Date: Sun, 7 Jul 2002 13:01:25 -0400 (EDT) From: Louis Epstein Subject: Rebuilding WTC...Petitions and Appeals The New York city government has set up http://www.nyc.gov/html/911/html/mail911.html to ask for suggestions on how to mark the one-year anniversary of the September 11th attacks.Of course that's the date set for the reopening of the rebuilt Pentagon and the groundbreaking for the new,taller 7 WTC...I have gone there and recommended,and urge others to go there and recommend,that the city publicly announce on the date support for new,at-least-as-tall,construction on the site of the Twin Towers. Beyond this... Eli Attia telephoned me yesterday,looking for support for his petition for a design competition for the site,from which he is certain tall proposals will emerge victorious.He has in the past designed projects for buildings over 130 stories,though none have been built...and of course he wrote the excellent Newsday article reminding people that any 100 story building is safer than any 50 story building...as he put it yesterday,if the jets had hit 50-story buildings,the buildings would have been "pulverized"... collapsing much more quickly with virtually 100% fatalities. He also mentioned Whitehead's chief planner,Alexander Garvin, as a particular advocate of slicing the superblock up with streets with all the crippling influence that has on development possibilities,and noted the minimal planning expertise of the board and its prejudice toward treating redeveloping the site as a local-neighborhood issue. His petition can be reached from the http://www.phoenixusa.org/ site and has 2185 signatures as of this writing.It is hosted at petitiononline.com and has far more signatures than the other pro-rebuilding petitions I have seen there...disturbingly,no pro-rebuilding petition has nearly as many as Anita Solomon's loathsome build-no-commercial-buildings petition. (I do not know how the petition now linked from teamtwintowers.org is doing as ipetitions does not have the signature-count-viewing feature of petitiononline). As he said,we need to show the numbers on our side...he recommends that signers urge their friends to sign and get them to tell theirs, etc. The sponsors of petitions do get email lists when signers give their email addresses,though petitiononline no longer posts the addresses publicly even when requested...Eli Attia's petition also has publicly displayed postal mail addresses for most of the thousands of signers.Petition sponsors among you may want to let your signers know about this email list (I have between 450 and 500 good email addresses of people wanting something at least as tall built on the site) and see if they want to join it if not already on it. It would also be a good idea to ask those petition signers within easy enough travel of New York to register for the July 20th Listening To The City II event...Eli Attia confirmed he will be there. I know a significant chunk of you will be there,but so far only a few have confirmed you're planning to attend the pro-rebuilders' networking dinner afterwards.Do get back to me! http://pps.org/downtownnyc/ needs keeping an eye on in the site-input area for the WTC...right now anti-rebuilder Lynne Miceli has the last word,"praying" that the Twin Towers will not be rebuilt.As before,it's especially good if people who haven't posted there before respond,so that the number of pro-rebuilding voices is shown to be large. The BBC News site did update the Twin Towers "Talking Point",but they didn't include my or other pro-rebuilders' messages that we left. -=-=- The World Trade Center towers MUST rise again, at least as tall as before...or terror has triumphed.