Feuds threaten 9/11 memorial

By James Bone

New Yorkers have ignored pleas to contribute towards the $1 billion World Trade Centre project

ALMOST ten million New Yorkers were given the option on their tax returns this year to donate to the World Trade Centre Memorial. Just 14,707 did so.

Of the seven charities named on the tax form, only the Lake Placid Olympic Training Centre did worse. The public response, which raised $150,085 (£80,000) towards the $1 billion projected cost, showed the depths of the crisis surrounding the project to commemorate the September 11, 2001, terror attacks on New York.

Delays, a ballooning budget, feuding architects, security concerns and opposition from victims’ families are among the myriad problems now jeopardising the memorial. The result is that, four-and-a-half years after the attack, the site remains just a hole in the ground.

“The memorial project is sagging beneath the weight of competing constituencies, conflicting agendas and unfortunate political exploitation of the memory of 9/11,” James Young and Michael van Valkenburgh, 2 of the 13 jurors who chose the design, wrote in a recent New York Times article. The design, by Michael Arad, a London-born Israeli architect, was selected by a jury two years ago from 5,021 submissions.

The plan, titled “Reflecting Absences”, is for two sunken reflecting pools where the twin towers once stood, each with water cascading down the sides and a square void at the centre. The public would be able to descend beneath the pools and view the waterfalls from below. The memorial is expected to become the biggest tourist attraction in New York. Michael Bloomberg, the Mayor of New York, has called for the price tag to be slashed.

The World Trade Centre Memorial Foundation, the non-profit organisation that is supposed to raise $300 million of the total, has collected $131 million. Gretchen Dykstra, its president, resigned last week, saying: “Perhaps it would help if there was one less player.”

Mr Arad has spoken out about “butting heads” with other architects and bureaucrats on the project. “I have no choice but to fight them every step of the way,” he said.

James Kallstrom, New York state’s top counter-terrorism official, has said that the memorial’s design makes it vulnerable to a terrorist attack. Many of the victims’ families are outraged that it is underground and does not protect the footprints of the twin towers.

Mr van Valkenburgh, a professor of landscape architecture at Harvard, said: “I think the memorial will survive. I cannot imagine it won’t.”

Reflecting Hubris

May 17, 2006
Reflecting Hubris by Tom Engelhardt

Recently, a number – one billion – in the New York Times stopped me in my tracks. According to a report commissioned by the foundation charged with building Reflecting Absence, the memorial to the dead in the attack on the World Trade Center, its projected cost is now estimated at about a billion dollars and still rising. According to Oliver Burkeman of the British Guardian, "Taking inflation into account, $1bn would be more than a quarter of the original cost of the twin towers that were destroyed in 2001."

For that billion, Reflecting Absence is to have two huge "reflecting pools" – "two voids that reside in the original footprints of the Twin Towers" – fed by waterfalls "from all sides" and surrounded by a "forest" of oak trees; a visitor will then be able to descend 30 feet to galleries under the falls "inscribed with the names of those who died." There is to be an adjacent, 100,000 square-foot underground memorial museum to "retell the events of the day, display powerful artifacts, and celebrate the lives of those who died." All of this, as the Web site for the memorial states, will be meant to vividly convey "the enormity of the buildings and the enormity of the loss." Not surprisingly, the near billion-dollar figure does not even include $80 million for a planned visitor's center or the estimated $50-60 million annual cost of running such an elaborate memorial and museum.

So what is Reflecting Absence going to reflect? For one thing, it will mirror its gargantuan twin, the building that is to symbolically replace the World Trade Center – the Freedom Tower. As the Memorial is to be driven deep into the scarred earth of Ground Zero, so the Freedom Tower is to soar above it, scaling the imperial heights. To be precise, it is to reach exactly 1,776 feet into the heavens, a numerical tribute to the founding spirit of the Declaration of Independence and the nation that emerged from it; its spire will even emit light – "a new beacon of freedom" – for all the world to see and admire. Its observation deck will rise a carefully planned seven feet above that of the old World Trade Center; and with spire and antennae, it is meant to be the tallest office building on the planet (though the Burj Dubai Tower, whose builders are holding its future height a tightly guarded secret, may quickly surpass it).

