The International Freedom Center, a proposed museum that is facing expulsion from ground zero under pressure from angry relatives of 9/11 victims, will make a forceful new appeal today to stay at the World Trade Center site.
The museum’s decision to stand firm would force the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation and Gov. George E. Pataki to make a tough choice. They could either infuriate hundreds of impassioned relatives of those who died, or alienate influential cultural, academic and business figures, as well as family members who support the center.
The Freedom Center was chosen by the development corporation in June 2004 to occupy the cultural building on the memorial quadrant. It would portray the history and role of freedom around the world in exhibits and programs. “You could not put it someplace else,” said Tom A. Bernstein, its chairman and co-founder.
But the Freedom Center is now fighting for its life, in part because some victims’ relatives do not want anything around the memorial that smacks of anti-American politics or detracts from the story of 9/11.
Someone ought to do a fact check for them. The New York Post did. There's a lot more than just a few 9/11 families. For starters, we have both the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association (with 50,000 members) and the Uniformed Firefighters Association (with 22,000 members) opposed to the IFC. Then, there's the Take Back The Memorial group, which has gathered the names of more than 47,570 people including 2,269 9/11 family members as of this posting. The New York Times is alone in pushing this particular project, despite the fact that most Americans would oppose the IFC if they knew the full extent of what was envisioned.
So how can Pataki and Bloomberg OK the center — opposed, as it is, by cops, firefighters and numerous 9/11 families?The leadership of the IFC hasn't changed, and will not change its views on the US, or how it should have the artistic and cultural freedom to blame America first and foremost for 9/11. They will, however, obscure and obfuscate their intentions so that they can sneak in under the radar and by then the damage will have been done. Once the IFC gets entrenched in the Ground Zero plans, it will be too difficult to remove them. Therefore, this particular battle is crucial to the long term outlook for the site.
And how successful can private fund-raising be if Reps. Vito Fossella, Peter King and John Sweeney tie up Washington's share of the necessary cash?
The IFC — founded by the head of a group that's suing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld personally for his role in the "abuse" of terrorist prisoners — is meant to be an academically oriented "educational" center.
You know what that means: Counting how many ways there are to blame America for the world's ills, including the 9/11 attacks themselves.
"Officers regularly put themselves at risk at protests and rallies so that public dissention can occur," Lynch said.
"Just as we do not see political rallies at Arlington National Cemetery . . . or performing arts at Oklahoma City National Memorial or debate at the Pearl Harbor Memorial, we should not see those activities . . . at this sacred site." Hear, hear.
Sufficient funding for the project has long been a concern of public officials. On Tuesday, the state Senate passed a bill to let taxpayers donate to the project by checking off a box on their tax returns; the Assembly passed the bill earlier.
Meanwhile, competition for funding from Hurricane Katrina has cut further into the memorial's pot.
But now comes the threat by Fossella, King and Sweeney to shine a spotlight on the entire "$2.7 billion in federal funding that will be spent at the site."
"It's now or never for the IFC," Fossella said. "The museum has until Friday to do what is right . . . We will not allow the American people to subsidize a museum that blames [America] for . . . 9/11."
As for the NYT assertion that blocking this particular group from operating at Ground Zero will somehow annoy or alienate the business community, I find that laughable. The business community will do what is best to make money, and if the developers at Ground Zero are sensitive to the business needs, they will come there in droves. Foot traffic through the retail portion of the site will get people to come, regardless of what the NYT wishes to be the case. They will, however, withhold money for the memorial because they see what is going on with the IFC, and that is a separate and distinct issue. Cultural groups might find this decision distasteful, but then again, it should never have been made in the first place.
There was no reason to include cultural groups at Ground Zero in the first place. That this was included in the LMDC master plan instructions was a failure of imagination to foresee problems with groups that have specific political agendas. As it is, there are two other groups that are involved in the cultural center at Ground Zero that are largely unaffected by the problems with the IFC (The Drawing Center had dropped out, though they're getting $150,000 to assist in relocating near to Ground Zero).
UPDATE
As for Bernstein's claim that you could not put this particular center somewhere else, that's just plain wrong. There are plenty of places and spaces in the city that could accept this project the way Bernstein wants it to be displayed. If they want to play their revisionist games with history, they can do it wherever there is space that can be converted to exhibition space. The Museum of Modern Art relocated parts of its collections to Queens while the main building underwent a thorough renovation, expansion, and reconstruction. They turned a warehouse structure into a museum. That Bernstein is wedded to Ground Zero is purely a political stunt. He knows that the effect of his project is based purely on the politics of the site combined with his own political leanings. It loses its impact if the IFC is placed somewhere else in the city.
UPDATE:
The NYT also wonders how many people will want to attend the WTC memorial. The projections are needed for environmental impact statements and one has to wonder whether the memorial will actually be big enough to handle the crowds.
The issue of crowd capacity at the World Trade Center memorial is not nearly as intriguing as the current melodrama over the tenancy of the cultural building on the site. Yet capacity has a lot more to do with how visitors will experience the memorial.The projections range from 3 million to 8 million, with higher figures in the first 2-3 years that the memorial is open. I think that those figures are low-balled, and even the Times offhandedly notes the siting of the IFC at the site means that space that could be needed and useful for the memorial is being used for other purposes.
What makes this a tough issue is that concrete decisions must be based on widely diverging projections. Like chickens and eggs, capacity and demand have a circular relationship. The number of visitors cannot be reliably estimated until the memorial has been fully designed. But the memorial cannot be fully designed without a reliable estimate. And demand itself will be ever changing.
I'm not alone in noting that the memorial is located below grade while the IFC is an above ground feature. People have no above ground marker for the museum or memorial. Oh, and the design of the memorial itself is coming under fire:
Ms. Iken, whose husband was killed on Sept. 11, 2001, asked Ms. Papageorge at the forum, "We wouldn't have, like, a turn-away policy or anything like that?"With the number of people flowing through the site, this strikes me as being shortsighted; additional points of egress also make sense from a security standpoint - in case the site needs to be evacuated, everyone would have to flow through a limited number of exits - which is the same fault that some families have noted in the past about the original WTC (too few stairwells spaced too close together).
Ms. Papageorge answered, "We're planning on implementing timed ticketing in the early years so that people will be able to know in advance when their time-ticket slot is."
As for the relatives of 9/11 victims, Mr. Pryor added yesterday, "No matter what the attendance level is on any given day, family members will not be turned away."
SOME speakers at the forum criticized the decision to reduce the number of ramps in the memorial.
In the original plan by Michael Arad, there were to have been four L-shaped ramps, two for entry, two for exiting, around both pool-filled voids on the twin tower footprints, reaching street level at the far corners of the memorial plaza.
Now, there are to be two switchback ramps that reach street level in the center of the plaza. Entry will be through the north ramp, exiting through the south ramp.
Ms. Papageorge said Management Resources, consultants in the design process, "actually suggested that we have a single entry/exit for orientation purposes because they felt that people would be confused if there were multiple entrances and multiple exits."
But Mary Fetchet, the founder of Voices of September 11th, told the architects who were at the forum that the memorial should have "as many entrances and exits as possible" and said she was worried about "traffic jams" in the new configuration.
UPDATE:
Jeff Jarvis does a far better job than I on going through the IFC's compromise plan to build the IFC at Ground Zero. He takes the IFC to task every step of the way and reinforces the fact that this is the wrong project for the wrong site.
Technorati: World Trade Center, WTC, Pataki, LMDC, urban policy, Freedom Tower, IFC, Drawing Center.
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