They point with concern to enormous halls far below street level. Advisers to the Skyscraper Safety Campaign, an organization led by two relatives of 9/11 victims, say that the plan for long transfer corridors between the exit doors and stairwells leading up to street level might prompt some visitors, particularly if they were disabled or out of shape, to reverse course and try get to the wide ramps in the central memorial hall, creating a potentially disastrous bottleneck .Meanwhile, the LMDC is providing a livecam of the rebuilding from their offices that face Ground Zero. It's going to show the ongoing progress at the site. It can be accessed at projectrebirth.org.
The issue will almost certainly come up today in a hearing called by City Councilman Alan J. Gerson of Lower Manhattan. Although the Council has no authority over ground zero, Mr. Gerson said he was convening the session to get a number of issues involving the memorial out in the open, including questions about the emergency exits.
Less than a year ago, security concerns expressed by the New York Police Department forced a redesign of the Freedom Tower, immediately north of the memorial, delaying the project by months.
City and state officials insist that will not be the case this time.
But before you get your hopes up, Gov. Corzine of New Jersey wants to have his say on the rebuilding as well. As one of the two governors who have a say in what the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey does, he's starting to throw his weight around. Not a good thing at this juncture either. Codey and McGreevey were notable by their softshoeing around the issue at Ground Zero. Corzine's comments are anything but.
New Yorkers may wonder why the fate of a prime parcel of land in their city should be subject to the whims of a neighboring state. One, in fact, whose interests are in direct conflict with New York's.Again, it all comes down to money. And New Jersey wants its share, or else it will spike development at Ground Zero so as to favor Jersey City and Hoboken development.
The fact is that the official owner of Ground Zero is the Port Authority - a public agency created by Congress in 1921 to represent the interests of both New Jersey and New York.
Thick books have been written about this unnatural relationship; space here is limited. Suffice it to say that New Jersey got, among other things, the Port Authority to take over a decrepit commuter-rail system as its price for agreeing to the original World Trade Center - and it clearly intends to exact a price this time, too.
It's just not clear right now exactly what that price will be.
Meanwhile, Jersey officials looking to attract commercial real-estate investment across the Hudson are in no hurry to see anything built at Ground Zero.
Any new construction Downtown represents competition: Indeed, one of Jersey's representatives on the PA board, David Steiner, is a real-estate developer.
Some family groups want all the 911 tapes from 9/11 released to the public.
group of outraged 9/11 families yesterday said they may return to court to try to force the city to make entire recordings of 911 calls from the World Trade Center available to the public.Gothamist also recaps some of the events of the past 24 hours.
With just 24 of the 130 victims who made emergency calls from the Twin Towers on 9/11 now identified by the city, some families told The Post they wanted to be able to listen to all the recordings in the hope of hearing their loved ones' voices.
The city, forced by court order, plans to release only the 130 recordings with the voices of 911 operators - not the victims' voices.
Technorati: World Trade Center, WTC, Pataki, LMDC, urban policy, Freedom Tower, IFC, International Freedom Center, spitzer, silverstein.
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