The revelation of that staggering billion-dollar price tag for a memorial whose design, in recent years, has grown ever larger and more complex, caused consternation in my city, led Mayor Michael Bloomberg to suggest capping its cost at $500 million, caused the Times to editorialize, "The only thing a $1 billion memorial would memorialize is a complete collapse of political and private leadership in Lower Manhattan," and became a nationwide media story. Because the subject is such a touchy one, however, no one went further and explored the obvious: that, even in victimhood, Americans have in recent years exhibited an unseemly imperial hubris. Whether the price tag proves to be half a billion or a billion dollars, one thing can be predicted. The memorial will prove less a reminder of how many Americans happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time on that September day, or how many – firemen, policemen, bystanders who stayed to aid others – sacrificed their lives, than of the terrible path this country ventured down in the wake of 9/11.

If the latest opinion polls are to be believed, Americans have grown desperately tired of that path, and, as a result, the whole construction project at New York's Ground Zero is likely to become emotionally obsolete long before either Reflecting Absence or the Freedom Tower make it onto the scene.

Memorials Built and Unbuilt
Let me offer a few framing comparisons:

1. Sometime in the coming week or two, the number of American soldiers killed in the Iraq and Afghan Wars will exceed the 2,752 people who died in or around the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001 (including those on the two hijacked jets that rammed into the towers). With a combined death toll of 2,739, the war dead have already crept within 13 of that day's casualties in New York. Here's a question then: Who thinks that the United States will ever spend $500 million, much less $1 billion, on a memorial to the ever growing numbers of war dead from those two wars?

2. Or consider the prospective 9/11 memorial in this context:
The National World War II Memorial (405,000 American dead): $182 million for all costs.
The Vietnam Memorial (56,000 American dead): $4.2 million for construction.
The Korean War Veterans Memorial (54,000 American dead): $6 million.
The USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor (2,390 American dead, 1,177 from the Arizona): $532,000.

The Oklahoma City National Memorial (168 American dead): $29 million.
The 1915 USS Maine Mast Memorial at Arlington Cemetery (260 American dead): $56,147.94
The Holocaust Museum in Washington (approximately 6 million dead): $90 million for construction/$78 million for exhibitions
The WTC Memorial (2,752 dead): $494 million-$1 billion.
3. Or imagine a listing of global Ground Zeros that might go something like this:
Amount spent on a memorial for the Vietnamese dead of their Vietnam Wars (approximately 3 million): $0.

Amount spent on a memorial to the Afghan dead in the civil war between competing warlords over who would control the capital of Kabul in the mid-1990s (unknown numbers of dead, a city reduced to rubble): $0.

Amount spent on a memorial to the victims of the Dec. 26, 2004, earthquake and tsunami in the Pacific and Indian Oceans (at least 188,000 dead): $0.

Amount spent on a memorial to Iraqis confirmed dead, many with signs of execution and torture marks, just in the month of April in Baghdad alone (almost 1,100), or the Iraqis confirmed killed countrywide "in war-related violence" from January through April of this year (3,525) – and both of these figures are certainly significant undercounts: $0.
The WTC Memorial (2,752 dead): $494 million-$1 billion.

The Victors Are the Victims

The dead, those dear to us, our wives or husbands, brothers, sisters, parents, children, relatives, friends, those who acted for us or suffered in our place, should be remembered. This is an essential human task, almost a duty. What could be more powerful than the urge to hold onto those taken from us, especially when their deaths happen in an unexpected, untimely, and visibly unjust way (only emphasizing the deeper untimeliness and injustice of death itself)? But where exactly do we remember the dead? The truth is: We remember them in our hearts, which makes a memorial a living thing only so long as the dead still live within us.
As an experiment, visit one of the old Civil War or World War I memorials that dot so many towns, undoubtedly yours included. You might (or might not) admire the fountain, or the elaborate statue of soldiers, or of a general, or of any other set of icons chosen to stand in for the hallowed dead and their sacrifices. I happen to like the Grand Army Plaza, designed by Augustus Saint-Gaudens and dedicated to the Union Army, that fronts on Central Park in New York City, my home town; but it is, in a sense, no longer a memorial. Decades ago, it turned back into a somewhat gaudy, golden decoration, a statue – as all memorials, in the end, must. The odds are that few today visit it to remember what some specific individual did or how he died. To the extent that we remember, we remember first individually in our hearts in our own lifetimes – and later, collectively, in our history books.

