Twins Rise Again: New plans come closer to justice.

National Review Online ^ | March 04, 2004 | Deroy Murdock

[xsysmgr]

[Note: Picture added - not in National Review Article.]

At last, an architectural team has given a glimmer of hope to those who want to see the Twin Towers rise again.

Herbert Belton and Ken Gardner just completed "The Plan of the People" to transform Ground Zero into a thriving commercial and transportation center. They also have crafted a tasteful and compelling memorial that recalls the 2,749 people killed there on September 11. It celebrates their lives and work without becoming an urban cemetery.

While this plan arrives two months after officials approved "Freedom Tower" by David Childs and Daniel Libeskind, nary a spoonful of soil has been scratched on that project. Legal, insurance, and financial questions cloud the Freedom Tower's future. Americans should urge public officials to substitute the majestic Belton-Gardner proposal for the lackluster scheme now selected for construction.

Team Twin Towers — a New York nonprofit that favors the World Trade Center's restoration — endorses the Belton/Gardner work. TTT unveiled their concept and stunning architectural models at a February 18 news conference at the Marriott Financial Center Hotel, two blocks south of where WTC Two stood for 28 years. It's all online at www.teamtwintowers.org.

"Herbert Belton and I created this to bring New York back to New York," says Gardner. He is a structural engineer while Belton, formerly with Emery Roth & Sons, worked as an architect on the first WTC's transit infrastructure. Their layout updates Minoru Yamasaki's 1962 design. Wider windows correct a recurring complaint about the Twin Towers. A "sky hotel" operates at mid-level in one tower. Belton and Gardner suggest that some floors house luxury apartments.

The new skyscrapers feature tougher, tube-within-a-tube construction. They contain more concrete and less drywall, a light material that was pulverized on September 11. Modern fireproofing, six (up from four) broader staircases, and sensors that pinpoint stairway obstructions all promote safety.

As before, the Towers dwarf shorter, adjacent structures, namely five attractive, 12-story buildings with rooftops as gently curved as the Towers are ramrod straight. These include offices, a transit hub, and an opera house.

This plan's memorial elements are sensitive yet imaginative. The new buildings stand 300 feet east of the Twin Towers' footprints. Each skyscraper's bottom five floors reappear in recovered or replicated steel. Within those lines, individuals who were killed will be named on stone tablets. Visitors can study this atrocity in an onsite museum and meditate on it inside a quiet, 12-story glass tower.

Belton and Gardner masterfully add an FDNY memorial at the top of one tower and its NYPD analog equally high in the other. They believe that since these brave souls climbed into each blazing building, those who honor their service should reach their intended destinations. Rebuilding advocates emotionally call for Belton-Gardner to become reality.

Hollywood entertainment executive Chuck Booms displays a small copper model of the Twin Towers that he acquired during a childhood trip to the WTC. Stifling tears, he recalls saying back then, "Dad, this is the greatest thing I've ever seen. How could man build such a thing?" He hopes to visit the new towers' souvenir shop and purchase a new model to
accompany the memento he bought at age 10.

TTT spokesman Jonathan Hakala says the Twin Towers were among Earth's few "instantly recognizable" landmarks. He compares missing the chance to restore them with "allowing the Pyramids to crumble or the Great Wall of China to come tumbling down."

Hakala says that financing anything at Ground Zero will be difficult. However, he believes it will be easier to fund something that is monumental, not mundane. He suggests congressionally-approved Liberty Bonds and private, domestic and international donations could help underwrite a new WTC.

"It was a magnificent structure to see going up," recalls Artie Vignapiano, who was a Port Authority landscape planner as the WTC was built. "When I worked on the 74th floor of Tower One, I used to tell people, 'You know what I get paid for? To look outside my window at the Statue of Liberty.'"

Vignapiano fled his office on September 11. Still, that horror has not slaked his desire to see the Twin Towers again. "All of the people who worked on the buildings — 10 out of 10 — want them back."

Erecting enhanced Twin Towers "can ignite the great American renaissance," Ken Gardner says. "I believe there will be a rallying cry for every floor that goes up...It's going to be amazing when it starts to pierce the skyline once again and rise above the Brooklyn Bridge."

