Pataki Warns Cultural Groups for Museum at Ground Zero

By PATRICK D. HEALY
Published: June 25, 2005
Gov. George E. Pataki delivered an ultimatum to two important cultural players at ground zero yesterday, demanding "an absolute guarantee" that they would not mount exhibitions that could offend 9/11 families and pilgrims to a proposed memorial nearby.

The museum model for the International Freedom Center and the Drawing Center. Some art at the Drawing Center has been criticized.
Treading warily into the nexus of art and politics, the First Amendment and the symbolism of the twin towers site, Mr. Pataki made the demand after learning that one of the groups, the Drawing Center, has featured some politically themed and controversial artwork in its shows. A current display at its SoHo gallery, for instance, appears to make light of President Bush's description of Iraq, Iran and North Korea as the Axis of Evil.

While saying that he respected artistic expression, Mr. Pataki invoked the solemnity of past battlegrounds in promising to preserve the hallowed ground in Lower Manhattan and ensure that no one will come away feeling offended by the reborn site.

"I view that memorial site as sacred grounds, akin to the beaches of Normandy or Pearl Harbor, and we will not tolerate anything on that site that denigrates America, denigrates New York or freedom, or denigrates the sacrifice or courage that the heroes showed on Sept. 11," Mr. Pataki told reporters in Albany.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/25/nyregion...ild.html?oref=login

Fight over ground zero museum reveals deeper divide

By MICHAEL WEISSENSTEIN
Associated Press Writer
June 24, 2005, 5:06 PM EDT


NEW YORK -- Will the ground zero freedom museum be anti-American?

Its creators say the International Freedom Center will offer inspiring stories of mankind's progress toward liberty. Critics say the institution is being hijacked by left-wing advisers who blame the U.S. for the world's wrongs.

The debate is playing out on talk shows, opinion pages and the Web. Relatives of people slain on Sept. 11, 2001, protested the museum this week at ground zero. More than 13,000 people have signed an Internet petition condemning it.

"What they're going to be showing on the spot where 3,000 people were crushed and incinerated is man's inhumanity to man," Debra Burlingame, the museum's principal opponent and sister of the American Airlines pilot whose plane hit the Pentagon, said on "Fox & Friends" this week. "Slavery, Native American genocide, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Gulag."

Supporters say that the controversy over political correctness stems from misinformation and will dissolve when people understand the museum's goal of highlighting great moments in the worldwide struggle for freedom. But interviews with boosters and detractors alike indicate that this month's bitter fight disguises a deeper divide over ground zero.

Museum supporters see the 16 acres where the World Trade Center stood as a bustling future hub of tourism, commerce and culture along with remembrance. With as many as 2 million visitors expected a year, the International Freedom Center will be an engine of the revitalized lower Manhattan when it opens in 2009, they say.

Many of the victims' relatives who are protesting the museum and signing the Internet petition have a very different vision. Politics aside, they say, the museum is wrong simply because it will not focus entirely on the lives lost on Sept. 11.

"I don't think that there should anything else there but a memorial to those people," said retired New York building inspector Edmund Caviasco, 75, whose daughter, Jean De Palma, died in the trade center collapse.

Museum supporters point out that a separate memorial at ground zero will commemorate the dead. They say the decision to build cultural institutions on the site came from a lengthy, open process replete with opportunities for public input.

"The basic idea from the beginning was a memorial place, yes, but not always a sad place, and that's why music and the arts and a museum were always part of this," said Lower Manhattan Development Corp. director Roland Betts, a business partner of the museum's founder, Tom Bernstein.

But many victims' families, who have been far from the complex rebuilding process and consumed by daily struggles weighted with grief, say they simply didn't think deeply about what will rise at ground zero until the museum controversy grabbed their attention.

"I don't watch the news a lot," said Rachel O'Brien, 45, whose husband, Michael worked for Cantor Fitzgerald and died on the 104th floor of Tower One, and who this week joined the more than 700 relatives of victims to sign the petition. "I've been trying to concentrate on my three kids."