And, of course, for most human beings in most places, especially those who are not the victors in wars, or simply not the victors on this planet, no matter how unfairly or horrifically or bravely or fruitlessly their loved ones might be taken from them, there is only the heart. For those dying in Kabul or Baghdad, Chechnya, Darfur, the Congo, or Uzbekistan today, the emotions released may be no less strong, but in all likelihood there will be no statues, no reflecting pools, no sunken terraces, no walls with carefully etched names.

There has, in American journalism, been an unspoken calculus of the value of a life and a death on this planet in terms of newsworthiness (which is often, of course, a kind of memorializing, a kind of remembering). Crudely put, it would go something like: One kidnapped and murdered blond, white child in California equals 300 Egyptians drowning in a ferry accident, 3,000 Bangladeshis swept away in a monsoon flood, 300,000 Congolese killed in a bloodletting civil war.

Call that news reality in this country. It's also true, as the recent World War II memorial on the Washington Mall indicates, that Americans have gained something of a taste for Roman imperial-style memorialization (though, to my mind, that huge construction catches little of the modesty and stoicism of the WWII vets like my father who did not come home trumpeting what they had done).

Reflecting Absence and the Freedom Tower, however, go well beyond that. Their particular form of excess, of the gargantuan, in which money, elaborateness, and size stand in for memory is intimately connected not so much with Sept. 11, 2001, as with the days, weeks, even year after that shock.

To grasp this, it's necessary to return to the now almost forgotten moments after 9/11, after the president had frozen in that elementary school classroom in Florida while reading My Pet Goat; after a panicky crew of his people had headed Air Force One in the wrong direction, away from Washington; after Donald Rumsfeld and George Bush (according to former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke) started rounding up the usual suspects – i.e., Saddam Hussein – on Sept. 11 and 12; after the president insisted, "I don't care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass"; after he took that bullhorn at Ground Zero on Sept. 14 and – to chants of "USA! USA! USA!" – promised the American public that "the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon"; after his associates promptly began to formulate the plans, the "intelligence," the lies and tall tales that would take us into Iraq.

It was in that unformed, but quickly forming, moment that, under the shock not just of the murder of almost 3,000 people, but of the apocalyptic images of those two towers crumbling in a near-mushroom cloud of white dust, that an American imperial culture of revenge and domination was briefly brought to full flower. It was a moment that reached its zenith when the president strutted across the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003, and, with that Mission Accomplished banner over his shoulder, declared "major combat operations" ended in Iraq.

The gargantuan Freedom Tower and the gargantuan sunken memorial to the dead of 9/11 are really monuments to that brief year and a half, each project now hardly less embattled in controversy, cost-overruns, and ineptitude than the war in Iraq or the post-Katrina rescue-and-reconstruction mission. Each project – as yet unbuilt – is already an increasingly controversial leftover from that extended moment when so many pundits pictured us proudly as a wounded Imperial Rome or the inheritor of the glories of the British Empire; while the administration, with its attendant neocon cheering squad in tow, all of them dazzled by our "hyperpower" (as other Americans were horrified by the hyperpower of al-Qaeda's imagery of destruction), gained confidence that this was their moment; the one that would take them over the top; the one that would make the United States a Republican Party possession for years, if not generations, the Middle East an American gas station, the world an American military preserve, and a "unitary" commander in chief presidency the recipient of the kinds of untrammeled powers previously reserved for kings and emperors. These were, of course, dreams of gargantuan proportions, fantasies of power and planetary rule worthy of a tower at least 1,776 feet high, that would obliterate the memory of all other buildings anywhere, and of the largest, most expensive gravestone on Earth, one that would quite literally put the sufferings of all other victims in the shade.