If New York's civic and business leaders shelve the Freedom Tower and embrace "The Plan of the People," citizens from Gotham to the Golden Gate will exult. This winning detail of the Belton-Gardner blueprint embodies the American spirit: The new Twin Towers stretch 112 floors into the sky — two stories taller than did the beloved originals.

[SuziQ]

The design that resembles the international hand signal "Eff U".

That sounds like the Capitol buildings for the state of Florida. The crowning touch is that the two shorter buildings on either side of the tall tower are domed structures. Folks always said it was a metaphor for what the State does to it's citizens every day.

[Ronly Bonly Jones]

Buh bye, serbocrazy!

[Ronly Bonly Jones]

Buh bye, serbocrazy!

[Mr. Jeeves]

This will never be built. The Libeskind/Childs plan will never be built. We'll still be having these arguments ten years from now.

[eno_]

You are the one mongering surrender to jihadis.

And, anyway, not enough people are fully aware of the extent to which Warren Christopher, Madeline Albright, Wesley Clark, and the Clintons took us toward appeasing the jihadis, discrediting NATO, and provoking the Russians with the Blakan misadventure. So keep digging, Mr. Jones. It's a topic worth exploring.

[null and void]

OK... so we go ahead and paint a couple of big-a** red circular targets on them.

Yep, right under the møsque...

[Ronly Bonly Jones]

Liar.

Buh-bye, serbocrazy.

[swarthyguy]

Limited vocabulary and thinking, eh.

Don't fret. Serbocrazy? Comprehension issues, too.

Sad.

[swarthyguy]

Limited vocabulary and thinking, eh.

Don't fret. Serbocrazy? Comprehension issues, too.

Sad.

[swarthyguy]

Limited vocabulary and thinking, eh.

Don't fret. Serbocrazy? Comprehension issues, too.

Sad.

[eno_]

Liar.

Really?

Is it a lie that General Wesley Clack was relieved of duty for misleading NATO commander Solana and seeking armed confrontation with Russian peacekeepers?

Is it a lie that his assistant met with Anne Richards to plan the Waco assault, that he, at best, narrowly skirted laws against the use of soldiers against civilians, and that tanks from his command were used in that assault?

Is it a lie that the CLinton administration pursued a course of appeasement with jihadis?

[Ronly Bonly Jones]

I do not put my pearls before swine.

Buh-bye, Serbocracy.

[eno_]

Go have a bag of pork rinds, pearl boy. If you think it's swinish to point out the greasy Klintoon fingerprints on on our Yugoslavia policy at the time, well, we know where you are coming from.

[Ronly Bonly Jones]

Clinton was right to save the helpless from Serb Nazis. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

[eno_]

You can't even get your Nazis straight. It was the Croats and Bosnians that served in Nazi military formations in WWII. Nor are today's Serbs neo-Nazis. They have ambitions of uniting ethnic Serbs in a region that has been carved up by outside powers. So what? Unlike the Moslems in the region, they are no threat to anyone outside of ethnic Serb areas. I have no dog in that fight and would have preferred not to spend the money to bomb the crap our of Serbia in a manner that undoubtedly caused hundreds to thousands of innocent civilian casualties.

The Bosnians were neither helpless nor innocent. They invited in Al Quaida and other jihadis and provided a European base for their operations.

[Ronly Bonly Jones]

The door that allowed Qaida to come in was blown open by Serb Nazis using Serb dynamite by attempting to exterminate the Bosniac people.

Point a finger of accusation, three more point back at yourself.

[Ronly Bonly Jones]

You can't even get your Nazis straight. It was the Croats and Bosnians that served in Nazi military formations in WWII.>>

The latter fact is true. But when you round up individuals because of their demographic status, hold them in detention centers, and then systematically EXTERMINATE them in an attempt to wipe them off the face of the earth, that makes the perpetrators into NAZIS themselves in EVERY SINGLE ASPECT.

The Croats and Muslims were Nazis in WW2. The Serbs were Nazis in the 1990s. The former does not excuse the latter; on the contrary, it makes the Serbs even more guilty, because THEY SHOULD HAVE KNOWN BETTER.