"I have no remains of my husband, and to me that's sacred ground," she said. "That's the last place he was, and I think that the whole area should be all about what happened on that day."

Victims' relatives say they object to ground zero as a forum for any political debate. Echoing their concerns, state officials overseeing the rebuilding process said this week that the museum should present a patriotic affirmation of America's role in the world.

"We're not going to let it turn into something anti-American, anti-freedom or questioning the values of New York, the values of America or the values of freedom," Gov. George Pataki said.

But the academic advisers to the museum _ who include the heads of the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights First _ envision something more complex and potentially controversial.

Many see the International Freedom Center as a place to vigorously debate past and present issues of freedom, from slavery to the roots of the Sept. 11 attacks.

"9-11 should not be something you treat with kid gloves," said Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International and a principal adviser to the museum. "It should be something you debate, that you talk about, that we explore, that we use as a way to think about our position in the world."

Such talk is anathema to Debra Burlingame, who sees any debate at ground zero as offensive and inappropriate.

"You could have a completely apolitical presentation and it would still be objectionable to me," she said. "It is offensive to me for people to use 9-11 as a platform or springboard for these other ideas."
 
http://www.newsday.com/news/local/wire/new...ny-region-apnewyork

Editor's notes: Taking the war on terrorism a bit too casually

By Charles Mathewson
MPG Newspapers
I remember the late morning of Sept. 11, 2001. We had watched on the TV in the newsroom the second plane go into the World Trade Center tower. I later had to go to town hall, where people had not heard the news. Then I went home. I don't know why. Plymouth hadn't been attacked, but I wanted to know all was well there. I wanted to speak to my kids.

Walking to the front door, the thought occurred to me, "So this is how it feels to be in a real war."

I lived through the Vietnam War, but it did not involve an attack on our country. The morning of Sept. 11, I felt a connection to my parents and grandparents.

...

http://oldcolony.southofboston.com/article.../25/news/news07.txt

The Guv got the picture
 
The News is pleased that Gov. Pataki has dispelled appearances that he's all too amiably willing to let any Tom, Dick and Lefty post odiously anti-American artistic sentiments at Ground Zero. The governor told us yesterday he'll see to it that nothing that denigrates the nation or its heroes will ever appear at the site, period. We're happy to take him at his word.

Nobody suggests the only "fitting" 9/11-themed art should be Fourth of July fireworks. Neither, however, is a somber memorial for the 9/11 dead an appropriate showcase for the kind of political juvenilia that a SoHo gallery called The Drawing Center likes to mount. We published some of that sad-sack stuff yesterday: a jetliner dive-bombing a naked, spread-legged woman; a flow chart conspiratorially linking George W. Bush to Osama Bin Laden; that sort of thing. Pataki couldn't believe his eyes either. And he pulled the plug.

"So what I am doing is directing the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. to contact the cultural institutions on the memorial site and to make sure and get from them an absolute guarantee that as they proceed it will be with total respect for the sanctity of the site," he said. "If they do not meet that requirement, they will not be at the memorial site. We do not want that at Ground Zero."
 
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ideas_opin...22224p-275507c.html

The battle over Ground Zero
 
By PAULA BERRY
 
For me, solving the puzzle that is Ground Zero has always been a straightforward proposition: Ensuring we remember and honor all those we lost, like my husband, David, while honoring the things they stood for in life. It's a balance between making sure we as family members have a powerful memorial to honor our loved ones, and ensuring the site reflects the hope and aspirations for the future that David, like many others, had for his family.
I believe that with the memorial, the museum devoted to the events of Sept. 11 and the International Freedom Center, we have achieved that balance. I trust and hope that the Drawing Center will also rise to the occasion and meet the challenges that Gov. Pataki has presented us.

In large part, that balance has been attained thanks to the vigorous participation of family members at every step of the process.
 