As those two enormous reflecting pools were meant to mirror the soaring "beacon" of the Freedom Tower, so the American people, under the shock of loss, experiencing a sense of violation that can only come to the victors in this world, mirrored the administration's attitude. In a country where New York City had always been Sodom to Los Angeles' Gomorrah, everyone suddenly donned "I [Heart] New York" hats or T-shirts and became involved in a series of repetitive rites of mourning that in arenas nationwide, on every television screen, went on not for days or weeks but months on end.

From these ceremonies, a clear and simple message emerged. The United States was, in its suffering, the greatest victim, the greatest survivor, and the greatest dominator the globe had ever seen. Implicitly, the rest of the world's dead were, in the Pentagon's classic phrase, "collateral damage." In those months, in our EveryAmerican version of the global drama, we swept up and repossessed all the emotional roles available – with the sole exception of Greatest Evil One. That, then, was the phantasmagoric path to invasion, war, and disaster upon which the Bush administration, with a mighty helping hand from al-Qaeda, pulled back the curtain; that is the drama still being played out today at Ground Zero in New York City.

But those 2,752 dead can no longer stand in – not even in the American mind – for all the dead everywhere, not even for the American dead in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Perhaps it's time not just to cut back radically on that billion-dollar cost, but to do what we should have done – and, if we had had another kind of leadership, might have done – starting on Sept. 12, 2001. Taken a breath and actually thought about ourselves and the world; taken another breath and actually approached the untimely dead – our own as well as those of others around the world – with some genuine humility.

I know that somehow this memorial will be built; that, for some, it will touch the heart. But I also know that someday, maybe even yesterday in a country that now wants to forget much of what occurred as it was railroaded into a never ending war, whatever is built at Ground Zero will mainly memorialize a specific America that emerged from the rubble of 9/11. That was the America that had stopped being a nation and had become a "homeland," a country that should not have been using the numbers 1776 in any way.
Facing a building so tall, who has any need to approach a declaration of only 1,322 words, so tiny as to be able to fit on a single page, so iconic that just about no one bothers to pay attention to it any more. But perhaps, with that monumental invocation of its "spirit" in mind, it's worth quoting a few of the words those men wrote back in the year 1776 and remembering what the American dead of that time actually stood for. Here, then, from a great anti-imperial document, are some passages about another George's imperial hubris that you are less likely to remember than its classic beginning:

"The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States…. He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance. He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures. He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power…. He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation…. For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury: For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offenses…. For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever."

Someday, those reflecting pools and that tower will mirror so much of the rise as well as the fall of the Bush administration – not least of all its heck-of-a-job-Brownie incompetence and its inability to fulfill civil promises of any sort. After all, almost five years past the catastrophe of 9/11, after all the grandiose promises and the soaring costs, after all that "enormity," there is nothing 1,776 feet in the air, nor, as yet, any hint of a gravestone over the dead of the tragedy of that day.

9/11 memorial backers put fundraising on hold

Tuesday, May 09, 2006
BY AMY WESTFELDTAssociated Press

NEW YORK -- A nonprofit foundation has stopped trying to raise money to build the World Trade Center memorial until it can be sure how much it will cost and what it will look like, officials said yesterday.

The World Trade Center Memorial Foundation suspended fundraising several weeks ago after discussing the soaring price of the memorial, now budgeted at close to $1 billion, and its orders to cut the costs in half.

"The decision was made to not actively pursue new fundraising efforts until complete clarity can be achieved with respect to the design and costs of the project," foundation board member Tom Johnson said yesterday. "It's only fair to do nors to be able to expressly say how their money will be used and how much the project will cost."

Foundation spokeswoman Lynn Rasic said the board decided several weeks ago not to pursue major gifts until it received a contractor's cost estimate, which came in last week at $972 million. The mayor and the governors of New York and New Jersey said the cost should be no higher than $500 million.

Officials now are considering changing the design of the memorial to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks two months after preliminary construction began.

The memorial, called "Reflect ing Absence," would create two pools shaped like the fallen Twin Towers and surrounded by oak trees. The pools would extend 30 feet underground, where visitors could read names of the nearly 3,000 people killed, pay respects to unidentified victims' remains and see the remnants of the towers' foundations. Rebuilders have said they want to open the memorial by 2009.

