New Castle resident pushes to include relics in WTC memorial
By ELIZABETH GANGA

NEW CASTLE — Pieces of steel from the wreckage of the World Trade Center are either disturbing, divisive reminders of terrorism or evocative, stirring memorials to the people who were lost.

The Town Board has made up its mind, voting in December not to include two pieces of the steel in a memorial to New Castle victims. But Michael Wolfensohn, who has pushed for more than three years to create a memorial with steel he acquired from New York City, wants people to see the steel for themselves.

Wolfensohn will bring the steel to the Duck Pond, where the memorial will be built, tomorrow from 1 to 4 p.m. He hopes people who see it will help him push the Town Board to reopen its decision. The Duck Pond is at Route 120 and Douglas Road in Chappaqua.

"There's still people who think this thing is 20 feet high," he said. "Literally it's two tiny pieces of steel. That's all it is."

Wolfensohn proposed a memorial at the Duck Pond after his friend, Louis Inghilterra, was killed in the attacks. Two other New Castle residents, George Morell and Allan Shwartzstein, were also killed. Though the Town Board initially approved Wolfensohn's memorial, it later took over the process of designing and choosing a site for the monument. The board reopened the site-selection process in early 2004 but, after months of debate, decided the Duck Pond was the right place for the memorial.

Wolfensohn has criticized the three board members who voted for a memorial without the metal for never coming to look at it. The Town Board voted 3-2 on Dec. 20 for a design that will include a deck looking out at the park's waterfall and a memorial rail that will hold the plaques.

Michael Brown, who has fought against including the steel in the memorial, which will be near his house, said the board made the right decision.

"The Town Board deserves the support and praise from all residents for their December decision regarding the memorial," he said.

http://www.thejournalnews.com/apps/pbcs.dl...1200387/1026/NEWS10

Downtown arts groups make their case for L.M.D.C. dough

By Ronda Kaysen

When Michael Dorf heard that $35 million was available for cultural organizations Downtown, he jumped in line with more than 100 other cultural groups for a chance for the money.

The founder of the Knitting Factory in Tribeca penned an application for a $2.5 million grant to build a 30,000 sq. ft. performance space and cafe Downtown called the Art Exchange. He describes his creation — at the moment little more than a proposal — as Carnegie Hall Downtown with a great wine list.

“They better give it to me because we are the most worthwhile of all,” said Dorf in a telephone interview. Art Exchange, which would have a 900-seat theater and a 250-seat club, currently has no home, although Dorf is considering a site in the South Street Seaport and another on Wall Street.

Dorf is one of more than 100 organizations that applied by the Dec. 22 deadline for $35 million in cultural enhancement grants from the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, the agency steering the World Trade Center redevelopment.

L.M.D.C. announced the grants, available to programs below Houston St., last November, making good on a promise to support culture in Lower Manhattan. The agency expects to announce the first round of winners in the spring.

For Downtown arts organizations that have waited in vain for the past four and a half years for L.M.D.C. money, the November announcement was welcome news.

“Part of the pressure on L.M.D.C. is to acknowledge that there are Downtown organizations that have the support that they should have,” said Lisa Ecklund-Flores, director and co-founder of Church Street School for Music and Art, the only non-profit community music school in Lower Manhattan.

Ecklund-Flores requested $500,000 for a plan to expand her school — which is actually on Warren St. — into an adjacent building. The expansion would triple the size of the 2,900 sq. ft. school.

Church Street’s enrollment dropped by 75 percent after the disaster. Now, four and a half years later, the school has 450 students and is near capacity, despite an expansion to the second floor completed last January. “The only silver lining in all this is that we came out the other side with even stronger student enrollment.”

Ecklund-Flores applied for a $50,000 grant from L.M.D.C. for the first expansion, but was denied. She ended up dipping into the school’s operating budget to cover the costs.

She hopes this time L.M.D.C. will turn its attention to locally grown organizations. “There’s got to be something that acknowledges the people that hung on,” she said.

Competition for the funds is stiff. Major institutions are lining up for the money, including New York City Opera, which launched a school program at the High School of Economics and Finance last year. The opera company applied for $125,000 to expand its program, which provides artist residencies in the Trinity St. school. “We want [the students] to know that the arts is a career available to them,” said Talena Mara, director of education for City Opera. The teachers “are trying to expand their horizons so they don’t think the only thing out there is to be a stockbroker.”

City Opera famously applied for a spot in the Performing Arts Center at the World Trade Center that Frank Gehry is supposed to design, but didn’t make the cut. “There are a lot of great opportunities,” said Mara. “That one we’ve put behind us now.”

