Christopher Hawthorne nails this weekend’s Pataki Day Celebration, aka the groundbreaking for the Freedom Tower.
This is what it has come to at Ground Zero: A premature, election-year press conference held on Independence Day to celebrate the start of construction on a building called the Freedom Tower, which is designed to be precisely 1,776 feet tall and to rise next door to a vaguely conceived but lavishly outfitted museum called the Freedom Center. Who says patriotism is dead?
Even though it’s not designed, funding is uncertain, there are no tenants, and market demand is less than zero, Pataki’s pushing the tower forward out of some mix of ambition and political narrative desperation. “All this is looking more and more like the process that brought us the original Twin Towers in the late 1960s and early ’70s.”
Related: Hawthorne nails the WTC Memorial competition