The nonprofit foundation has raised $130 million from private do nors in a year. Another $300 million has been committed by government agencies. Officials have blamed the slow progress in part on controversies over the memorial's design.

Opponents have said the memorial would be difficult to safely evacuate and that it is disrespectful to send family members underground to mourn their dead. Foundation members recently met with some Sept. 11 family members to hear their concerns about the design and said they were considering changes including moving parts of the design above ground.

The foundation will soon present suggestions to change the design and cut costs while staying true to the original design of architects Michael Arad and Peter Walker, said Johnson, who chairs the foundation's executive commit tee. He said that before construction could continue, the agencies involved "must all be on the same page."

State and city leaders urged the foundation to resume fundraising.

"The mayor and the governors are already on the same page," said New York Gov. George Pataki's spokeswoman, Joanna Rose. "The memorial foundation should focus on their most important task -- fundraising."

Pataki welcomes the foundation's comments on the design but would work with Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the trade center site, to make design changes, Rose said.

The foundation's board also passed a resolution supporting foundation president Gretchen Dykstra, who has been criticized for not launching a national fundraising campaign.

She was a Department of Consumer Affairs commissioner under Bloomberg. Asked if she should stay on yesterday, he said: "I don't know what's going on. I think that we have to go and raise private moneys and she was hired to do that, but the foundation board, that's up to them."

Memorial's Back on Hold

BY PAUL D. COLFORDDAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

With costs soaring toward $1 billion, the design for the World Trade Center Memorial is headed back to the drawing board for a major overhaul.

Mayor Bloomberg revealed yesterday that he, Gov. Pataki and New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine agreed to cap the cost of the memorial and memorial museum at $500 million - far below the current design's projected price.

The estimate the WTC Memorial Foundation got for designer Michael Arad's two sunken pools, a tree-filled plaza and exhibition halls came in at $672 million.

That doesn't include $300 million needed for infrastructure costs - pushing the project close to $1billion.

As it stands, only $100 million was going toward infrastructure work under the Port Authority's restructured Trade Center lease with developer Larry Silverstein.

Bloomberg said spending more than $500 million would be "inappropriate" and that the project had to be viewed "in the context of what we can afford."

"Nobody designs anything without the real-world financial constraints," he added.
Bloomberg's announcement came more than two years after Arad's memorial design was chosen and two months after site preparation began.

The design for a sunken memorial has raised security concerns among 9/11 family groups and government officials.

Former FBI man James Kallstrom, Pataki's counterterrorism aide and adviser on Trade Center security, recently flagged the need to shore up the design.

In addition, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said yesterday that the NYPD also raised "some issues, some questions" with the Lower Manhattan Development Corp., which has led memorial planning.

Asked what changes are needed, Kelly said, "Sounds to me like there's going to be ... probably a significant change in design."

The $500 million budget presents a formidable challenge, with the memorial set to open on Sept. 11, 2009.

"We will continue to look at appropriate strategies to accomplish that goal," the LMDC said in a statement yesterday.

Charles Wolf, a member of LMDC's Families Advisory Council who lost his wife on 9/11, said yesterday's news "reflects a failure of leadership at the bureaucratic level of LMDC to implement this properly."

Memorial Cost at Ground Zero Nears $1 Billion

By CHARLES V. BAGLI and DAVID W. DUNLAP
Published: May 5, 2006

The projected cost of building the World Trade Center memorial complex at ground zero has soared to nearly $1 billion, according to the most authoritative estimate to date.

Rebuilding officials concede that the new price tag is breathtaking — "beyond reason" in the words of one member of the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation board — and it is sure to set off another battle over development at the 16-acre site, with calls to cut costs, scale back the design or even start over.

The foundation, which had planned to start construction in March, has already quietly broached the possibility with some victims' families of moving important parts of the memorial out of the twin towers' footprints to ground level.

Only two or three years ago, the problems faced by the memorial, the spiritual centerpiece of the site, would have been unimaginable. The underground complex, with its pools, waterfalls and galleries, was the product of a worldwide design competition that drew 5,201 entries and inspired tremendous public passion.

It was supposed to be immune to the controversies that had engulfed the commercial rebuilding at the site, with its completion assured by an outpouring of good will and open checkbooks. But fund-raising has lagged, with just $130 million raised from private contributions.

