Red Coyote

Ten days until The Anniversary. My two cents on rebuilding: replace the towers. Add one floor to each, to give Osama a nice concrete and steel poke in the eye, to say, "You knock it down, we'll build it back, bigger and better." Consider relocating the towers on the site, and preserve the original "footprints" as memorial space, but, assuming there is a continuing need for the office space, rebuild the towers. Most of the people who died at the WTC did not die at ground level, but rather hundreds of feet above the site, so a memorial "observation deck" should be included in each of the new towers, at the level where the respective aircraft made first contact. Yes, rebuilding the towers creates a target for all manner of deranged yayhoos, but other large or symbolic buildings (as a very few examples: the Pentagon, the Empire State Building, the Sears Tower) are also targets, and I haven't heard or seen any call to relocate the people who live or work in those buildings so the structures can be torn down and replaced with something less, oh, target-worthy, or offensive to Islamikaze sensibilities. The memorial which should be included in the reconstructed WTC site should be restrained - many have mentioned the Oklahoma City memorial as a model, but I disagree. I come from the "simple is better" school, and I think the Oklahoma City model borders on the mawkish. The entrance and exit, with the "before attack"/"after attack" time on each, are fine, but the chair concept leaves too little to the imagination. Any memorial constructed at the WTC will be a part of the site for many decades to come, and it needs to speak to the future as strongly as it does to the present. The best memorial, though, is to rebuild the towers. WTC 1 & 2 were built for business, and that is at least a part of why they were attacked. Rebuild them, and get back to business.