Community Board 1 has long advocated bringing art and culture to this increasingly residential neighborhood. Last month, the board threw its weight behind City Opera’s application, along with a handful of other applicants, including the Church Street School; Manhattan Youth, a non-profit after-school and summer program for children that is building a new community center on Warren St.; the Poets House, a Soho-based poetry center that is moving to a new 10,000 sq. ft. facility in Battery Park City on Murray St.; and the River Project, a marine science center that is planning to build a temporary aquarium in Hudson River Park.

“All the cultural organizations that we supported are very worthwhile,” said Harold Reed, chairperson of the board’s Arts and Entertainment Committee. “The bottom line is that we must have more culture Downtown… the arts act as an economic engine.”

The board also requested that Reed be appointed to the L.M.D.C. grant review board.

Two arts organizations that lost their homes in the Trade Center Disaster —the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, which was in the Trade Center and 3-Legged Dog, which was in the severely damaged Fiterman Hall on West Broadway—both also applied for funding.

Three-Legged Dog, a nonprofit performing arts group, is in the midst of building a $4.6 million gallery and performance space on Greenwich St., three blocks south of the Trade Center site. The first phase—a 6,000-square-foot, 280-seat theater and rehearsal space—will open next month.

The center’s new home is in the ground floor of a Metropolitan Transportation Authority-owned parking garage that L.M.D.C. would like to see razed as part of a Greenwich Street South revitalization effort.

Instead of requesting capital funds from the agency that would like to demolish his building, executive director Kevin Cunningham requested $2.5 million for operating and recovery funds. “We are still trying to dig our way out after 9/11,” said Cunningham, who hopes to open the 2,200 sq. ft. gallery in April. (The Greenwich Street South plans are in preliminary stages and the M.T.A. insists it has no plans to sell its building to the city.)

Cunningham, like all of the applicants Downtown Express spoke with for this story, is confident his organization will stand out from the crowd. “They say that they want to help us and I believe them and I hope they do quickly because we’re ready to open soon,” he said.

http://www.downtownexpress.com/de_141/downtownartsgroups.html

Wife of Trade Center Victim Verbally Confronts Judge
By Julia Preston
New York Times


An attempt to forge an agreement over the handling of debris from the World Trade Center became a raw, sorrowful exchange yesterday between relatives of Sept. 11 victims and a federal judge.

The relatives sued in August to try to force the city to separate at least 360,000 tons of finely filtered debris, known as "fines," from the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island, and to create a formal burial place for it.

The judge, Alvin K. Hellerstein of Federal District Court in Manhattan, has adopted an unorthodox approach to the suit. He discouraged the two sides from filing the usual contentious motions and offered instead to hold a public discussion in his courtroom between the families and the city's lawyers, to try to resolve the painful issue of the remains without a drawn-out fight.

Judge Hellerstein sought to summarize the city's position yesterday by saying it hoped to turn "what we thought of as a garbage dump" into a "beautiful park."

In a startling break from normal courtroom decorum, however, Laura Walker, the wife of a victim, jumped up from her seat in the gallery.

"Are you crazy?" she asked the judge. She had to support the lawsuit, she said, "so my children don't have to think that their father is buried in a garbage pile."

"You should be ashamed of yourself," she told the judge, leaving the courtroom. Mrs. Walker's husband, Benjamin J. Walker, was an insurance broker at Marsh & McLennan, whose offices were at the trade center. Another victim's relative, Rose Foti, also walked out.

Rather than gavel the session to order, Judge Hellerstein apologized.

"I'm trying to deal with this as a human problem," he said, confiding: "I only lost friends and associates at the World Trade Center. I did not lose family."

If the suit has to be handled as formal litigation, he said, he will be bound by cold "statutes and technicalities," and the outcome may be worse for the families. He appealed for "a little slack."

The judge had invited the relatives to his courtroom yesterday to watch two videotapes presented by lawyers for the city. One, prepared by the Army Corps of Engineers, showed the careful process of sifting and sorting of huge steel beams and mountains of wreckage at the landfill after Sept. 11. The other showed drawings of a 2,200-acre park that the Bloomberg administration plans to create on the landfill, which has been closed.

While the city, at the judge's request, has not filed formal papers in the suit, the video of the sorting operation seemed intended to show that a meticulous effort had been made to recover any human remains that could be found.

Norman Siegel, the civil rights lawyer who represents the families' group, World Trade Center Families for Proper Burial, said he was encouraged by Judge Hellerstein's response. "Having a federal judge demonstrate that he cares and is willing to listen is positive and needed more in federal court," Mr. Siegel said. He said some relatives remained angry at the city, and so he was not surprised by their reactions.