The new estimate, $972 million, would make this the most expensive memorial ever built in the United States. And that figure does not include the $80 million for a visitors' center paid for by New York State. It is likely to draw unfavorable comparisons to the $182 million National World War II Memorial in Washington, which opened in 2004; the $29 million Oklahoma City National Memorial, which opened in 2000; or the $7 million Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, which opened in 1982.

The original World Trade Center itself cost $1 billion in the 1970's, or about $3.7 billion in current dollars. Then again, everything at ground zero carries a big ticket, from the $478 million vehicle-screening center to the $2.2 billion PATH terminal.

The latest figure comes from a lengthy report by Bovis Lend Lease, the construction manager hired by the foundation to come up with a rigorous analysis of the projected costs based on forecasts of labor rates and market prices for steel and concrete, which have been rising rapidly in recent months.

The report includes expenses not previously enumerated, like $25 million in insurance and $22 million for museum exhibit design and construction, as well as a $22 million increase in the cost of the entry pavilion to the underground museum.

The foundation has started briefing officials at City Hall, in the office of Gov. George E. Pataki and at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the land. A person involved in meetings about the memorial provided The New York Times with a copy of a confidential foundation memorandum, dated May 2, that summarizes the Bovis findings.

Even before the official release of the new estimate, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said yesterday that he had spoken to both Governor Pataki and Gov. Jon S. Corzine of New Jersey about the escalating costs.

"Both governors and I think that $500 million is the amount of money that they're going to have to learn to figure out how to deal with," the mayor said. "We want to build the memorial, but we have to realize that there are conflicting demands in this city."

John P. Cahill, Mr. Pataki's chief of staff, who is overseeing rebuilding at the trade center, issued a statement yesterday saying, "We remain committed to the creation of a prominent, powerful and moving memorial that our nation can be proud of. Generations to come will come to see this tribute. However, we must ensure that it is financially achievable, while remaining consistent" with the original vision.

The report estimates the cost of just the memorial and its related museum at $672 million, up 36 percent from $494 million only four months ago. In addition, the latest projections include $71.5 million for an underground cooling plant, up from $41.5 million four months ago.
Bovis also identified $300 million in site preparations and infrastructure — nearly triple the previous $110 million estimate by the foundation, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation and the Port Authority — that would be necessary before construction could begin. It contends that the Port Authority must deliver a "buildable site" and should bear those costs.

The authority will almost certainly contest that assertion. Last month it agreed to provide $100 million, based on the prior estimate, as part of a major realignment of the plans to build four major office towers on the site. It also took on financial responsibility for the troubled $2 billion Freedom Tower. Yesterday, some state and Port Authority officials expressed misgivings about the validity of the jump in infrastructure costs, but said that they did not want to say so publicly until they had been briefed.

The ensuing debate over costs and potential design changes may once again raise the possibility that the Port Authority will take over construction of the memorial. Last fall, both Governor Pataki and Mayor Bloomberg seemed to endorse the idea. In the last week, state officials have expressed a lack of confidence in the foundation's ability to build the memorial complex.
The matter is complicated by what some officials regard as the foundation's anemic effort to raise donations, more than four years after Sept. 11. In addition to the $130 million the foundation says it has raised, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation has put up $200 million, which, added to $100 million from the authority, would bring the total amount raised to $430 million.

The foundation has yet to address how it will handle the annual expense of running the memorial and the museum, which could reach almost $60 million.

Foundation officials attributed the earlier estimate, $494 million, to the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, but Stefan Pryor, the corporation's president, said, "In both instances, the two agencies have worked together."

Early this year, the foundation solicited contractors to build the footings for the complex. Peter M. Lehrer, a construction consultant working for the foundation, and Roland W. Betts, a former director of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, became alarmed when the responding bids ranged from $29 million to $61 million, two to four times higher than expected.
The foundation then withdrew the contract and asked Bovis for a new cost analysis of the entire project. That analysis is summarized in the confidential memorandum, which mentions design changes that better reflect the complexity of the project and "additions to the scope of the project."

