Volume 16 • Issue 18 | Sept 30 – Oct 06, 2003
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Thanks from ‘Point Thank You’
To The Editor:
Re “Seen and heard, 9/11/03” (Reporters’ Notebooks, Sept. 16 –22, 2003):
Thank you for the article. I was deeply moved by it. It is comforting to read how others are coping two years after the W.T.C. terrorist attack.
Rest in peace — all those who were killed on 9/11/01.
Bridget Cagney
Editor’s Note: Bridget Cagney, a volunteer at “Point Thank You” on West St., was quoted in the above-mentioned article although her name was misspelled.
W.T.C. costs
To The Editor:
Congratulations to Josh Rogers for what is by far the best, clearest coverage of the redevelopment at the World Trade Center (“Bus plan could reopen W.T.C. wounds,” news article, Sept. 23-29, 2003).
I especially value the focus on costs. The site is below street level because the Lower Manhattan Development Corp., etc., unwisely chose to justify the selection of Libeskind’s design by endorsing his claims about the slurry wall. The expensive adjustments Josh mentions to get parking space for buses is partly because a site 30 feet down instead of at street level cuts into the space available for infrastructure below the site, but mainly because Pataki shot off his mouth about not building on the footprints — and then didn’t correct himself. The “bedrock-to-infinity” crowd pounced instantly on the most expensive sentence ever blurted, and the decision-makers have been scrambling ever since.
I can hardly wait for the next pronouncement from the microphone-challenged elite. It’s going to cost you and me a bundle.
Tom Richter
Rochester, New York
Build on the footprints
To The Editor:
I am writing in reference to the editorial concerning the World Trade Center in the issue Sept. 23 – 29, 2003 issue (“The new plans for the W.T.C. site”).
It still mystifies me that the families of the airplane and W.T.C. victims of 9/11, wish to leave a gaping hole where the once great towers stood. My guess is that each employee that worked there had a sense of pride concerning their address of employment. I maintain that if it were possible to poll the victims themselves, they would most certainly dare N.Y.C. officials not to allow the terrorists’ handiwork remain a huge pockmark in Manhattan. This “footprint” to me is a tribute to the terrorists themselves.
Please do have a bedrock memorial site beneath the new, safer, Twin Towers. This is justified and appropriate.
But to allow this signal to the world that terrorists can select a site in the U.S.A. to make a permanent hole in the ground, is beyond me.
I say, build the towers back, taller and safer than before. Let the replacement towers be the memorial the victims of 9/11.
Michael E. Ferguson
Vinton, Va.
