Date: Fri, 8 Sep 2006 15:29:17 -0400 (EDT) From: Louis Epstein Subject: WTC Rebuilding #476:Time to Hit the Papers! It's time for letters slamming the Church/Greenwich Street dwarfs... besides the NY Times articles I forwarded yesterday (a Silverstein rendering of the new "skyline" is on the front page today),Cecil has forwarded me an article from the Post... ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Fri, 8 Sep 2006 05:07:55 -0400 (EDT) From: Cecil Shepherd New York Post Online Edition GROUND ZERO'S TOWERS BLOOM By TOM TOPOUSIS Here's Ground Zero as you've never seen it before. After five years of waiting, New Yorkers finally have a glimpse of what a rebuilt World Trade Center will really look like with yesterday's unveiling of dramatic designs for three new office towers slated for Ground Zero. The distinctive glass and steel towers overlooking - and paying homage to - the World Trade Center Memorial, complete the vision first laid out by Ground Zero master planner Daniel Libeskind nearly three years ago. Developer Larry Silverstein tapped three of the world's best-known architects, Lord Norman Foster and Lord Richard Rogers of Britain, and Japan's Fumihiko Maki to come up with the designs at a breakneck pace of just four months - a timetable set by Gov. Pataki. The trio of buildings, scheduled to be done by 2012, will join the Freedom Tower, a new PATH station and the memorial at Ground Zero. A performing arts center is the only missing piece. A 78-story tower designed by Foster includes four diamond shapes on an angled roof that point directly toward the memorial. And the tower is positioned so that sunlight will shine directly on the memorial at the exact moment of the terror strike on Sept. 11. "Wherever you are . . . and you look at this tower, it will tell you where the memorial park is," Foster said of his building, known as WTC Tower 2, or 200 Greenwich St. Tower 3, designed by Rogers, is the most slender of the bunch at the top, rising 71 stories and evoking dimensions of downtown's older skyscrapers. Rogers said the tower, encased by external steel bracing, will "send a stronger feeling of reaching upward." But at the base, both Towers 2 and 3 are designed atop wide pedestals that will have room f or enormous trading floors coveted by the financial services industry - a combined eight floors of trading-floor space Silverstein sought to attract major corporate tenants. Maki's design for Tower 4 calls for a 61-story building that will be sheathed in glass with a metallic tinting - transparent from the inside, but shimmery from the outside. The tower will also include a restaurant overlooking the memorial. The smallest of the Ground Zero towers, Maki's building will be home to the Port Authority headquarters and some city agencies, as well as corporate tenants. "They are brilliant, brilliant designs," Pataki said at an unveiling ceremony on the 52nd floor of Silverstein's recently completed 7 World Trade Center, which overlooks Ground Zero. The towers, planned for a corridor running between Church Street and a reopened section of Greenwich Street, will include 6.2 million square feet of office space as well as shops and restaurants, restoring much of the commercial space lost at Ground Zero. The Freedom Tower will include 2.6 million square feet of office space - much of it taken by federal and state agencies - when it is completed in 2011. Maki said the architects came together and decided that all the retail development in the towers would be located along Church Street, while quieter corporate entrances would be on Greenwich Street, which will face the memorial. More than 500,000 square feet of retail space will be located in the three towers and a below-ground corridor linking the buildings to the new PATH terminal and subways. Deputy Mayor Daniel Doctoroff yesterday lauded the new projects and said Mayor Bloomberg is thrilled with the designs. tom.topousis@nypost.com ---------- End forwarded message ---------- ...and the URL for the article in which the Daily News unwisely calls the dwarf-towers "dazzling"... http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/450614p-379126c.html TELL THEM THESE BUILDINGS WITH LESS THAN HALF THE SQUARE FOOTAGE OF A TWIN TOWER DON'T MEASURE UP!! letters@nypost.com voicers@edit.nydailynews.com (requires phone number and not-for-publication postal address to be considered for print) Both of them like their letters short. Don't delay...write today! A column from Alicia Colon in the NY Sun http://www.nysun.com/article/39291 leads with announcing the Sunday rally (later it gets political.) A CBS radio interview has aired and Twin Towers Alliance signatures have surged (maybe because the inadequate replacements now have a visible face?). I hope to see as many as possible of you at the rally! -=-=- The World Trade Center towers MUST rise again, at least as tall as before...or terror has triumphed.