Message #131579

[Ground Zero]

Criticism of progress

Following the six-year anniversary of the attacks, Bill Maher said:[1]

“ We may never know what the World Trade Center meant to our enemies, but our inability to build anything on the site in six years symbolizes our national head-up-the-ass. You know, it took two years to build the Eiffel Tower. In the 1880s. By hand. By French guys, while screwing their mistresses. Of course we can't rebuild Iraq. We can't get **** done in SoHo! ”

In the "Ground Zero" episode of the Showtime television series Penn & Teller: bulls**t!, Penn & Teller criticize the bureaucracy of the LMDC officials involved and list the multiple architectural setbacks in the initial design plans for the site.[2]

The base of the "Freedom Tower" (fortified because of security concerns) has also been a source of controversy. A number of critics (notably Derek Murdoch in the National Review) have suggested that it is alienating and dull, and reflects a sense of fear rather than freedom, leading them to dub the project "the Fear Tower".[3][4] Nicolai Ouroussoff, the architecture critic for the New York Times, calls the tower base decorations a "grotesque attempt to disguise its underlying paranoia."[5]