Response #1

The writer of the New York Times article, Seven Years Later, Ground Zero, must be from New York. As a person who does not drive or walk by the site every day I have only conglomerate memories of the World Trade Center towers on fire, and twisted mountains of rubble. Those are my lasting impressions of 9/11. I do not get to see any daily progress on the new construction. Though the writer’s frustration at the slow pace of development is understandable, I personally feel that the writer just wanted to be heard whining, as well as be given the distinction of having been printed in the illustrious New York Times: “All the news that’s fit to print.”

Though it seemed like the author might have some valid arguments against “the bureaucratic lawyers,” as he (or she) says, there was no worthy solution except to hand the whole thing back over to the officiating bureaucrats (in this case Mayor Bloomberg of New York City, Gov. David Paterson of New York and New Jersey’s governor, Jon Corzine). Then, in the final paragraph of the article, the author calls to “push” the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey into building the project more quickly. No thank you, I would rather the workers didn’t skip every other third rivet because the locals are tired of looking at a construction site. The writer was speaking to New Yorkers, but they failed to realize that the World Trade Center is not theirs alone.