The French Tower

I'll be moving to New York this fall, so I'm especially interested in the real estate there. Hence, my interest for the Freedom Tower. Or should we call it the French Tower since these words have been made interchangeable?

This very critical "appraisal" published today in the New York Times provides a lot of interesting side info on the tower, including some comparisons between the current tower and the original design by Daniel Liebeskind. After the NYT free access expires on July 6th, you can still see the current design on the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation website.

I wonder if they're not giving in a little too much to security issues. As the author says "The Freedom Tower embodies, in its way, a world shaped by fear." Heck, how many skyscrapers are built less than 30 feet from the street and don't rest on an elephantesque base? That's sad considering that most of the time when you walk downtown what you notice are only the first 3 to 4 stories of a building (to verify this, start looking up when you walk in a city you know: you'll discover a brand new city up there). If this 20-story concrete is really built, that's probably the only thing you'll see when you're in Lower Manhattan. Wow. Sounds like Back to the Future Part II scenario.