MAGGIE HABERMAN
Courtesy of The New York Post
Mayor Bloomberg yesterday touched of an uproar among families of 9/11 victims when he said a smaller Ground Zero memorial may be best - and that potential tenants there may be worried about living or working in "a cemetery."
Calling the comments insensitive, relatives of Sept. 11 victims charged that Bloomberg is putting economic development over honoring the dead and painting the family members as "unreasonable."
"People that live in Battery Park City don't want to live in a memorial, and we've got to be sympathetic to that," Bloomberg said during a speech to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Midtown.
"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," he added, saying there needs to be "a balance" in what gets built.
As for the size of the memorial, Bloomberg said, "There's a cry for making it bigger, and I would argue [that] sometimes less is more, and that we run the risk of making something much too big."
Bloomberg added that the memorial "process is everybody yelling and screaming for a number of years, and then somebody taking charge and just doing it."
Victims' relatives were outraged. "It's very inconsiderate using this rhetoric," said Jack Lynch, who lost his firefighter son.
Bloomberg "is not considering the feelings of the families who have lost people, who have not recovered anybody. That's still their burial ground, and he offends them; I know he offends them."
"That's disturbing," said Marian Fontana, who lost her husband at the trade center. "I kind of resent being portrayed as unreasonable. We never asked for anything other than to be included in the process, and that, so far, has been difficult."
Bloomberg spokesman Ed Skyler later said the mayor "has long maintained that the memorial should be the centerpiece of an area that should host other uses."
He said the "cemetery" comment was "relaying concerns" that Battery Park City residents have expressed to the mayor.
