Being as how I have worked in the real estate field since I've graduated from college, the fight over Ground Zero has been especially intriguing. However, as most New Yorkers are, I'm tired of it. Please, Governor Pataki, stop the bickering and build something already! ENOUGH with the memorials and the bullshit architectural beauty contests. Ship Daniel Liebskind out and bring in a real architect who will give us something besides constant pandering to the media.
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From the Financial Times:

Clashes over ground zero
By Paul Sullivan

"The Incredibly Shrinking Daniel Libeskind, as the architect behind the redesign of the World Trade Center site was recently dubbed, has had a rough year. But drawing himself up to his full 5ft 3ins, he is showing that he is not going down without a fight.

"I am still intensively and fully engaged as the master planner for ground zero," he wrote to the New York Times to rebutt its assessment of him last month. "By any standard, I don't appear to be shrinking, physically or metaphorically".

And last week he sued Larry Silverstein, the World Trade Center leaseholder, for $843,750. The suit was over design fees, but it is hard not to read broader meaning into it.....

Libeskind, with his spritely face and quirky glasses, had been the epitome of compact cool when his design won. Now he was girding to descend into the murk and mire of a court battle. His suit claims that Silverstein merely paid lip-service to the master plan because his "actions, then and up to the present time, bespeak a clear intent to derail the project wherever he perceives a conflict with his personal financial interests". All the high-minded rhetoric and outward symbolism (1776, the tower's height in feet, is the year the Declaration of Independence was signed) had apparently been erased by the dirty business of litigation.

Befitting the clashes around the design, the Freedom Tower itself is now in doubt: it might not reach its symbolic height and, if it does, it will probably do so with the help of antennae. Likewise the centrepiece memorial is being designed by Michael Arad, who won the commission in a contest, and it will not be sunk into the ground, part of Libeskind's plan that had been praised by Pataki.

In the end, Libeskind might be happiest if he can take Silverstein's money and run. But even that will be determined by a committee, in a New York courtroom."

] Befitting the clashes around the design, the Freedom Tower
] itself is now in doubt: it might not reach its symbolic
] height and, if it does, it will probably do so with the
] help of antennae. Likewise the centrepiece memorial is
] being designed by Michael Arad, who won the commission in
] a contest, and it will not be sunk into the ground, part
] of Libeskind's plan that had been praised by Pataki.

Yuck.

] All the high-minded rhetoric and outward symbolism ... had
] apparently been erased by the dirty business of litigation.
]
] Befitting the clashes around the design, the Freedom
] Tower itself is now in doubt: it might not reach its
] symbolic height and, if it does, it will probably do so
] with the help of antennae. Likewise the centrepiece
] memorial is being designed by Michael Arad, who won the
] commission in a contest, and it will not be sunk into the
] ground, part of Libeskind's plan that had been praised by
] Pataki.

[ I can think of no more accurate memorial to America than this. Unfortunately.

Great idealism mired by greed, commercialism, pride and legal contest... how unbelievably, terribly apropo. -k]