MW: I really don't want to focus so much on Monica Iken because Monica Iken is in pain and she feels like she lost her whole future. She's a very beautiful, young woman who I'm sure will discover that she does have a future ahead of her as soon as she's had time to properly grieve. I have spent a little time with her. We're careful around each other. But I've had the good fortune to have some very lengthy talks with other victims' families. And I don't think that necessarily Monica's views are the views of other people. I think that to concentrate on Monica because she has extreme views is probably not helpful to the process.

MW: He's been in touch on this issue and he knew that we literally had to start digging on Monday to make this happen because he's taken a personal interest with the victims' families and making sure that something happened very quickly. I guess between the time that I've talked to some of the victims' families and let them know that there was definitely an issue, I spoke to the Commissioner of the Community Assistance Unit and he knew that there was an issue. He knew that all these people knew that trying to sell this particular place for a temporary memorial was not going to be easy. I made it very clear that I didn't know how far I could push it. I would do my best to see if we could make this happen. So it obviously got back to the mayor that this was not going to be a slam-dunk. And I think it's very important for him to understand why it wouldn't be a slam-dunk, that there are thousands of people who use this small space as a place for the kids to go out and play. We probably won't know for ten or twenty years how this has affected kids, in the long term, both health-wise physically and health-wise emotionally. But these kids watch what goes on in the site. Some of them talk about watching bodies be removed sort of like it's a recreational afternoon. "Oh, I saw some bodies be removed today." I mean, this is very ironic and serious stuff. And these people are just trying to pull their lives together. Then to have this crushed sphere be put right next to them as a memorial, they feel like they're already living among so much death and they don't want to feel like they're living in a memorial park.

MW: I don't know how many people would participate with laying their bodies down in front of a bulldozer just like I don't know how many people will engage with Monica Iken when she lays her body down in front of a bulldozer. Perhaps they should lay their bodies down together and make more of an impact. I tend not to take those threats, I won't say seriously, but from my point of view, you cannot react to threats like that. Those kinds of threats do not get you anywhere. Those are threats that people tend to feel that this person is over the edge or is not a rational person and I think it does more to hurt her credibility than it does to try to make an effort to move forward and figure out a solution.

MW: The issue with World Trade Center 7 being the first building built on the site and being built rather quickly was an issue. Let's go back to the 1970's when the World Trade Center went up as a super structure in an area where nothing existed basically. It was an old neighborhood, a warehouse neighborhood. Nobody lived around it and little business at that point was being done around it. And then an entire community was built up. And then ten years or fifteen years later, 7 World Trade Center went up. And basically it was kind of like a wall separating all the communities. Besides being quite ugly, it sort of just stopped a main street. It was in the middle of a main street and if you looked down instead of seeing a view corridor of the World Trade Center, you saw this big, ugly building that was stopping traffic. So it was an afterthought of the World Trade Center and all of a sudden, it was going to be the first thing that would be rebuilt. And once again, it would be blocking Greenwich Street which is now a thriving area with families and businesses and the fastest growing community in New York…or it was before September 11th. Basically, we did not want the street grid to be blocked again. We wanted Greenwich Street to continue throughout the site. Whether it would be vehicular or just pedestrian, it was crucial that a building not be built to block Greenwich Street once again.

Sometimes out of these tragedies, some very positive things come out. And one of the things that happened since 9/11 is that we have the Financial District, and we have Battery Park City on another side. We have Tribeca on another side. We have the Seaport on the other side. 7 World Trade Center separated us all as a community. Without the building, without the World Trade Center, all of a sudden, you could see everybody's neighborhood and people started to feel like they belonged together for the first time. So it was a physical and emotional barrier that was broken down. The community did not want to see a building not only blocking Greenwich Street, but blocking us from becoming a whole community again. If you walked from Tribeca, for instance, you would walk down to 7 World Trade Center and you'd see this horrific wall and you would have to either walk all the way to the West Side Highway or all the way to Church Street to get around it. It really was a maze and it was a very large impediment. So the importance to slow Larry Silverstein down from our perspective was to make sure that Con Ed could rebuild their transformers and their substation below the building in a way that it could be moved to have us get back Greenwich Street. That was a very difficult engineering problem that needed more time to take to develop those strategies. And then we would have to move the building somewhere on the site. The building would have to be moved, made smaller, whatever it was so that we could reincorporate Greenwich Street. And this is not something that was in the original plan but something that was very important. I just had to make sure we got it.

<< 2 >>