That is the most appropriate comment/username combination that I have ever seen. 
- With rent in NYC being what it is, couldn’t they make some of the new building residential?
I almost took a job in NYC once, but the rent prices made it a net loss for me. Anything to lower those prices…
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Agreed. I’m in the Detroit area, and while 99% of this place is rather nasty, some of the old building downtown are great. (Chrysler Building, Fischer Building, etc.) Something a bit more creative then the old glass-rectangle would be nice.
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I would love to live in a high rise, near the top. I worry about lots of things on a daily basis, but being stuck in tall building at bad times is not among them.
Commercial-wise, who knows. I wonder if insurance rates are higher now in skyscrapers?
IMHO the land is worth too much not to return it to commercial use. Of course, some sort of memorial on the location is in order.
As previously stated, the market probably would not support that much office space, so the new building would have to be smaller than the WTC.
Maybe a 40 story twin or thirty story tri-towers
I’m putting my whole 401K into beads.
Why don’t we just piss all over ground zero? I mean c’mon, it’s a memorial to those people who died. I’m pretty sure NYC can do without a couple blocks of office space.
Wow. That would be pretty cool, but it won’t happen. The area is too valuable for just a memorial site and businesses won’t go for it. Still, it makes me shiver (in a good way).
d12, I hope that you are refering to metaphorical “piss.” The concept of a giant park over Ground Zero (there is no way that leaving a giant crater will go over) along with RTA’s idea would be just like the Eiffel Tower area and very cool, but, again the area is too valuable.
Imagine if after the 1906 earthquake, they decided to turn all of San Francisco into a memorial park.
Imagine if they decided not to build in Tokyo to memorilize the firebombing in WWII.
We need to remember, but remembering doesn’t have to involve vast amounts of space. Great cities build on their past by incorporating their triumphs and disasters into their present and future, not by meeting the dead with dead space.
Yeah but do we really need what is essentially a plaque that is several city blocks square? That site is also one of the few places in Manhattan where the bedrock can support tall buildings. It’s a geological imperative!
Yes, the victims should always be remembered, but we also need to move on.
I worked across the street. The footprints of the towers should be left as memorial gardens. There are STILL about 1600 families who have been given nothing–not one scrap of the physical remains of someone who was once daddy, mommy “my honeybunch”–to bury. They MUST have somewhere to mourn.
As to the the rest of it–some years before 9/11 writer Donald Westlake referred to the Twin Towers as the final failure of architectural imagination. So almost anything else will be better.
“There are STILL about 1600 families who have been given nothing–not one scrap of the physical remains of someone who was once daddy, mommy “my honeybunch”–to bury. They MUST have somewhere to mourn.”
—It’s going to be very hard not to come off as uncaring . . . But this is a pretty modern concept. Look at all the millions who lost loved ones in wars, shipwrecks, plagues, concentration camps, etc., over the past millennium, and never had “something to mourn.” Yes, it is necessary to have some kind of memorial at the WTC site for people to gather at—all the plans include that. But, as I said earlier, NYC (and all major cities) are built atop hundreds of years of graveyards. If we marked off as a memorial every site where a revolution or massacre or plague occured, no cities would ever be built, anywhere.
Not quite all major cities: according to a documentary I saw a few years ago, almost all of London’s parks are the sites of mass graves (‘plague pits’) constructed at the times of the Black Death and the Great Plague.
Everyone might find this website to be of interest:
Read your link, Lord Ashtar. Interesting concept.
One question: the link asserts that the tower will have an “external security system” that will use “Sound Waves” to “repel” flying objects threatening the building.
Is there any such technology, or are they loco?
Sua
Make one big building about half as tall as the towers were but wider, dye the glass and stuff so that a giant American flag is on one side, and on the other side put all the flags of all the countries in the world.
And just outside of it, make a wall with the victim’s names on it, kinda like the Vietnam one.
Just my sappy patriotic idea.
Yeesh, why dont we just make a giant tacky flag with neon lights, and have a speaker play “God Bless America” at 200 decibels 24 hours a day.
:rolleyes:
Since noone’s put up the link to the official redevelopment site, I thought I’d throw it in here before I go home.
That proposal is super cool, except they’re a little loopy on security measures. Iris, retinal, 3d body scans, and fingerprinting for everybody entering the complex? Give me a break.
A wound won’t heal if you pick at it, and a memorial means nothing if it’s just a place to meet you date. No-one will forget, time to move on folks. Rebuild.
People died at the Pentagon and it is being rebuilt, so why can’t people stop thinking of the WTC sight as something that it is not and start thinking of it for what it is. A war zone. Rebuild the bloody towers. They rebuilt Pearl Harbor after that attack so why not the WTC?
Loco.
Publicity stunt with no basis in existing technology. There was a thread about this recently –
One idea that quite appealed to me was allegedly proposed by Salman Rushdie, and then championed by another person. It involves building two towers on the site, taller than the previous ones, and open to business. The memorial would be formed by making the top forty or so floors on each building giant glass atriums.