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ideas_opin...22490p-275719c.html

WTC families must wait for proper burial
By BOB BAIRD
rbaird@thejournalnews.com
THE JOURNAL NEWS
(Original publication: June 26, 2005)


"You have to be an eternal optimist to be a legislator," Ryan Karben told me Friday, but as the Assembly session neared the end of overtime late in the day, the optimism was gone from his voice.

Karben has been trying to get the ashes of victims of the Sept. 11 World Trade Center attacks removed from a landfill on Staten Island and preserved for inclusion in a fitting memorial at a site to be chosen by New York and New Jersey's governors. But the effort died Friday — at least for this session.

Sen. Thomas P. Morahan's companion bill passed weeks ago. But Karben's bill languished since March in the Assembly's Corporations Committee, chaired by Assemblyman Richard Brodsky of Westchester.

It's not like there weren't reminders the bill was pending.

On June 9, all 23 members of the Corporation Committee signed a letter to Brodsky, urging his support and asking that he place Karben's bill — A.6814 — on the next committee agenda.

Hoping to draw attention to the issue as the session neared its end, Karben held a rally and press conference on the steps of the state Capitol on June 15, surrounded by many of his bill's 24 bipartisan co-sponsors and Rockland members of WTC Families for Proper Burial. The group has been campaigning for two years for removal of the ashes of their loved ones from the landfill, where authorities sifted debris for human remains and evidence.

Two days after the rally, with most legislators gone home for the weekend, Brodsky wrote to Karben expressing his concerns that the bill might allow the victims' remains to be kept at the landfill and that it didn't address who would pay for removal.

Karben quickly crafted amendments to the bill Monday, filing them in time to get them into print for the three days required before a vote can be taken. In a letter Tuesday, Karben advised Brodsky that he had amended the bill, "to include the language that you provided to me."

Karben says the bills didn't get printed and he has no idea why. That pretty much assured they wouldn't come to a vote by the full Assembly before the session's end, originally set for Thursday.

But with so much work left, the session continued well into Friday afternoon, still with no sign of the bill. Close to 4 p.m., Karben said he didn't think it would surface.

"I've bled on this, giving things up" to get support, Karben said, clearly sounding disappointed. "I've made my concern — my passion — for this legislation clear to both the chairman and the speaker," Karben said of Brodsky and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver.

Bryan Franke, a spokesman for Silver, later said the bill is still in the Corporations Committee and "is still being reviewed by the members." Asked about the letter from the committee members to Brodsky, Franke said he wasn't familiar with it.

Brodsky later told me he couldn't urge passage of the original bill, saying he believed its wording could allow the governors to leave the ashes in Fresh Kills.

The amendments filed Monday resolved that, he said. "But what's critical is when they were printed," he said, adding that he wasn't sure when or if that happened.

"This is an important bill, one that we'd like to get done," Brodsky said. "I now expect to be helpful to moving the bill along and recommending it to my colleagues."

But as time ran out Friday, that's probably months away. Complicating matters, Morahan's bill will need to be reconsidered after it's made to duplicate Karben's amended version. Two bills passed in New Jersey will also need changes and another vote.

Karben and Aaron Troodler, his chief of staff, credited Mary Novotny of New City, who lost her son, Brian, at the Trade Center, with extraordinary work on behalf of the bill late last week. "Mary was able to get to people I couldn't get to," Troodler said.

She reached Brodsky on Wednesday, telling him she didn't see how Karben's bill could permit leaving the remains at Fresh Kills.

Karben's changes also dealt with Brodsky's questions about who would pay for the removal, requiring the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to pick up the tab. Family members feel FEMA should pay as part of their pledge to cover the cost of the entire recovery effort.

Novotny and Maureen Bosco of Suffern, another founder of Rockland's WTC Families for Proper Burial chapter, faxed Brodsky a letter Friday expressing their hope that the bill will be considered when the Assembly returns to Albany.

