When trucks carrying construction materials try to enter the work site at ground zero on Wednesday, Beverly Eckert and 14 other men and women who lost family members in the Sept. 11 attack plan to block the road to protest plans to redevelop the site.
Eckert isn't a radical, schooled in the practice of civil disobedience, but is a grieving widow convinced that the memory of her husband, and the thousands of others who died on Sept. 11, is being betrayed by state and local officials overseeing redevelopment of Lower Manhattan.
Eckert's decision to risk arrest may mark a high point in her own personal grief, but it also reflects the intense passions that still swirl around the redevelopment effort two years after the attack.
"It's sad that we have to do something so extreme in order to hopefully get a response and commitment out of the governors of New York and New Jersey that they will protect and preserve this ground," said Eckert, 52, who said she was speaking on the telephone with her husband, Sean Rooney, 50, when the south tower collapsed and the line went dead.
But there is no consensus, even within specific groups, as some victims' relatives acknowledge the need for development at the site.
"How can you turn 16 acres [6.47 hectares] into a grave site?" asked Nikki Stern, a member of the family advisory council working with the government agency overseeing the redevelopment. Her husband, James Potorti, 52, died that day.
"How do you restore transportation to downtown without disturbing an area in which a body part was found? The only way you do it is to agree to come to some sort of representation that will give the greatest number of people some peace. I don't know what that is. People are struggling," Stern said.
The redevelopment plan has inched forward and work has begun. A new commuter train station is already taking shape and the tracks have been laid. Public officials have agreed that the architect Daniel Libeskind's winning design will remain largely intact, and judges are reviewing 5,200 entries for the design of a memorial.
This is the kind of balance that the business community says is appropriate.
"Clearly the site has many functions, of which a memorial is an important one but not the only one," said Carl Weisbrod, president of the Downtown Alliance, representing Lower Manhattan businesses.
"We want to see these functions complement each other and to use this site as something that will be essential for the revitalization of an area that was devastated," Weisbrod said.
But Eckert and her partners say the only reality that matters is that ground zero is a grave site, and as such, needs to be preserved.
They want the 3.8 hectares that include and surround the footprints of the two towers preserved as part of a memorial, and they want the memorial to begin 21m below street level, at the bedrock on which the towers rested.
Current plans set aside 1.82 hectares for the memorial site and raise the floor by 12m for what developers call aesthetic and engineering reasons.
The feelings about the plans are raw, but they may not be enough to stop them from proceeding.
"Millions of people around the globe voiced their opinions about the future of the World Trade Center site, and this design best reflects the consensus that emerged, providing a vast, respectful setting for a memorial while reaffirming life in the aftermath of tragedy," said Matthew Higgins, chief operating officer of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, the agency charged with overseeing the construction project.
With much pomp and circumstance, Cairo is today to inaugurate the long-awaited Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM), widely presented as the crowning jewel on authorities’ efforts to overhaul the country’s vital tourism industry. With a panoramic view of the Giza pyramids plateau, the museum houses thousands of artifacts spanning more than 5,000 years of Egyptian antiquity at a whopping cost of more than US$1 billion. More than two decades in the making, the ultra-modern museum anticipates 5 million visitors annually, with never-before-seen relics on display. In the run-up to the grand opening, Egyptian media and official statements have hailed the “historic moment,” describing the
‘CHILD PORNOGRAPHY’: The doll on Shein’s Web site measure about 80cm in height, and it was holding a teddy bear in a photo published by a daily newspaper France’s anti-fraud unit on Saturday said it had reported Asian e-commerce giant Shein (希音) for selling what it described as “sex dolls with a childlike appearance.” The French Directorate General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control (DGCCRF) said in a statement that the “description and categorization” of the items on Shein’s Web site “make it difficult to doubt the child pornography nature of the content.” Shortly after the statement, Shein announced that the dolls in question had been withdrawn from its platform and that it had launched an internal inquiry. On its Web site, Le Parisien daily published a
China’s Shenzhou-20 crewed spacecraft has delayed its return mission to Earth after the vessel was possibly hit by tiny bits of space debris, the country’s human spaceflight agency said yesterday, an unusual situation that could disrupt the operation of the country’s space station Tiangong. An impact analysis and risk assessment are underway, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) said in a statement, without providing a new schedule for the return mission, which was originally set to land in northern China yesterday. The delay highlights the danger to space travel posed by increasing amounts of debris, such as discarded launch vehicles or vessel
RUBBER STAMP? The latest legislative session was the most productive in the number of bills passed, but critics attributed it to a lack of dissenting voices On their last day at work, Hong Kong’s lawmakers — the first batch chosen under Beijing’s mantra of “patriots administering Hong Kong” — posed for group pictures, celebrating a job well done after four years of opposition-free politics. However, despite their smiles, about one-third of the Legislative Council will not seek another term in next month’s election, with the self-described non-establishment figure Tik Chi-yuen (狄志遠) being among those bowing out. “It used to be that [the legislature] had the benefit of free expression... Now it is more uniform. There are multiple voices, but they are not diverse enough,” Tik said, comparing it
RSS