reuse” by New York Construction magazine. The 23-story landmark office building from 1907 was carefully cleaned and restored after sustaining heavy damage on 9/11. The Beaux-Arts tower re-opened last year as a 410-unit luxury rental complex, with the help of $106.5 million in Liberty Bonds.

http://www.downtownexpress.com/de_140/undercovre.html

WTC MEMORIAL A SECURE THING

January 13, 2006 -- Work on the World Trade Center memorial, set to begin in March, won't be halted by last-minute gaffes over security similar to what happened to the Freedom Tower, Gov. Pataki's top adviser for Ground Zero security vowed yesterday.
"There may be some fine-tuning, but I don't see anything major happening that will dramatically change the design," said James Kallstrom.

He said the memorial has been scrutinized by security consultants and the NYPD.

"We have the best minds working on this and we will bring in the best products and procedures when it's all said and done," Kallstrom said.

His assurances didn't appease a group of relatives of 9/11 victims, who called on Pataki yesterday to put the brakes on the project because of security and design concerns.

"America is going to end up with a memorial that does not honor the victims of 9/11," said Anthony Gardner, whose brother died in the terror attacks.

http://www.nypost.com/news/regionalnews/59204.htm

Metro Briefing

NEW YORK

MANHATTAN: DESIGN REVISIONS TO 9/11 MEMORIAL There may be some fine tuning added to the design of the World Trade Center memorial to meet security concerns, the state's top antiterror official, James K. Kallstrom, said yesterday. Mr. Kallstrom, a senior adviser to Gov. George E. Pataki and director of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, said that the plans were reviewed months ago by the Police Department and that he did not foresee significant changes, but added that the design might be modified "so that we can react to whatever threat we're at here in the city." At the same corporation board meeting, John C. Whitehead, the chairman, said the waterfalls within the twin memorial voids would be able to run year round. Construction of the memorial is to begin in March.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/13/nyregion/13mbrfs.html