That will be right around another Sept. 11, another anniversary of the grief that never goes away.

http://www.thejournalnews.com/apps/pbcs.dl...6260317/1019/NEWS03

You ask God, why?'
By CHRIS ENGLISH
Bucks County Courier Times

Lower Makefield - Almost four years later, William H. Kelly Sr. still wonders about the subtle twists of fate that saved others on Sept. 11, 2001, but not his only son.

William Kelly Jr. worked for Bloomberg LP, the financial news service, on Park Avenue in Manhattan. However, he happened to be attending a one-day training seminar that Tuesday morning in the Windows on the World restaurant on the 106th floor of the north tower of the World Trade Center.

He and many others died when terrorists slammed a hijacked jetliner into the building at 8:45 a.m. Minutes later, the south tower was hit.

Sitting for an interview in the lunchroom at McCaffrey's supermarket in Lower Makefield, Kelly Sr. still fights back tears when thinking about that day.

"I'm sure there were many others that morning who actually worked at the trade center but had called in sick, or called in to go fishing because it was such a nice day, or were just late," he said. "You ask God, why?"

Watching the horror unfold on TV, Kelly Sr.'s wife, Joanne Kelly, initially thought her son was at his usual place of work and safe.

"When I saw the second plane hit, I thought 'Thank God Billy's in Upper Manhattan,' " Joanne Kelly said at the time.

Then his girlfriend called to say he was in the World Trade Center for training.

"I just couldn't believe it. It's every mother's nightmare," Joanne Kelly said.

Time hasn't done much to dim the nightmare, they said.

"You have days that are better but, generally speaking, it doesn't get any easier," said Kelly Sr. "It's a little different for me because I didn't lose a husband or wife, or someone I was depending on for financial support. I still have a wife and four other children [daughters], but I lost a son, and it sure hurts."

One thing that has helped is his work on a committee that is raising money for the Bucks County Sept. 11 Memorial to be built at Memorial Park on Woodside Road in Lower Makefield.

Like Kelly, most of the members are people who lost family members in the terrorist attacks. They include Ellen Saracini, who lost her husband, Victor; Lower Makefield Supervisor Grace Godshalk, who lost her son Bill; and Clara Chirchirillo and Tara Bane, who both lost their husbands.

The committee has raised about $640,000 of the estimated $700,000 cost of the memorial. Lower Makefield hopes to award a contract next month and start construction later this summer. It should be ready by the 2006 anniversary of the attacks.

Called the Garden of Reflection, the memorial is being designed by Lower Makefield architect Liuba Lashchyk. It consists of a pool with two fountains representing the two towers of the trade center destroyed in the attacks. Surrounding part of the pool will be a railing with glass panels inscribed with the names of the 17 Bucks County victims. Also planned are smaller panels with the names of all 3,000 victims on a walkway leading up to the pool.

 
http://www.phillyburbs.com/pb-dyn/news/111-06262005-507379.html

City of his dreams
 

 
By JOSE MARTINEZ
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
 
 
Stellar Mexican architect Enrique Norten and one of the projects for which he is being hailed - a $75 million Brooklyn Library for the Visual and Performing Arts (below).
 
The New York of Enrique Norten's memory is hardly the city whose future look he is helping shape.
The celebrated Mexican architect is behind up to six big-ticket projects in the city, including a new arts library in downtown Brooklyn and Harlem's first big hotel in 40 years.

"As far as architecture goes, there's no longer water between the boroughs," Norten said. "So we're going to areas that weren't always favored for new developments."

Norten is also hoping to bring his distinctive modern style to other projects throughout the city. He's been tapped to design ambitious waterfront developments in Williamsburg and Gowanus, Brooklyn, but they still face several zoning and financial hurdles. He's also on board for work in Jamaica, Queens.

"Years ago, it would have been unthinkable to have all this development going on outside of Manhattan," said Norten, 51, who started visiting the city as a Cornell graduate student in the early 1980s. "It was different then, a lot rougher."

