Campaign opposing plans for World Trade Center starts in Anthony
Associated Press
ANTHONY, Kan. - Planners for the Sept. 11 memorial in New York City could learn from a memorial built by Anthony residents, two men who lost family members in the terrorist attacks said.
Jack Lynch and Charles Wolf visited the memorial in the Harper County town Wednesday, as the first stop on what they say will be a national effort to make the public aware of dissatisfaction with plans for a memorial at the site of World Trade Center attacks.
Lynch and Wolf are members of a group called Take Back the Memorial, which represents 15 Sept. 11 organizations. Take Back the Memorial opposes plans to include a theater and International Freedom Center at the World Trade Center site, saying those unrelated sites would distract people from what happened on Sept. 11, 2001.
Wolf, 51, whose wife died when a plane hit the north World Trade Center tower, compared the plans to setting up Vietnam War protest booths at the Vietnam War Memorial.
"You wouldn't do that," he said. "Whether you are a conservative in Kansas or a liberal in Greenwich Village, the response to the International Freedom Center has been the same: It does not belong there."
The Freedom Center and theater are parts of cultural space long planned at ground zero. The museum would chronicle freedom throughout the history, such as displays about Martin Luther King Jr. and how the Allies conquered the Nazis.
"These are important stories that should be told elsewhere," Lynch told about 75 people at the Anthony memorial. "We need to make sure all politics - left, right or center - stay way from the memorial."
Both men praised the Anthony memorial, which used steel from the towers, limestone from the Pentagon and dirt from the field in Pennsylvania where a fourth plane crashed.
"It's not a fantastic memorial, it's not a huge memorial like we'd expect at ground zero," said Lynch, 70, whose firefighter son died rescuing people after the attacks. "But it's appropriate.
"Our freedom has been affected. We feel that this memorial should be about 9/11 and 9/11 only."
The Lower Manhattan Development Corp., which is overseeing the rebuilding of the entire 16-acre site, has given the International Freedom Center until Sept. 23 to produce more specific plans for its museum.
The Anthony memorial, which was dedicated in 2004, grew out of the town's efforts to help the family of Joe Spor Jr., a Bronx firefighter who died in the attacks. It was built with about $80,000, most of which was raised by selling brownies, T-shirts and inscribed bricks used in the sidewalk leading to the display.