Date: Tue, 13 Aug 2002 17:04:17 -0400 (EDT) From: Louis Epstein Subject: WTC:Online-LTTC closes,Soaringtowers opens site,more The Online Listening To The City closed its message boards today, some closing polls might still be open.The polls on tall towers in the memorial came out well,towers being first in "exclusively important" and second to names of the victims in combined "exclusively important" and "very important" scores. Two closing polls specifically focus on tall towers,acknowledging that a strong majority wanted towers as tall or taller...they ask why they should be built,and how they should be used.Results should be out tonight...I hope all-office,office-plus-memorial,and no preference do well compared to the options of leaving them mostly empty or empty on top. Richard Krasney's "Soaring Towers Coalition" has started a website at http://www.soaringtowers.org/ that has an ikonboard message board... they have invited other Online-LTTC members to join.I appreciate their enthusiasm even if they don't realize the extent to which they have "reinvented the wheel"...pushing goals that others of us have been campaigning for for months,including people prevented from participating in Online-LTTC after registering in good faith.I have linked their site from http://www.put.com/wtc/ and hope the link will be reciprocated. Preparations for a New York rally continue,apparently about a month's lead time is required to get all the permits required.Date and site will be announced when appropriate. Tonight is the building codes hearing at Bowling Green...I hope it does not report out anything that Bloomberg can enact to effectively ban supertall construction. Tomorrow's the date for the TTT fundraiser,and also my chance to talk to a candidate for lieutenant governor about the issue. Thursday is the Gotham Gazette Java-chat with Deputy Mayor Doctoroff. I hope the computer on which I can do such things (and see PDF files and launch printouts) has its connection to my LAN working again by then. Whitehead's board meets that day also,according to reconstructionreport's site. August 19th was the last known deadline for the Site Plan comments to the Whitehead clique,and I will have my text available for the mailing list when ready.(My previous-phase comments,along with past list emails,should be linked to the put.com/wtc/ website soon). If I might be permitted to wax philosophical-metaphorical-free-associative for a moment...the family property I live on includes forests,in which my family does not allow hunting.A necessary expression of this is posting POSTED-PRIVATE PROPERTY-NO-TRESPASSING signs on trees along the roads going through our land. It's been years since I did this,and the signs I put up years ago have faded,become torn,or disappeared.Lately I felt it was time to do it again,and it fit well with my present mindset concerning response to the violation that occurred on September 11th...I went out with a roll of signs and a pair of hammer tackers (stapleguns that expel staples into what you strike with them,hammer-style...easier than my long-ago use of hammer and nails for the signs) and put up lots of these warnings against violation.Along the way,besides exhausting the first roll of signs and nearly finishing a box of staples,I managed to pick up the worst poison ivy case I've had in some years.(I won't be coming into Manhattan to help with the petition/literature tables this week,certainly). But this hazard of resisting violation does not intimidate me. As the rashes and blisters subside as they inevitably will and always must,I will get gloves and long sleeves and more staples and finish the job,the signs posted will endure for years to come while the itches and oozes are an increasingly distant memory.One takes more precautions,one does not cede ground! And so it must be on the old superblock.Stronger new towers but not shorter ones...a message of perseverance rather than paralysis. The grief-stricken survivor groups may want to make the horror we all felt on September 11th the defining guide to redevelopment,but this is not the way those who died are best commemorated...as many have said we must honor their lives more than their deaths.A song that has lately come to mind is "Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again" from PHANTOM OF THE OPERA,with its expression of desire to move on beyond the death of one sorely missed..."Thinking of you won't help me to do all that you dreamed I could"...We need to make the WTC site one where more dreams can be held and lived,not one that dwells forever on tragedy.What victim would have wanted a cemetery there? The desire for a World's Tallest Building may or may not be gratified. (I don't know what affect it would have on the rebuilding movement if we were asked to choose between,to choose relevant figures with simple transposed digits,one 1730-foot(to roof) building or two 1370-foot buildings...hopefully not a division that would allow a shorter third choice to win).Economics will be argued.But understand that it was the very fact of being built in the teeth of an economic downturn that let the Empire State Building reign so long as world's tallest...before there had been a race between buildings taking the title from each other often.Likewise the Queen Elizabeth remained the world's largest passenger ship for decades because people thought there would never be reason to build a bigger one.Let us build taller than conventional wisdom thinks wise now,and we will have a tower or towers that will not be quickly surpassed! I know there is a faction out there...not on this list!...that thinks the ESB is somehow the "rightful" tallest building.Arthur C. Clarke's IMPERIAL EARTH has it standing in the Manhattan of 2276,noting "all its upstart rivals had long since been demolished".Walter Tevis in MOCKINGBIRD had the ESB,even in some drafts a duplicated ESB,reigning over a far-future Manhattan,extolling its size but not having any larger building survive.And David Macaulay,in his UNBUILDING,had his "Prince Ali Smith" offer to dismantle the ESB and move it to Arabia while creating a duplicate in its place,and what sealed the deal with an initially skeptical NYC was his offer to demolish the Twin Towers. However,while I have supported just about all the World's-Tallest visions offered for NYC (and resented those in other cities),my loyalty has always been to the Twins over the ESB even though I have (once) been to the ESB and never got to see the Twins.(One science-fiction future history of mine has had the ESB,surrounded across every street by taller buildings,demolished).The advance of the WTC over the ESB is an achievement of my lifetime,done in my childhood and now my duty as an adult to defend. See you on the 111th floor on 9-11-11! -=-=- The World Trade Center towers MUST rise again, at least as tall as before...or terror has triumphed.