Norten's stamp on the city of the future is highlighted in a new exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York. "New York Fast Forward: Buildings by Enrique Norten/TEN Arquitectos" is on display through Oct. 30.

The exhibit features plans for the V-shaped glass structure of the Brooklyn Public Library for the Performing and Visual Arts, the 34-story Harlem Park tower and a glass apartment tower that will top an old warehouse in Tribeca.

"Midtown Manhattan and Wall Street aren't the only places where there is cutting-edge architecture," said Donald Albrecht, the museum's adjunct curator of architecture and design. "It's all over town now, and that's what appealed to us about him."

New buildings by Norten and other noted architects point to a "design renaissance" in New York, said Amanda Burden, chair of the city Planning Commission.

 http://www.nydailynews.com/news/local/story/322639p-275845c.html

Tears from 9/11 haven't stopped
June 26, 2005

FOXBOROUGH -- It has been almost four years since that beautiful and horrific September morning in 2001 when the planes took off from Logan Airport headed for the World Trade Center in New York. And still, families are burying their loved ones. On a recent overcast morning, Cindy McGinty and her sons took the ashes of Michael McGinty and laid them in the ground.
 
Sign up for: Globe Headlines e-mail | Breaking News Alerts The family had been down this path before: A month after the tower where McGinty was attending a meeting collapsed, he was memorialized at Bethany Congregational Church, where he was chairman of the deacons, served on the church council and two pastoral search committees, helped run the confirmation program, and filled in for the pastor on occasion. At the time, Sept. 11 was the only story of the day and would remain so for months. The media crowded into the church, along with 500 mourners, some of them strangers to the family. Cindy McGinty was in a daze, as were her children, who were 7 and 8 at the time. Their father was 42, a senior vice president at Marsh Inc. of Boston, in New York on business.

Daniel is 12 now, David 11, and their mother wanted to let them have a say in how to best honor their father, whose partial remains were cremated. ''The first time, I felt they didn't really understand what was going on," says McGinty.

Daniel, who was close to his father, has struggled with depression, and now attends a five-day-a-week boarding school in Marlborough, where he is thriving. ''He went from not being able to sit in a classroom and the [public] school calling me every day to high honors this semester," says his mother.

Over the years, the New York City Medical Examiner's Office has matched some 4,000 body parts with victims. McGinty has gotten the call a couple of times that bits of her husband's remains have been identified. She decided to cremate them and bury the ashes. Families could either choose to be notified each time something was identified, or not. To McGinty, it was a no-brainer; she wanted to claim any piece of her husband she could.

The 9/11 family members comprise a group no one would willingly join, but many have formed a lifelong bond born out of their shared grief. Christie Coombs of Abington, who lost her husband, Jeff, on American Airlines Flight 11, and Sally White of Walpole, whose daughter, Susan, worked at the World Trade Center, were at Mike McGinty's service with plenty of hugs for his widow. Coombs and McGinty have traveled to the medical examiner's headquarters together to see the remains themselves.

http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/...911_havent_stopped/

Don't worry, Old Glory can take the heat

June 26, 2005

The House of Representatives passed a constitutional amendment on flag burning last week, in the course of which Rep. Randy ''Duke'' Cunningham (Republican of California) made the following argument:

''Ask the men and women who stood on top of the Trade Center. Ask them and they will tell you: Pass this amendment."

Unlike Congressman Cunningham, I wouldn't presume to speak for those who died atop the World Trade Center. For one thing, citizens of more than 50 foreign countries, from Argentina to Zimbabwe, were killed on 9/11. Of the remainder, maybe some would be in favor of a flag-burning amendment; and maybe some would think that criminalizing disrespect for national symbols is unworthy of a free society. And maybe others would roll their eyes and say that, granted it's been clear since about October 2001 that the federal legislature has nothing useful to contribute to the war on terror, and its hacks and poseurs prefer to busy themselves with a lot of irrelevant grandstanding with a side order of fries, but they could at least quit dragging us into it.

http://www.suntimes.com/output/steyn/cst-edt-steyn26.html

Built to Be Noticed, and to Return the Favor

By GLENN COLLINS
Published: June 27, 2005
For three years now, 7 World Trade Center - the last tower to fall on Sept. 11, 2001, and the first to be reborn at ground zero - has meant a crucial question for its developer, Larry A. Silverstein.
  