Some progress has been made in the talks, Mr. Siegel said. On Wednesday, he said, he identified a site in the landfill park area that does not contain garbage, to which the fine debris could be moved. James E. Tyrell, a lawyer for the city, said the site was not acceptable, but he did not dismiss the idea of recovering the fine debris.

http://www.voicesofsept11.org/artman/publi.../article_002401.php

Although there was a previous post concerning the LMDC reversal on winter operation of the fountain at /m2042, this article has some more technical information. Of some concern is that the LMDC does not plan on prototype testing under freezing conditions.

http://www.archpaper.com/news/01_18_06_waterfall.html

WTC Foundation To Keep Fountain
Flowing Year-Round

01.18.2006

Despite recent reports that the waterfalls in the World Trade Center Memorial will be turned off during the winter, the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation recently announced that the water will indeed run all year round. On January 10, the foundation, which will build, operate, and own the memorial, allocated $300,000 to adjust the design for cold-weather modifications and another $750,000 per year for operational costs. This decision is a reversal from the foundation’s December declaration that the waterfalls would not run in the winter months.

Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC) Memorial Design Director Anne Papageorge was quoted in the December 9–15 issue of Downtown Express as saying “The fountain will not run in the winter months.” She explained that visitors “will not only be cold, but wet. The wind will blow water into the galleries” and winter operational costs will be “extremely expensive by factors of four or five.”

The waterfalls are an integral part of the initial design Reflecting Absence, by Michael Arad and Peter Walker, and were to cascade year-round into reflecting pools where the names of the victims of the 1993 and 2001 attacks are engraved. In December, after months of testing a $175,000 memorial prototype in Ontario, Canada, the LMDC concluded that the waterfalls could not function through winter in its current design state, due to the cold Northeastern climate, threat of ice expansion and the high cost of operation.

Foundation spokesperson Lynn Rasic asserted that the design change was largely due to the leadership of construction consultant Peter Lehrer, who has been working with Arad and the other designers to come up with a resolution. “It’s something that we’ve been looking to change for some time,” said Rasic.

The modified design includes four additional heat exchangers and pumps which will warm the circulating water during periods of freezing temperatures. Additionally, computerized controls for the central building management system will activate and monitor the heating of water in response to falling temperatures. Also, exterior edges and overhangs of the memorial will be heated as well, in order to prevent the formation of icicles, which are often formed by droplets and mist.

When asked about previously stated concerns of water intruding into galleries and frigid visitor experiences, Rasic said, “We don’t anticipate the spray to create an uncomfortable visitor experience, and the waterfalls will not affect the museum.”

The additional funding adds to the current cost of $330 million for the memorial. A heated prototype is not planned, as the WTC Foundation believes extensive testing has been completed. Construction is slated to begin in Spring 2006 and is scheduled for completion in 2009.
TERESA HERRMANN

ARCHITECTURE
A Great Park chill brings on cold feet
After appearing to settle on a designer, board members in Orange County seem to be reconsidering.

...

It is one thing, given the scope and complexity of this project, to choose one winner and then ask that team to enlarge its ranks. That's what happened when Michael Arad prevailed two years ago in a high-profile competition for the World Trade Center memorial. Then a 34-year-old architect with virtually no record of built work, Arad was convinced by the jury to add the Berkeley firm Peter Walker and Partners to help flesh out and execute his design.

But it is quite another to ask the finalists suddenly to embrace one another as collaborators and meld their very different schemes into one. That notion is a recipe for infighting and inefficiency. Even worse, it essentially precludes a strong central design vision shaping the new park. Imagine if jurors for the National Book Award, unable to pick a winner in the fiction category, asked three finalists to sit down in a locked room and not emerge until they'd produced a single novel.

...

http://www.calendarlive.com/galleriesandmu...-home-more-channels

Space at Ground Zero, and Better Views

By DAVID W. DUNLAP

NEW vistas have opened at the World Trade Center site.

The architectural firm Snohetta has radically redesigned what was once to have been the cultural center at ground zero. The new version, occupying about 30 percent of the area of the original, will create an entry plaza at Fulton and Greenwich Streets that will guide visitors to the twin memorial pools beyond, rather than blocking the view from the north and the east.

It will also allow skylights, set in the plaza pavement, to illuminate the underground mezzanine of the PATH terminal and transportation hub designed by Santiago Calatrava.

The Snohetta building should be much easier to engineer - and therefore less expensive - with its bulk shifted away from a location directly over the column-free PATH mezzanine.

Absent the Drawing Center and the International Freedom Center museum, which have been removed from the project, the Snohetta building is expected to shrink to about 50,000 or 60,000 square feet from 250,000 square feet. It is to serve as a visitors' center, an orientation center and as a "center for Sept. 11," said John P. Cahill, who oversees downtown redevelopment as Gov. George E. Pataki's chief of staff.

