An extensive police plan to safeguard the rebuilt World Trade Center
site against vehicle-borne bombs with new checkpoints and barriers could
stifle a growing community and complicate traffic and feels like "a
strangulation," area residents said Wednesday.
The plan, outlined
in a draft document, would ban uninspected vehicles from accessing the
16-acre lower Manhattan site, which includes the National September 11
Memorial & Museum, five new skyscrapers, a performing arts center
and a major transportation hub.
Julie Menin, the chairwoman of
the community board representing the neighborhood, testified at the
hearing, saying that no one was against the need for security at the
site where terrorists used hijacked planes to destroy the twin towers
and kill thousands of people on Sept. 11, 2001.
New York Police Department Commissioner Raymond Kelly said the department wanted to hear from residents.
Lower Manhattan is turning into an armored security zone.
Antiterrorist
paraphernalia litter parts of nine square blocks, or at least a dozen
acres -- all to protect the New York Stock Exchange from attacks.
Where
Broadway opens to Wall Street, jaw-like truck barriers and a
plastic-tent guard booth block the street. A fence squeezes pedestrians
into one narrowed sidewalk.
Concrete Jersey barriers posing as
planters are particularly hideous, part of a new antiterrorist aesthetic
that afflicts courthouses and City Hall.
Adding to the visual
misery, the New York Police Department rebuffed an effort by the
National Park Service to move its disgraceful Statue of Liberty security
checkpoint from Battery Park to the island itself. (At the statue's
reopening on July 4 after storm repairs, National Park Service Director
Jonathan B. Jarvis said that all options for the checkpoint were under
review.)
Very soon, the Police Department will finish a plan to
cordon off the entire 16-acre World Trade Center site, adding lines of
bollards and nine vehicle-screening zones that come with
credential-presentation queues, guard booths and pairs of those
bladelike barriers projecting out of the street. (They are capable of
stopping a speeding, explosives-laden truck.
The security ring
wasn't supposed to be necessary. The new buildings have been reinforced
to resist the force of bombs. All deliveries and parked vehicles will
use an underground vehicle-screening facility that's being built now.
The
police department's perspective, according to Richard Daddario, deputy
commissioner for counterterrorism, is that "the site must be protected
from a vehicle bomb." Period.
To see how such risks were assessed
after 9/11, I met architect Jonathan Marvel in front of Federal Hall,
within the security zone created around the Stock Exchange.
He
showed me the line of bronze geodes he had designed to guard Wall
Street. I watched people use Marvel's bollards as leaning posts and a
convenient place to perch a coffee cup while conversing.
The
Department of City Planning got Marvel involved in the design of these
devices after police parked sand-filled pickups at seven intersections
leading to the Stock Exchange following 9/11.
Today, these
well-meaning improvements are almost entirely obscured by the maze of
movable fences and sentry booths that have been added by the Stock
Exchange and an adjacent bank building. The turntables weren't properly
maintained, according to Marvel, and stopped working. Now the intrusive
truck barriers are back.
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Marvel didn't work on the Trade Center security
plan. It will render worthless the new streets that are being
expensively built, because few drivers will endure the pre-authorization
and up to five-minute screening needed to enter.
Steel Ring
London
is famous for the so-called Ring of Steel around the City, but it's not
so much steel as surveillance, since citizens and businesses rejected
the kind of physical barricades planned for the Trade Center site.
Security
agencies don't like to talk about the "why" of security, but the
measures for the World Trade Center and the Statue of Liberty -- the
latter, after all, America's symbol of freedom -- should not go ahead
until the Police Department shows that they are not extravagantly
redundant paeans to fear.
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