Could he build a skyscraper atop a monumental concrete Con Edison substation - arguably the ugliest pedestal at any Manhattan building - and adorn it with a facade so arresting that tenants would clamor to rent office space there?

The answer is emerging these days at the northern edge of the trade center void. A shimmering, sharp-edged parallelogram sheathed in glass is being married to the brutalist 78-foot-tall substation with what looks like a sculptural installation: a kinetic, interactive stainless-steel wall.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/27/nyregion...ade.html?oref=login

Burning amendment


No debate fills the pages of the Congressional Record with more balderdash than ideologues yammering away for the passage of an anti-flag-burning amendment. In the past, blustery comment in the House was followed by a rational vote in the Senate that ended the craziness.

It’s different this year. The zealously partisan House, to no one’s surprise, approved the “Flag Desecration Amendment” last week by a vote of 286-130. What’s frightening is the Senate vote will supposedly be tighter than normal. One question: Why on Earth is the Senate fooling around with this overplayed non-issue? The Senate should defeat this amendment for the same reason it has done so in the past: Burning the flag is constitutionally accepted free speech.

Waving a flag is easy. It’s much harder to have faith in the ideals the flag represents. And we act with faith in those ideals when we defend the most repugnant forms of protest. We put up with flag burning for the same reasons we don’t snatch the flag from hooded Klansmen while they spew the most venomous lies. No, they don’t destroy the flag, but they do gut the meaning for which it stands.

Several House members who stood up for the current flag-burning amendment emphasized their point by using two powerful images in American culture: New York City firefighters raising the flag among the smoldering wreckage of the World Trade Center towers and Marines planting the flag on Mount Suribachi during World War II. It’s a tough act to follow. But members of the U.S. Senate should find time to read the eloquent statements of Congressman Jerrold Nadler, a Democrat whose district includes the trade center site. He reminded his colleagues that he’s fighting federal, state and local bureaucrats who are denying first responders workers’ compensation for illnesses caused by working at the trade center site. He’s fighting the EPA to raise its standards on measuring toxic dust from the wreckage.

“If the flag needs protection at all, it needs protection from members of Congress who value the symbol more than they value the freedoms the flag represents,” Nadler said prior to the vote. “Quite frankly, the crass political use of the flag to question the patriotism of those who value fundamental freedoms is a greater insult to those who died in the service of our nation than is the burning of the flag.”

http://www.fortwayne.com/mld/journalgazett...torial/11991004.htm

Ground Zero: It will always be a cemetery

Monday, June 27, 2005

By ALFRED P. DOBLIN
HERALD COLUMNIST

Make Ground Zero into a national shrine. There are many ambitious projects for the former World Trade Center site. So far nothing is getting built. And there is a reason why - a reason beyond the bureaucratic morass, a lack of enough money or commercial tenants. It is not the loud complaints of the families of the men and women who died on Sept. 11. It is the silent cry of nearly 3,000 dead.

The Freedom Tower was sent back to the drawing board. What gets built is unlikely to be a dramatic architectural statement. It will be a compromise. Yet it is not big buildings that will determine the success of the rebuilding. The World Trade Center site is not about bricks and mortar; it is about something stronger: character. The site, as planned, will have office towers, shops, a theater, a memorial and an independent museum. The Drawing Center, a relatively tiny museum in SoHo, was picked as one of four cultural institutions that will be built at Ground Zero.

The museum - like most museums - displays artwork some people find offensive. Remember Rudolph Giuliani pre-Sept. 11? Hizzoner was apoplectic about an art exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum that he said defaced an image of the Virgin Mary. Giuliani wanted to block funding to the museum. He wanted morality police to determine if institutions that received city money were worthy.