Knowing that the cost of the complex was becoming politically unpalatable, the foundation's executive committee met on April 18 with representatives of some victims' family groups, including Anthony Gardner, a leader of the Coalition of 9/11 Families, which has sued to block the memorial design, as well as Edith Lutnick, Patricia Riley and Sally Regenhard. In an attempt to cut costs and appease critics, the executives suggested broad changes to the design, according to three people who attended.

In the current design, the names of the victims would be inscribed 30 feet below street level, on a parapet in galleries surrounding underground pools within the footprints of the towers. Officials said that eliminating the galleries and moving the inscription of the names to plaza level would save money and resolve some security issues and perhaps assuage opponents.

"We've always made it clear to the foundation and to L.M.D.C. that we do not support this memorial as it stands now," Mr. Gardner said yesterday, although he refused to discuss the April 18 meeting.

But supporters of the current design objected to what they said would be a major revision to appease some critics. "I don't think it's appropriate to go back and start from scratch," said Jeff H. Galloway, a member of Community Board 1 in Lower Manhattan. "The memorial design wasn't thrown together in some haphazard way. It's the result of a thorough and amazingly inclusive process."

Monica Iken, a member of the foundation board and a champion of the original design by Michael Arad and Peter Walker, expressed her dismay at what she called a "leadership failure."
"Fund-raising would not have been a problem if the memorial and memorial museum was a priority in the first place, which it has never been," she said. "If the original design hadn't been treated like a Tinker Toy, we may have not have had these problems."

Memorial Mess

Escalating Costs, Budget Cap Could Force Design Changes;Dwarfing Other Tributes
By ALEX FRANGOSMay 5, 2006;

Soaring cost estimates for the World Trade Center memorial -- already expected to be one of the most expensive architectural tributes ever built -- coupled with uncertainties about funding may force planners to return to the drawing board to scale back some of the pricier portions of the massive project.

The latest cost study puts the price tag at $1 billion for the design as currently envisioned -- plus an estimated $40 million to $60 million a year to operate and serve the seven million visitors expected when it opens and provide security for the site.

With the source of such funding still in doubt, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, along with New York Gov. George E. Pataki and New Jersey Gov. Jon S. Corzine, yesterday agreed to cap building expenses at no more than $500 million. "There's just not an unlimited amount of money that we can spend on a memorial," Mr. Bloomberg says. "The two governors and I think that this is the amount and let's get on with it."

Those new financial realities will likely force the memorial's architects, including lead designer Michael Arad and associate architects Davis Brody Bond, to consider major design changes, including moving some of the memorial's signature below-ground functions above ground.
Even at $500 million, the memorial would dwarf the costs of similar tributes around the world. The World War II memorial, completed in 2004 on the National Mall in Washington, cost $182 million, including an endowment to pay its continuing operation. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe that opened in Berlin in 2005 had a price tag of $35 million. The Pentagon 9/11 Memorial, scheduled to be completed this fall, is expected to cost $11.6 million.

Renderings of the proposed World Trade Center memorial envision two pools covering the towers' footprints
Costs at the World Trade Center memorial are so high largely because of the elaborate design that includes a park with two square openings that approximately cover the footprints of the Twin Towers. Water would fall from the openings into underground chambers with victims' names etched in granite. Visitors would walk down a ramp to an underground plaza where they could view the etched names along with a slurry wall that survived the attacks. Also planned is an ossuary containing the bones of unidentified victims and a museum documenting Sept 11, 2001, and its aftermath.

Adding to the costs, the memorial will have to share a yet-unbuilt underground infrastructure with five skyscrapers, a performing-arts center, a train station and a mall-size collection of shops. What's more, it would be built in what is the most expensive construction market in the U.S.

"If you are doing this out in a field, this would be very, very different, probably a fifth the cost," says James E. Young, a professor at University of Massachusetts Amherst and a member of the original jury that selected the memorial design.

The seeds for the memorial's current troubles seem to have been sowed early on. The jury that selected the design "came up with a beautiful design for a memorial without regard to cost....It's kind of a backward way of doing it," says Debra Burlingame, a board member of the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation, a publicly chartered organization responsible for the project. Her brother, Charles F. Burlingame, was the pilot of American Airlines flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon.

