The Whining Has Already Begun

Yesterday's announcement shortly before 5pm by Gov. Pataki that the IFC could not be situated in the same quadrant as the 9/11 memorial and museum was a huge win for the 9/11 families, police and fire unions, a collection of bi-partisan politicians including Sen. Clinton and former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani, and thousands of other people who didn't want the memories of those murdered on 9/11 diminished by this group's anti-American messages.

The IFC turned around and said that they could not find any other suitable location and claimed to disband. Why? If there were such a need for the International Freedom Center, surely some space would have been located and provided for the IFC to operate. The LMDC, which is overseeing the reconstruction of Lower Manhattan has already provided $150,000 to the Drawing Center which refused to have anyone look into what kind of programs it would run at Ground Zero and withdrew from the site last month.

So far, the LMDC website has not updated their site.

The NYT characteristically is running stories about how this decision to pull the plug on the IFC will upset the delicate balance of years of urban planning.

So what.

If the plan was bad to begin with, then this was the right decision. The fact is that the cultural components to the Ground Zero reconstruction were never central to the rebuilding of the site, and now that the IFC and Drawing Center have been given the boot, the space allocated to them could now go to a much larger museum and memorial space. The memorial/museum space as it currently stands would not have had any structures at or above street level. The memorial itself would have been 60 feet below street level, at the bedrock foundation approximately where the towers once stood.

Perhaps the result will be salutary. It is not hard to imagine the cultural building in the memorial quadrant, now emptied of the Freedom Center and the Drawing Center (which is looking for alternative space), serving usefully as an extension of the underground memorial museum devoted to 9/11.

Now the question is what else in the master plan is open for revision. If ground zero is too hallowed for a freedom museum, how much longer will a performing arts center be considered appropriate? Or a million square feet of retail space? Or four office towers? Especially if one of them is named Freedom.

The fact is that the 'freedom musuem' was never only about freedom. Even the IFC had to acknowledge this fact.

Curiously, the NYT editorial page did not have any comment in this morning's edition to the events that transpired last night. The New York Post was estatic over the news. They also provide a good summary of the reasons why the IFC could not be trusted with an honored position within the site:

The center was the brainchild of one Tom Bernstein, whose group, Human Rights First, is devoted exclusively to blaming America for just about everything wrong in the world.

It invited in "scholars," like Columbia Univesity's Eric Foner, who wrote after 9/11: "I'm not sure which is more frightening: the horror that engulfed New York City or the apocalyptic rhetoric emanating from the White House."

Anthony Romero, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, was made an IFC adviser.

Meanwhile, the center planned to hand over control of its programming to ultra-liberal academicians. Its exhibits and forums were to focus heavily on the international role in the march of freedom — the world's response to 9/11.

And, as if further proof was necessary, the IFC provided it yesterday.

Pataki had explicitly offered to "work with the IFC to explore other locations for the center" — even some spots within the 16-acre Ground Zero footprint. But center officials thumbed their noses at him (and New York), saying they wouldn't even consider another locale.

The memorial quadrant at Ground Zero "is the site for which the IFC was cre ated," it said, "as an integral part of Daniel Libeskind's master site plan." (Well, whoop de-do!)

"We do not believe there is a viable alternative place for the IFC at the World Trade Center site. We consider our work, therefore, to have been brought to an end." (Three cheers for that!)

What did New York lose? "[A] museum of freedom at the place where freedom was so brutally challenged. The failure to accept the offer of nine great universities to offer cultural programming on freedom issues in the heart of Lower Manhattan. . ." Blah, blah, blah.

And so on and so forth.

Good riddance.

UPDATE:
The New York Sun tries to have it both ways:

We can understand the decision of the leaders of the Freedom Center not to go ahead. They have been subjected to withering attacks from some family members of September 11 victims; we share a number of Debra Burlingame's concerns. Starting a new institution from scratch is a capital-intensive, time-consuming process, and there are always plenty of people out there rooting for one to fail. If the leaders of the International Freedom Center don't think it is feasible to soldier on under these circumstances, they can at least know that New York is a city, and America is a country, with vast resources devoted to explaining and advancing freedom.

Both the Freedom Center's critics and its backers can go forward with the hope that at least some of the worthy programs and activism and education that would have been carried out by the Freedom Center will go on under the banner of other institutions, whether Freedom House or the Hudson Institute or the New-York Historical Society or the New York Public Library or Ellis Island or Federal Hall National Memorial or the City University of New York or the Smithsonian Institution or the Cold War Museum or some other institution that is still yet a glimmer in the imagination of some entrepreneurial New Yorker.

The Sun doesn't truly address the faults of the IFC that the Post clearly states. It only alludes to them as being some of the same concerns that Burlingame has. If the IFC were truly about what it says it was about, then it could still have found space and the money to put this venture together. The fact that they slammed the door on the whole idea minutes after the Governor's announcement shows that the rug was pulled out from under them and they were exposed for what Burlingame and others knew them to be.

NY Newsday doesn't have any comment on the IFC issue in today's paper either.

UPDATE:
The Daily News slams Gov. Pataki for creating this mess in the first place:

It was the governor whose vaunted World Trade Center master plan called for including cultural centers at Ground Zero.

It was the governor's Lower Manhattan Development Corp. that picked an outfit called the Drawing Center to be one such organization, only to have the Daily News reveal this summer that the place had exhibited offensive 9/11-related works.

It was the governor's LMDC that invited the IFC onto Ground Zero and then told sponsors to morph it this way and that, helping to create exactly what the families wanted least.

It was the chairman of the governor's LMDC who thought IFC founder Tom Bernstein was onto such a good thing that Bernstein should help lead fundraising for the entire memorial complex.

Considering all of those facts, Pataki's statement yesterday was astonishing in that he had the gall to blame the IFC for the fiasco. The governor was reduced to saying the LMDC would try to find a new location for the Freedom Center, which the center refused, and to develop new programming for the site, whatever that means.

In other words, four years after 9/11, he doesn't have a clue, and no one else does, as to the future of America's sacred ground.

Where have we heard this before? Throughout my multiple postings, that's where. At least there's someone paying attention out there.

UPDATE:
The LMDC has released their plans for the retail center. It will be 200,000 sq. ft., which is about half the size of the former underground mall at the WTC. And there was more detail about the memorial space:

Mr. Cahill also said that the cultural building on the memorial quadrant, originally intended for the Freedom Center and the Drawing Center, will instead be used as the above-ground "complement" to an underground memorial museum devoted solely to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. That museum is planned to be built within the trade center's foundations - a sore point for relatives of 9/11 victims, many of whom opposed the Freedom Center.

Use of the cultural building, designed by the Norwegian firm Snohetta, might increase by at least 40,000 square feet the amount of exhibition space for the memorial museum, which now stands at 110,000 square feet.

Technorati: World Trade Center, WTC, Pataki, LMDC, urban policy, Freedom Tower, IFC, International Freedom Center.