  
The Drawing Center is under fire because it has displayed art that mocks President Bush, as well as a drawing that shows four planes flying into a naked woman. I understand why the families of Sept. 11 victims are upset over the possibility that a museum at Ground Zero might display artwork that mocks the tragedy of that day. However, museums cannot be sanitized. No museum should have to accept as its charter a pledge not to offend someone. That flies in the face of a free, democratic society.

Whether any museum is appropriate at Ground Zero, though, is worth a discussion. Anything short of a shrine may offend at some point. If retail returns to Ground Zero, some of the merchandise sold will be offensive. The stuff sold on the streets of Lower Manhattan today is offensive. People are making money on the dead of Sept. 11. What happens when a bookstore opens inside one of the new office towers and displays a book critical of the Bush administration's handling of Sept. 11? Will that be inappropriate for Ground Zero?

Artists should not be censured. New Jersey's gutless political leaders dumped Amiri Baraka as the poet laureate because they objected to a poem he wrote before they made him poet laureate. The poem was offensive and based on false information, but it never was more than a poem. Baraka wrote an offensive poem about the origins of the Sept. 11 attacks.

The survivors of Sept. 11, the families of the dead - they deserve respect. But we cannot compromise the integrity of a free society to placate grief. If New York Gov. George Pataki has a spine, he will acknowledge that. One day there will be theaters, museums, shops and businesses at Ground Zero - or not.

You can't open museums and theaters and dictate what is displayed and performed. You can't open a shopping mall in the middle of a cemetery. Pataki and the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. should take a road trip to Pennsylvania. They should visit Gettysburg and imagine a 1,176-foot skyscraper, office towers, stores, theaters, museums and a train station in the middle of the battlefield. It doesn't work.

The Drawing Center and its controversial artwork are not the problem. Ground Zero is Gettysburg. Respect it. Let the dead rest in peace.

Alfred P. Doblin doblin@northjersey.com

http://www.northjersey.com/page.php?qstr=e...xN2Y3dnFlZUVFeXkxNA==

Legislature Approves New Incentives for Lower Manhattan
By Barbara Jarvie
Last updated: June 27, 2005 08:01am

NEW YORK CITY-An agreement called a “Lower Manhattan Marshall Plan” by New York State Assembly speaker Sheldon Silver contains incentives to promote economic growth and revitalization in Lower Manhattan. The legislation calls for initiatives to promote Downtown commercial space occupancy, including a $5-per-sf incentive for the first 750,000 sf of commercial space leased anywhere on the World Trade Center site and a $3.80-per-sf incentive for the first 750,000 sf leased at 7 World Trade Center. Developer Larry Silverstein will have to match these incentives.


Additional provisions include to permanently eliminate the Commercial Rent Tax for all Ground Zero tenants and a five-year exemption of the CRT for all of Lower Manhattan and the modification of the Relocation and Employment Assistance Program to make businesses relocating to the area eligible for the tax credits, while the benefit for businesses leaving the area will be at the discretion of the city. Other provisions include sales tax exemptions for such items as office furniture and equipment for businesses leasing at the WTC site and build-out costs at the site and other downtown locations. The agreement also eliminates tax incentives that encourage residential/mixed-use conversion before June 30, 2006.


A separate agreement will dedicate the remaining $3.5-billion Liberty Bond pool for use in Lower Manhattan only with a priority at Ground Zero. Other items listed as priorities by Silver include reconstructing the Church Street corridor and constructing a rail link connecting Lower Manhattan to JFK Airport and the Long Island Rail Road.

Carl Weisbrod, president of the Alliance for Downtown New York, says the agreement will “provide significant economic incentives for the revitalization of Lower Manhattan. Downtown has come a long way since the horrible events of Sept. 11. But the economy remains fragile and these incentives are a key tool for revitalizing the area and fueling economic growth for years to come.”

http://www.globest.com/news/314_314/newyork/135627-1.html