Yes, it is.

Uy, I just saw United 93 in the theatre. FYI, definitely NOT a date movie.

The $1 billion number is crazy, to be sure. But to get it in perspective, it includes $300 million in general WTC infrastructure which is going to have to be built anyway, and another $375 million or so just to shore up the bathtub -- again money which is going to have to be spent anyway. Which all helps to explain why getting from the present estimate to the $500 million budget requires "only" $170 million or so in savings.

On the other hand, no one seems to have even started to worry about where the $60 million per year in annual operating costs are going to come from -- you can just imagine the size of the endowment needed to generate that kind of income in perpetuity.

The real problem dates back to the original design competition, and the de facto decision that the footprints of the twin towers were sacred. That, in turn, more or less guaranteed that the largest quadrant of the site -- west of Greenwich and south of Fulton -- would be dedicated to the memorial. Which guaranteed an absolutely fucking enormous memorial -- much bigger, in fact, than any memorial ever needs to be. But there was so much emotion in the air at the time that the idea that the memorial might be smaller was considered unthinkable. So now the LMDC and the WTCMF are stuck with a huge area which would cost a fortune to develop no matter what was built there.

Felix is correct. I've never understood the argument that the ground itself was sanctified by the events of 9/11. The reason, for example, that there are no colonial-era buildings in Manhattan is that massive conflagrations destroyed large sections of the entire old city on several different occasions - once during the British invasion following the Battle of Brooklyn Heights in August, 1776. Is everything south of Canal St. sanctified because of the death toll from those fires? And if not, why not?

We rebuild. Lower Manhattan ground has been built upon, and rebuilt upon, and rebuilt upon more times than can be counted. The whole "bathtub" should be filled up with the foundations of new buildings, or filled in with earth. This fixation with spots on the ground is morbid.

What is interesting is that in 2006, monies still haven't been budgeted for shoring up the bathtub (if, say, the Memorial foundation decides to blink and not build until they are good and ready -- meaning, fully funded, won't the cost have to be shifted to the Freedom Tower?). Considering how vague the PANYNJ has been about funding anything except Calatrava's boneyard, shouldn't Bloomberg be asking more pointed questions of them than lecturing Arad on budgetary restraint?

Shit, I agree with Sterling on something.

I too think that setting up the footprints as a memorial is burdening future generations excessively with our present-day concerns, important as they are.

Take for example, the sinking of the General Slocum in 1904 -- it's the second biggest calamity to have befallen New York in terms of victims, after 9/11, with around 1,000 women and children perishing in a blaze on the East River. It's tragic, and there is a memorial in Tompkins Square Park for it. And that's about right, 100 years on, in terms of how the disaster should be remembered.

Hey, the US is a global empire. Can't we just raise taxes on the Gauls or the Phoenecians or somebody to pay for the memorial? Somebody get Marius on the phone, fer Chrissakes.

Also worth considering is how the Black Tom explosion of 1916 has been memorialized. It had a surprisingly low death toll but was similar in scale to the 9/11 attack - 2 million pounds of TNT detonated in a series of explosions following a German attack on a Jersey City munitions pier.

My old house in Jersey City has masonry repairs in the basement that I suspect date from the Black Tom explosion. The blast registered about 5.0 or 5.5 on the Richter scale around New York Harbor, blowing out windows and cracking masonry for dozens of miles around.

Black Tom is now part of Liberty State Park, but it was rebuilt and continued to be used as a shipping terminal for decades after the explosion. There's a fairly large plaque at the site. The Daily News' printing plant is a few hundred yards away.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911 is also commemorated appropriately - with several plaques. The building was renovated after the fire and is currently used by NYU as, I think, lecture hall space.

I don't want to minimize what happened on 9/11, but this modern tendency to construct enormous monuments to tragedy is wasteful and self-pitying.

On has to feel badly for Maya Lin. After fighting so long to get what most consider an fitting and elegant tribute, followed up my a largely invisible and mediocre career, no doubt the de riguer process of inscribing all the names of all the victims of a particular event will lead to some likely backlash against her innovation. In most design circles it already has, but that doesn't stop everyone from cynically finding a way to incorporate it.

Maybe we can recover the dying industry of phone directories by making books of the dead. Each year families and interest groups and whomever can fight about getting included in memorial directories that will be published and thrown on everyone's stoop to be ignored for weeks before we finally push them into the trash.

Does anyone have an example of a memorial constructed anywhere in this country since the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial that has made a positive contribution to the process or remembrance? I can't think of any.

99, Maya Lin didn't invent the inventory. Go to any WWi/WWII memorial in any British village, and you'll see the names of all the local boys who went off to die gloriously in their country's service.

But it's true that Maya Lin is pretty much singlehandedly responsible for the meme that memorials can be beautiful, moving, etc. -- and that holding an open architectural competition is a good way of constructing them.

As for what we seem to be talking about here, which is lives commemorated per square foot, I reckon the Cenotaph in London must be near the top of the rankings. It's basically a small little thing stranded on a traffic divider in the middle of a busy street, but it serves to memorialise the dead of both world wars.