On Sun, 16 Sep 2001 15:42:57 Bill Stewart wrote:

Donald Trump is a capitalist - if building his proposed kilometer-high New Trump Tower would have made sense without the subsidies he's been so good at talking New York into giving him, it'd probably be built by now. It's not.

I agree completely that the real issue will be economics. Though, as I remeber, like most Manhattanites I try to tune "the Donald" out when he started spouting, the issue wil Trumps proposal to build the world's tallest building in the old railroad yards he is developing on the West Side was not the economics of the building, which he thought worked, but rather his inability to get the necessary zoning approvals. Another developer, Silvestein, had a 99 year lease on the WTC while the Port Authority continued to own the property. Siverstien has already called for the site to be redeveloped, though what if any rights he enjoys to do so under the 99 year lease on now non-existent buildings I don't know. As Trump seems at the moment at least to be syclically solvent I am sure he will make a high profile proposal to redevelop the site as well. Jim Windle

Rebuilding it doesn't make sense, though I did enjoy the picture that's been floating around the net of the replacement building, four towers shaped like a hand with the middle finger extended. :-) If it weren't for the near-infinite value of land in Manhattan, I'd say it would be better to build your basic eternal-flame monument there.

At 09:47 AM 09/16/2001 -0700, Tim May wrote:

...

The looming Bauhaus boxes of the World Trade Center never inspired me in the slightest way.

Agreed - the Empire State building and Chrysler Building are cool, but the WTC was ugly, though the view from the restaurant was impressive.

(...and the John Hancock tower in Boston at least had the entertainment value of guessing where the next glass window was going to fall off...)

...

By contrast, the Parthenon and other buildings on the Acropolis in Athens really _did_ inspire me. I guess this is why I like the Getty Center so much.

And the Parthenon lasted over 2000 years - it didn't turn into a ruin until the Turks blew up the ammunition storage there in the ~1850s.

...

Some years ago (mid 1960s), IBM decided to move the bulk of its headquarters operations _out_ of Manhattan to places like Armonk and Yorktown Heights, north of NYC. They found many of their execs were already living in those areas, and younger workers could buy actual homes in the suburban areas. Likewise, my old company, Intel, decided ...

The Internet makes it possible for anybody to work from anywhere they want. Of course, that's why everybody moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to be near the action :-)

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