It's been a few days since I hammered away at the WTC disaster, but Miss Representation takes up the slack in a big way with another one of his scathing take-downs. This is a must-read, but I'll whet your appetite here:"...it’s a total clusterfuck. Not a total clusterfuck like last year, when no one knew what the Memorial would look like, or even what the final program was; when the deconstruction of 130 Liberty was marred by poor oversight and flawed planning; ... when no progress was being made on the Freedom Tower; when Pataki was a bumbling idiot who couldn’t marshal the forces ... to finalize any site planning; when no one knew how anything was being paid for, but that all the money was definitely running out.
No, now it’s a new kind of clusterfuck, one that -- I was going to cut and paste the above paragraph, for dramatic effect, but even that isn’t worth it. Can we agree once again how unfathomable it is that these people can speak without shame in public? If this were medieval Japan ... wouldn’t they all have committed ritual suicide by now for their failings?"
I wrote an article for the July issue of Planning magazine (a trade publication for professional urban planners) arguing that the utter lack of planning at Ground Zero is the root of all the problems there. But given how milquetoast that publication is, I wasn't able to make the case as strongly as it really needs to be made. Oh well, I'll link to it anyway once it's up on their website.
(I took the above photo from inside the Winter Garden, which overlooks Ground Zero, to accompany the piece.)
