Foundation work is going ahead tomorrow. That work may include blasting away the bedrock so that the foundations can be laid. Such blasting would reduce the time to complete this portion of the excavation to two months. The alternative would be thousands of hours of men using jackhammers and heavy machinery. The contractors are planning a test blast tomorrow, and if everything checks out, additional blasting would begin within days. Expect lots of 911 calls from concerned folks who don't know that this blasting will occur.
The blasting would require the closure of some nearby streets and PATH service would be stopped while the blasting occurred.
A firefighers' memorial at Station House Number 10 across the street from Ground Zero has opened. The memorial was paid for by Holland and Knight after one of their partners, who was a volunteer firefighter, died trying to rescue people from the Twin Towers. The New York Times has an interactive feature allowing you to learn about the various details of the memorial. Meanwhile, the offical 9/11 memorial is still in limbo. What's the appropriate cost for building the memorial?
The Australian thinks that New York City needs its own Eiffel Tower. Sorry, but any tower built is going to be a target, whether it's an office building or a spire like the CN tower in Canada or the Eiffel Tower in Paris. I still think that building a Freedom Tower is the right thing to do, and the criticism about how it is far away from the transit hub is a weak one. Considering that much of the East Side of Manhattan is without a subway line, the fact that the Freedom Tower is situated at a point only a few thousand feet from the transit hub (PATH and subways), the argument does ring hollow - after all, you don't hear how construction projects on the East Side of Manhattan are going to fail because there isn't a subway within blocks of various building sites.
Also, Ground Zero workers are pressing for a meeting with President Bush to demand health care coverage for ailments related to their work.
Technorati: World Trade Center, WTC, Pataki, LMDC, urban policy, Freedom Tower, IFC, International Freedom Center, spitzer, silverstein.
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