#NYC’s Radio Row held a funeral procession for Mr. Small Businessman, the man in question represented by a life-sized effigy, mysteriously risen, Lazarus-like, from his coffin. This resurrection proved overly optimistic; #SCOTUS, in approving the scheme, quickly killed him all over again. The #TwinTowers, so deeply mourned in their passing, were not exactly welcomed in their rising. The small businessmen of the city’s six square block electronics mecca known as Radio Row, all about to be evicted for the project, were not the only ones complaining. The American Museum of Natural History said the towers would kill unconscionable numbers of birds. Fiscal hawks assailed the giant taxpayer-funded freebie given to the non-tax-paying #PortAuthority. The city’s real estate developers bemoaned the parlous state of the city’s economy; ten million square feet of commercial space already stood empty – who in God’s name was going to occupy another like amount? The property owners of the #LowerEastSide screamed foul when the original site for the much smaller complex was nixed (the Governor of #NewJersey vetoed it in the name of his state’s nameless commuters to the city) in favor of the more NJ-proximate west side. Before ground was even broken, the management consulting firm McKinsey had written a definitive report concluding pessimistically ‘nothing about the concept .. was assured’ and recommending against proceeding; their work-product was promptly buried. And then there was the design itself. Activist Jane Jacobs called it ‘vandalism’. A Manhattan Assemblyman suggested that the project’s best and highest use would be to ‘wrap a rubber band around the two [towers] and use it as a slingshot to send a man to the moon’. Harper’s called it ‘a fearful instrument of urbicide’. Lead Architect Minoru Yamasaki was assailed for a plaza too huge (4 football fields of barren emptiness – in fairness, his plans to humanize it had been kiboshed by the #PortAuthority in the name of economy), and windows too small (narrower than the span of his own diminutive shoulders, a view-killing response, it was quipped, to his own fear of heights). … [Continued in Comments]