US:The rebuilding of Ground Zero has fallen on bleak times. The police department has sent designs for the Freedom Tower, the proposed replacement of the twin towers and symbol of a city reborn, back to the drawing board, saying the structure would be too vulnerable to truck bombs.
Goldman Sachs has become the latest Fortune 500 corporation to baulk at returning downtown, abandoning plans in recent weeks for a proposed headquarters near Ground Zero.
Developer Lawrence Silverstein, meanwhile, is charging so much rent for his rebuilt 7 World Trade Centre that he has not attracted a single corporate tenant.
The New York Post now refers to Ground Zero as "Pataki's Pit" as it twits Republican governor George Pataki for the delays and dismisses the Freedom Tower's architect as the "elfin Daniel Libeskind".
The New York Times editorial board has taken to calling Mayor Michael Bloomberg "Mayor Ahab", complaining that "Hizzoner" is so obsessed with building a midtown football stadium that he has neglected the revival of Ground Zero.
Democratic local senator Charles E Schumer sounded his own alarm last week, warning that the city could lose $2 billion in federal funding because of a "culture of inertia".
The criticism has grown so loud that Mr Pataki came to the city on Thursday and announced he had appointed his chief of staff to take charge of the rebuilding. "Failure to rebuild," he said, "is not an option."
The clouds have gathered with surprising speed. Only last summer the rebuilding blocks seemed firmly in place. A gleaming new Port Authority Trans-Hudson (Path) commuter train station reopened, telephone and power companies updated and rewired downtown, and a design was chosen for the memorial to the 2,800 killed in the September 11th, 2001, attacks at the site.
Last July 4th Mr Pataki and Mr Bloomberg laid a 20-tonne garnet-flecked cornerstone for the Freedom Tower, which at 1,776 feet would become the world's tallest building.
Ten months later there are few signs of construction in the 16-acre crater that is Ground Zero, and the cornerstone may have to be moved. A growing number of influential New Yorkers question whether downtown Manhattan can retain its status as the world's best-known financial district. Washington recently surpassed Wall Street as the nation's third-largest business district.
"There's a sense of crisis because the private sector is uncertain about its commitment to relocating to Ground Zero," said Kathryn Wylde, president of the Partnership for New York City, which represents the city's 200 top private-sector chief executives.
"Even if we build the Freedom Tower, do businesses want to relocate next door to a target? No one has a good answer yet."
The latest round of problems arose when senior police officials wrote a letter in early April warning that the Freedom Tower, with its asymmetrical and twisting pinnacle, would not be secure enough against a possible truck bomb.
The original architectural plans had the tower rising next to West Street, one of the city's busiest truck routes.
The police department recommended moving the tower to the northeast corner of Ground Zero. This advice infuriated some state officials, who said that a 100-plus-storey building could not be shuffled about so easily. More to the point, they said city and police officials had remained silent too long.
But police commissioner Raymond Kelly told reporters that his aides first raised their concerns 16 months ago. It was only when state officials insisted on keeping the tower so close to West Street that the police department felt compelled to step up its warnings last month.
"We're in an entirely new world where we're trying to evaluate whether the tower could withstand a 10,000lb bomb blast, a 15,000lb bomb blast," deputy mayor Dan Doctoroff said.
Even if the Freedom Tower is built, no major corporations have offered to move in as anchor tenants. Few corporate leaders are comfortable with the notion of signing up for a corner office in an international symbol of resistance to terrorism.