The last thing in the world which should be built at the site of the 9/11 Twin Towers World Trade Center disaster in lower Manhattan is another lavish World Trade Center Tower complex. But that’s exactly what it’s going to be – a huge skyscraper together with an elaborate memorial and museum for the sake of historical posterity.
Now the entire 16 acre site is a permanent reminder and monument to the dark triumph of Osama Bin Laden, the Al-Qaeda terrorist mastermind who successfully brought it down, and a big red bulls-eye target for the next terrorist attacker to aim at.
Aside from a suitable plaque memorializing the victims, and perhaps a small park with a few trees and a fountain, a better idea for the rest of the site, in my humble opinion, would have been a parking garage connected to a shopping mall or some other kind of innocuous facility – anything to divert attention and memory from the horror of 9/11.
But no; the irrational emotionally driven American powers that be felt compelled to dub the site “ground zero,” right from the beginning, and construct the most impracticably expensive building in the history of the world there.
From now on, hapless New Yorkers are going to have every wannabe Al Qaeda terrorist America hater and his mother flocking to the “ground zero” site in droves to pay tribute to their hero, Osama Bin Laden, at the place of his victory over the American imperialist crusader enemy. That is, until one of them finds a way to bring the new skyscraper down.
When first proposed, the building was expected to cost about $2 billion. Resting firmly in government hands, however, the price tag for One World Trade Center, the lavishly conceived replacement for the original Twin Towers, has ballooned to more than $3.8 billion to date, making it by far the most expensive office building in world history.
The developer of the Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest tower, located in Dubai, UAE, by comparison cost in the neighborhood of $1.5 billion. The difference is mostly because of the politically charged nature of the World Trade Center project and the elaborate precautions which are deemed necessary to protect the building from future terrorist attackers.
Lengthy construction delays alone together with a myriad of political challenges and squabbles have resulted in eleven years of a still unfinished project. The site has been boarded up for more than 10 years.
Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, owners of the project, are displaying typical government malfeasance, mismanagement, and incompetence in the whole affair. Cost increases in the billions have resulted in higher bridge and tunnel tolls and reduced spending on other vitally necessary transportation and infrastructure projects in New York City.
Construction is far more complicated and expensive than with a traditional office tower, mostly because of security costs on a site that has been the target of two separate terrorist attacks in the past. The Twin Towers were bombed by terrorists in 1993 and then destroyed completely on 9/11/01.
Consequently, the new 1,776-foot skyscraper sits atop a heavily reinforced, windowless podium, and a thick core of steel and concrete surrounds its elevator shafts. The government run Authority has given up on any hope that the new World Trade Center will be profitable for a very long time.
For now, it’s just a big bulls-eye building – a multi-billion dollar Manhattan monument to Osama Bin Laden.
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