The Battle For Ground Zero, Part 99

The LMDC has basically told the families who have expressed concerns about the memorial's location and design that the design is going forward.

In a letter sent yesterday to about 20 family members, Lower Manhattan Development Corp. President Stefan Pryor spelled out dozens of changes made to the memorial in response to concerns raised by relatives over the last four years.

Some elements of the memorial, now criticized by family members, were the result of suggestions from 9/11 relatives, including construction of a memorial and museum below ground level, Pryor wrote.

A copy of the letter to members of the LMDC's Family Advisory Council was obtained by The Post.

"This letter points out that the memorial is moving ahead," said a lower-Manhattan source who read it.

Construction is set to begin later this month, with completion in 2009.

Many families have been quite vocal in how and where the site should be developed, and it is tough to come to a consensus on any issue relating to Ground Zero. Pryor is correct that they're into the building phase now, but I have to wonder about the security concerns- the Freedom Tower was moved and redesigned after months of examination at its prior site when the NYPD expressed concerns about security from car/truck bombs.

Meanwhile, Larry Silverstein's 7 WTC has a lobby art installation that comes after months of discussion and compromise between Silverstein and the artist. Larry got his wife to work with the artist to come up with selected passages from a number of poems that will adorn installation:

The artwork — a continuing stream of poetry and prose written by dozens of different authors, from Elizabeth Bishop and Allen Ginsberg to Langston Hughes and Walt Whitman — will move along a screen made of acid-etched, diffused, translucent glass illuminated by whitish light.

It will take at least eight hours for the entire text to scroll by, Ms. Holzer said. The piece will dominate the lobby of the 52-story building, a shimmering, sharp-edged parallelogram sheathed in glass at the intersection of Greenwich and Barclay Streets at the northern edge of ground zero.

Though the $700 million building is not scheduled to open until mid-May, the artwork is already being tweaked. The letters appear in a five-foot-high band of text about two-thirds of the way up the high-tech wall, which was created, with Ms. Holzer, by James Carpenter, a Manhattan designer.

Under the high slabs of glass, white light-emitting diodes are threaded on 14-foot-tall metal ribbons. The laminated, structurally fortified wall is also a security amenity, screening the public from the private precincts of the building, and acting as a blast shield in case of terrorist attack.

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