FREEDOM TOWER
Posted on 01/28/2013 8:15:38 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Behold, the new One World Trade Center — the unfinished, imperfect end-product of maybe the most anguished public soap opera ever to bring forth a single building.
Still in a raw state, it’s already cause to celebrate. The nearly $4 billion, largest, most fought-over piece of the puzzle in downtown’s epic skyline restoration turns out to be a gentle giant, graceful and humane as the Twin Towers were not.
Architectural eggheads will sneer at it, but the masses will just as surely love it.
Include me in the common rabble.
What scant pleasure the old towers afforded lay in their tacky duplication. The thumbs-up tuning fork lent their banal bulk a semblance of wit; imagine how utterly awful one of them would have looked without the other.
The new One World Trade Center requires no identical sibling to draw stares or smiles. Although we won’t see it whole for another year, my heart lifts from every vantage point — from narrow Fulton Street, where it thunders skyward beyond the shabby old storefronts; from the Brooklyn Heights Esplanade, revealing its prideful place in the lower Manhattan panorama; and from beneath the Manhattan Bridge in Dumbo, a perspective that invites the Frank Gehry-designed 8 Spruce St. into a surprise pas de deux.
One World Trade Center’s prominence in the downtown pantheon is more plainly perceived from the New Jersey shore. Stand on the Exchange Place pier and see how comfortably it fits amidst stubbier neighbors. The sight also teases and delights riders on the No. 7 and F trains, motorists on the Long Island and Brooklyn-Queens expressways and the New Jersey Turnpike, party animals on Williamsburg’s Wythe Hotel terrace, and air travelers over Newark and the Verrazano Bridge.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
A lovely new target.
I hope Bloomie allowed the owners to mount rocket launchers on the roof.
Prayers for the new residents.
I saw it last May when I was in NYC. There are moslems everywhere in the city. At the 9-11 memorial there were NONE.
Even our moslem taxi cab driver dropped us off on the wrong side so he would not have to drive in front of it.
Stupid name for a building in a city and a state that has no appreciation for freedom.
The building looks ugly to me.
The TWIN Towers, ONE WTC, and TWO WTC were destroyed on 9-11.
The address should be One-Two World Trade Center.
I don’t like this new building AT ALL.
First off is the appearance. Slices have been taken off the corners making it look broken.
Secondly is symbolic. Where two buildings stood now stands one building, a smaller building.
It is less of a building by any measure, appearance, square footage, height. It is less impressive. It is sheepish.
Yeah, but union workers are getting rich off it.
Like your tagline, btw.
Got that right. Countries that slather "freedom" and "democracy" all over their public squares are usually the most tyrannical.
I'd be happier if they named it "Hugo Chavez Tower" in a country where I can build a shed without kissing the ass of some local bureaucrat, and carry my Leatherman on an airplane.
Who knows, maybe that lizardly Hizzoner Bloomberg will stamp his name on it in the near future.
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