"It is a building that will hopefully tell the story about Sept. 11, the uplifting stories of Sept. 11," Mr. Cahill said yesterday. "It will be a place where people can discuss the events of Sept. 11." In that way, he said, it will pick up where the underground memorial museum leaves off, by focusing on how New York, the nation and the world responded to and recovered from the attacks.

Craig Dykers, a founding partner of Snohetta, said the change in program permitted greater flexibility in locating the building on the site.

"We've attempted to create an open and welcoming atmosphere that will allow the memorial quadrant to complete itself toward the corner of Fulton and Greenwich Streets," Mr. Dykers said, "but will also allow for new and more open orientation space."

As originally envisioned, the cultural center would have run about 240 feet along Greenwich Street and 160 feet along Fulton Street, creating a wall between the memorial and the PATH terminal, the performing arts center by Frank Gehry and Tower 2 of the office complex, which is being designed by Norman Foster.

Now, the Snohetta building will have only 65 feet of frontage on Greenwich Street and none on Fulton Street. It will also be shorter than the original, said Stefan Pryor, president of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation.

Its long axis, perpendicular to Greenwich Street, will align with the angle of Dey Street, with one edge of the PATH terminal and with the north end of the memorial museum entrance building, also being designed by Snohetta. Mr. Dykers said these three buildings would form "a string of pearls: smaller, pavilionlike structures that filter across from West to Church Street.

"They allow the memorial quadrant not only to have an identifiable form but to connect it to the surrounding urban character."

The newly created open space is one of the first recent design refinements that actually pushes the trade center project a bit closer to the master plan laid out three years ago by Studio Daniel Libeskind, which showed a "Sept. 11 Place" at that intersection. Mr. Libeskind said yesterday that he thought the latest Snohetta design was a "very, very good solution."

So did Raphael Samach, a principal in DMJM Design, which is associated with Mr. Calatrava and STV in the PATH terminal project for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. "We're obviously delighted by this," Mr. Samach said of the revised Snohetta design. "It is a very good thing from an urban planning perspective, as well as functionality."

State officials and the project architects would not discuss the aesthetics of the new design - nor provide a rendering - reserving that for what will undoubtedly be a ceremonial debut in the near future.

But they agreed to describe the structure in broad outlines after Governor Pataki's announcement last week that he would set aside $80 million for the visitors' and orientation center. That announcement meant either that the building was being redesigned to fit a predetermined budget or that the redesign - which has been kept under wraps for months - was in fact far enough advanced to yield a meaningful construction budget.

Four companies have submitted proposals to serve as construction manager for the memorial and memorial museum, the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation announced this week. They are Bovis Lend Lease, Turner Construction Company and Sciame-Skanska, a joint venture of F. J. Sciame Construction Company and Skanska USA Building. The selection will be made in early February, a foundation spokeswoman said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/19/nyregion/19blocks.html

Java the Hut! Starbucks hits WTC

By PAUL D. COLFORD
 
Starbucks, which has 160 stores in Manhattan, will open a new one - just two short blocks from Ground Zero.
Banners with the Starbucks Coffee logo and the words "Coming Soon" mark the now-dark corner location at Washington and Carlisle Sts.

"I think it's great that new things are opening down here ... though there are other places to get a coffee," said Marla Goldwasser, who lives in the neighborhood but hadn't heard about the planned Starbucks until yesterday.

The immediate area is desolate and dominated by the empty Deutsche Bank tower. Opposite the planned coffee shop on Washington St. is a hole in the ground where an office building was recently torn down.

But Starbucks - which is taking over a former floral shop, at the back of the Marriott Financial Center Hotel - is raising its flag with an eye on the residential influx in the area and even busier days ahead.

It will join several other new businesses and restaurants that have popped up south of Ground Zero.

The deep hole is where developer Joseph Moinian plans to build a 53-story W Hotel and condominium tower.

The 40-story Deutsche Bank building, contaminated with asbestos and other materials from the collapse of the twin towers across the street, will be dismantled over the next year and eventually replaced by another office high-rise.

In addition, Ground Zero will buzz with hard hats in the months ahead as construction gets underway on the World Trade Center Memorial and the 1,776-foot Freedom Tower.

Nick Davis, a spokesman at Starbucks headquarters in Seattle, said the new store will be a licensed property - operated by the Marriott, not the coffee company - and is set to open in the next few months.

Hotel manager Roger Borsink cited nearby conversions, such as 90 West St. - a former office building damaged by the 9/11 terror attack and since turned into 410 apartments - and said, "We thought Starbucks would be a good business for the area, based on present circumstances alone."

There are currently 7,661 Starbucks stores nationwide.

 http://www.nydailynews.com/business/story/383839p-325834c.html

Forsyth County fire Lt. Brian Gary (left) and Capt. Jason Shivers.

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/