The Battle For Ground Zero, Part 72

The Deutsche Bank building will be dismantled beginning in February. It was severely damaged by the collapsing towers, but its status was up in the air as insurers and the owners tried to determine whether the building could be salvaged. It was decided that the building was too badly contaminated, and it was sold to the LMDC, which will use a portion of the space for a security center for trucks entering the WTC complex, a new building and park space will be constructed. The LMDC website has more information, including a computer generated model of how the structure will be deconstructed.

Meanwhile, Steve Cuozzo thinks that nearly every aspect of the 9/11 Memorial stinks:

The real problem is the scary prospect that "Reflecting Absence" will actually be built as now conceived, in all its earth-hogging, morbid mediocrity.

The memorial scheme calls for a subterranean crypt and museum beneath waterfall-drenched Twin Tower footprints. Under-focused and over-engineered, it promises a result between mere disappointment and outright disaster.

It's considered impolite to criticize this design — first dreamed up by architect Michael Arad, then nudged along by Vietnam Memorial designer Maya Lin, later massaged by landscape architect Peter Walker and architectural firm Davis Brody Bond, and tweaked on an ongoing weekly basis by a horde of bureaucrats.

But as a few family-victim activists file suits aimed at seizing even more of Ground Zero's precious square footage for their own purposes, it's time to say enough — and maybe recapture some land already allocated for the memorial and put it to better use.

TO say that "Reflecting Absence" absolutely stinks is blasphemous. It's regarded as both disrespectful of 9/11's victims and their survivors and a threat to bogged-down fund-raising efforts.

But stink it does. (And that's the real reason fund-raising has lagged embarrassingly.)

I think that the problems with the fundraising were due to the anti-American bent of the IFC and the Drawing Center controversy, plus the lackluster development at the site in general.

Frankly, I'm not sure that the size of the memorial is the problem, but rather its subterannean nature. Nearly everything relating to the memorial is below the street level. There's nothing at the surface to indicate that there is a memorial there. And that's part of the 'allure' of this memorial design. It forces you to think of the absence of the towers and buildings in that space.

Will that work? I'm not sure.

The memorial foundation crows that it has pledges for $100 million of the needed $500 million, a figure certain to mushroom. In fact, $100 million is peanuts — especially since half of it came from one nonprofit foundation and two Downtown-based companies (Bank of N.Y. and Deutsche Bank) that would surely be glad to see anything fill the empty pit that Ground Zero has been since the cleanup ended in 2002.

The foundation blames everything but the product itself. Before, it was the dispute over the since-booted Freedom Center. Now, they're squawking that donors will construe it as a "government project" if the PA sends in its engineers.

Sorry — but those cowed by a handful of noisy zealots are pretending not to see the Emperor's New Clothes. The obvious truth is, citizens by the millions have not fallen in love with "Reflecting Absence."

THE first error was to mistake size for substance. The memorial quadrant consumes seven of Ground Zero's 16 acres — an extravagant commitment to justify Gov. Pataki's calling it the "centerpiece" of the WTC site, and an exercise in gigantism as arrogant as the Twin Towers themselves were.

You can't grasp how big the memorial is from street level; for that you need to gaze down from a high floor of the new 7 World Trade Center, as I did last week.

A far more cogent argument against the memorial is that it forces the office space into a far more constricted space, which will make the site feel far more crowded. The solution to that problem would be the construction of new skyscrapers - a twin for the Freedom Tower, which is something I've suggested for quite some time. The site suffers from the same problems that Minoru Yamazaki first encountered when designing the original WTC complex. Too many skyscrapers and the site feels crowded. Too few, and it becomes a desolate space. Two superskyscrapers - the Twin Towers - were the balance needed for the site.

What Cuozzo is essentially calling for is a scrapping of the entire Libeskind master plan, which set up this land use arrangement. That isn't going to happen at this late juncture, even though the plan is badly flawed.