Date: Wed, 17 Jul 2002 00:05:28 -0400 (EDT)
From: Louis Epstein <le@put.com>
To: infolmdc@empire.state.ny.us
Bcc: [the email list]
Subject: Phase I Options...Too Short...Too Plain...Too Similar!


While I will respond at greater length at the Listening To The City II
event,at the August public hearing,and in the Phase I comment period,
I wanted to offer my initial reaction to the annoucement of the six
preliminary proposals.

Boiled down to the barest gut reaction,none of the plans offers buildings
as tall as the lost Twin Towers and therefore none of them is acceptable,
but you deserve more details than that and I will provide them.

To replace 110-story towers including a 1725-foot antenna with
a cluster of 85-or-fewer-story buildings with a 1500-foot antenna
is an obvious retreat and acknowledgement of being "cut down to
size" by the terrorists,a point there is no need to belabor.
The human presence in the skies is not being restored to what
was taken from us.

However,the motivations in the plans do bear scrutiny.
A Beyer Blinder Belle partner was quoted as saying the present
real estate market justified setting the sights so low,which shows
a disturbing myopia.When the original World Trade Center Towers
were built,they were not deterred by temporary softness in the
real estate market,and in time they did indeed fill up.
As John Ruskin said,"When we build,let us think that we build
forever"...not for the perceived rental market as of several
years before the buildings are completed.

While reining in speculative development might have been
appropriate in the 1960s,the present circumstances make lack
of courage shameful in this endeavor...the symbolic importance
of completely restoring the physical devastation caused by a
monstrous crime can not be overstated.Nor can that of failing
to do so.

Apart from their timidity in returning to the former height,
the design proposals suffer from a more generic lack of
inspiration.Some of them have been aptly likened to Empire
State Plaza in Albany.None of them stand out from the surrounding
area in the way the Twin Towers did,rather they represent just
extensions of the surrounding cityscape.

Not only is there no diversity in options as to whether the
former height should be recovered,there is none on the issue
of whether it is wise to extend Greenwich Street completely
through the site....a precondition that greatly limits the
potential placements of buildings and the possibility of
providing surrounding open space toward the edges of the site.
Nor is there any diversity in focus on the memorial.

Of course the single greatest means of providing flexibility
in placement of buildings is the minimization of the number
of buildings...the consolidation of the needed office space
into towers of heroic scale,rather than ones that melt into
surrounding streetscapes that leave one wondering just where
the World Trade Center site begins and ends.

Your website's "history of the site",low-detail maps of the
18th and 19th centuries,fails to show just what the development
profile was,and omits the immediately previous dominant structures,
the Hudson Terminal Buildings of 1908-65...like their successors,
twin high-rises built as the largest office buildings in the world.

These are changes for the worse and we deserve better.

Take these proposals back to the drawing board,
and come back with options so tall,so breathtaking,
and so distinctive as to make New York proud.

-=-=-
The World Trade Center towers MUST rise again,
at least as tall as before...or terror has triumphed.