It's the eve of the seventh anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and one day after the scaled-back designs for the September 11 Memorial and Museum were unveiled (right), and as the nation's cameras will soon turn on a construction pit that's still embarrassingly empty, Mayor Bloomberg has a few things to get off his chest about this whole delayed rebuilding of Ground Zero thing. He does so in a strongly worded Wall Street Journal op-ed piece that makes three points: 1) The memorial "must be completed by the 10th anniversary." (Good luck!) 2) Santiago Calatrava's PATH station must be scaled back even more. (Old news.) 3) The city needs more control over the rebuilding. Oh?
We will ask Gov. Paterson to dismantle the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation and hand over its development responsibilities to the city. Although the LMDC, a conduit for federal funds, must remain a legal entity, turning over its other functions to the city would eliminate one redundant layer of bureaucracy.Which would only leave about a dozen more layers. But seriously, folks, Bloomberg argues the ousting of the state-run LMDC would land the demolition of the Deutsche Bank Building in the hands of the already existing Lower Manhattan Construction Command Center, a city/state entity that would supposedly kick ass and take names in order to meet the July 2009 deadline to finally rid ourselves of that cursed building. "The public has a right to know whether we are meeting our goals," Bloomberg writes in the op-ed. Actually, we're a little scared to find out.
· There Should Be No More Excuses At Ground Zero [WSJ]
· Curbed's World Trade Center coverage [Curbed]
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