If you're wondering why Ground Zero remains a hole in the ground, today's New York Post
lead editorial succinctly provides the answers:
As America prepares to mark the passing of five full years since those strikes, not one square foot of the Twin Towers has yet been rebuilt.
Not one.
Ground Zero has suffered naysayers and saboteurs. Such as newspapers with hidden agendas that claimed the market couldn't bear to replace the lost space. And Mayor Bloomberg, who piped up late, casting doubt on developer Larry Silverstein's ability to finish the job and urging that already-late plans be scrapped altogether, in favor of some out-of-the-blue preference for residential development.
Gov. Pataki abdicated his role as leader of the project, focusing like a laser instead on his post-gubernatorial career.
Silverstein showed them all. His rapid, government-free reconstruction of 7 WTC stands in biting contrast to the no-go approach by Pataki, Bloomberg and the Port Authority. And with that building now filling up with tenants (Moody's, the latest, is to take 700,000 square feet of space), Lower Manhattan's real-estate bears have to head for hibernation.
But even as the designs for the new buildings are made public, New Yorkers know that they've seen pretty pictures before. They know that much more needs to be done before construction can begin.
The PA must still give a final OK to the financial terms for Ground Zero rebuilding. Leases need to be signed, rents agreed to. The WTC insurers still are holding out on some $1 billion in payouts.
Meanwhile, the Port Authority's mammoth bureaucracy has done zilch - zippo - to prepare the site for the new buildings.
If (and it's a monster if) the stars line up, the four towers would be done by . . . 2012. Eleven years after the Twin Towers fell.
The Onion's editors, masters of the sophomoric, view the situation a bit more cynically in their story, "
NYC Unveils 9/11 Memorial Hole":
Days before the fifth anniversary of the destruction of New York's World Trade Center by terrorists, city officials gathered on the site where the Twin Towers once stood to dedicate the newly completed 9/11 Memorial Hole.
"From the wreckage and ashes of the World Trade Center, we have created a recess in the ground befitting the American spirit," said New York Governor George Pataki from a cinderblock-and-plastic-bucket-supported plywood platform near the Hole's precipice. "This vast chasm, dug at the very spot where the gleaming Twin Towers once rose to the sky, is a symbol of what we can accomplish if we work together."
Developer Silverstein may or may not emerge as the hero of this slow-motion fiasco (his plans still include the horrendous "Reflecting Absence" waterfalls into oblivion in each of the fallen towers' "footprints.") But as the Post says, Governor Pataki, Mayor Bloomberg, the New York Times and a gaggle of posers and greedheads all serve, with varying degrees of culpability, as the villains. As it stands now, the whole benighted project is the most expensive example of how not to rebuild after a terrorist attack in the history of the nation. (All puns intended.)
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