The foundation, formed in 2005 by the Lower Manhattan Development Corp, a state-city agency, is charged with raising the money and building and operating the memorial. Funds are meant to come from both private donations and the government.
So far, fund raising has been modest. About $130 million in private donations has been gathered, mostly from Wall Street banks that have an interest in seeing the dusty pit that is Ground Zero transformed as quickly as possible. The Lower Manhattan Development Corp. has promised $200 million. A $100 million donation by the site's owner, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, is meant for infrastructure that the memorial will share with the other buildings -- and isn't included in the $500 million cap discussed by Mr. Bloomberg.

The foundation says it plans to start a national advertising campaign this month with commercials and print ads. Another tactic is to have individuals pay $500 for cobblestones that will be installed on the memorial's plaza. So far, the foundation has sold 36 cobblestones. The goal is to sell 5,000 by Sept. 11 this year.

Waterfalls cascade to an underground walkway with victims' names etched in granite.
The source of the annual operating money remains unclear, but the foundation is considering several options, including an admission fee to the museum, licensing the memorial's image and requesting federal-government support.

The foundation is scheduled on Monday to review the latest cost estimate -- which puts the price tag for the entire memorial at $1 billion, according to rebuilding officials. The new report will show the memorial and an attached museum costing $700 million. An additional $300 million would be needed to pay for site-preparation work and underground facilities the memorial will share with the Trade Center's other buildings.

A foundation committee headed by Roland Betts, a businessman and close friend of President Bush, is investigating the cost overruns and could recommend doing away with much of the memorial's below-ground elements to save money, according to people familiar with the project.
According to several people involved in the memorial planning, Monday's board discussion will center on how to preserve Mr. Arad's design with the new budget realities. Mr. Arad couldn't be reached for comment yesterday. A spokeswoman for Davis Brody Bond declined to comment.
"We are trying to do something extensive and spectacular and dignified in a very complicated environment," says Gretchen Dykstra, president of the memorial foundation. "But I'm not justifying costs that are too high. There's a tipping point here, and the board will have to talk about that."
The board includes some of the biggest titans of Wall Street and real estate -- including John C. Whitehead, former head of Goldman Sachs & Co.; Kenneth I. Chenault, chief executive of American Express Co.; Maurice R. Greenberg, chief executive of CV Starr & Co. and former American International Group head; and Jerry Speyer, chief executive of Tishman-Speyer Properties, a privately held real-estate company. Actor Robert DeNiro and several victims' family members also serve.

The foundation's hope to complete work by Sept. 11, 2009, now seems in jeopardy. Construction on the memorial officially began in March without a finalized plan or budget. Several problems have dogged the design, including the concern that its underground sections could be terrorist targets. One vocal group of family members object that much of the memorial will be housed underground and have filed a lawsuit alleging that the design violates historic-preservation rules protecting the remnants of the Twin Towers' foundation. "We'd support an aboveground memorial with access to the footprint remnants," says Anthony Gardner, executive director of World Trade Center United Family Group.

Also dogging the memorial is a protracted disagreement with the Port Authority over who should pay for the several hundred million dollars of underground infrastructure, including a heating and cooling system, electrical power supply system and a central command center to oversee security.

In an agreement among New York-area leaders two weeks ago, the Port Authority said it would contribute $100 million toward the memorial. A person close to those negotiations said New Jersey officials agreed on the $100 million as a cap against the agency having to pay more in the future.

The National Park Service, which operates 28 memorials but isn't involved at Ground Zero, says the cost of operating memorials, more than building them, is the big challenge. "As these things come in the system, we ask Congress to not just have money to build them, but some sort of endowment for funds for operating," says Park Service spokesman David Barna. The Park Service spends $20 million a year to operate the National Mall complex in general, plus $2.4 million to run the Washington Monument, $2 million for the Jefferson Memorial and $2.1 million for the Lincoln Memorial. It spends $14 million a year on the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, including security costs.

Foundation board member Ms. Burlingame says she is confident that the foundation will raise money to meet a reasonable estimate. "We can go out and say we have this beautiful design, but we have to have a realistic figure," she says. "I don't think these board members should be fund-raising when they are 100 years old."