KAREN MATTHEWS
Associated Press Writer
NEW YORK (AP) -- Mayor Michael Bloomberg said a lower Manhattan memorial to victims of the World Trade Center attack should not be ``too big'' and argued that the needs of residents and businesses in surrounding neighborhoods must be taken into account.
In a speech Wednesday to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Bloomberg said people living in the nearby neighborhood of Battery Park City ``don't want to live in a memorial, and we've got to be sympathetic to that.
``People that want to move and take office space, commercial space, residential space that we're going to build, when people say, `Well that's a cemetery,' that's not exactly what a rental agent wants to have out there. So we've got to find a balance like anything else.''
The mayor said he didn't know how big the memorial would be.
``There's a cry for making it bigger,'' he said, ``and I would argue sometimes less is more, and that we run the risk of making something much too big.''
The mayor's comments about the memorial angered some relatives of those who died in the terrorist attacks.
``It is a cemetery. That's the reality,'' said Sally Regenhard, whose firefighter son, Christian, has not been recovered.
``This is not about real estate. We have to think about human life and those who died,'' she told the Daily News.
Some family members have said the entire 16-acre trade center site should be used for a memorial. Former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani initially supported that idea, but Bloomberg, who took office in January, has argued for a more balanced approach.
In his speech at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, Bloomberg also said that whatever office buildings are constructed at the trade center site would not duplicate the twin 110-story towers.
``The mistake of the World Trade Center was it was built without looking at the marketplace,'' he said. ``You have to wait and see what the market wants and then we're going to build most of those buildings to what the market wants, and not the reverse.''
