CNBC’s Ground Zero Rising: Freedom vs. Fear, one of the first documentary specials on the 15th anniversary of September 11, starts to ask the right questions.
Hosted by Jim Cramer, Ground Zero Rising airs Thursday at 10 p.m. ET and strikes its own balance between reverent remembrance and analysis of, frankly, how smart we’ve been around the site of the former Twin Towers.
The reverence remains appropriate. The attacks of September 11 remain a raw wound in New York City, leaving a scar unlikely to heal in the lifetimes of anyone who remembers or was affected.
Cramer and the documentary do a reasonably good job in the tricky area of separating what the site means from how we have rebuilt and transformed it.
That is to say, did we do the right things and are they having the desired result, which was to reaffirm vibrant life where terrorists sought to sow death and despair.
CNBC runs through what’s gone up in the last 15 years: the Freedom Tower, several surrounding towers, a massive transit hub called the Oculus (right), and of course the memorial museum.
There has been discussion and sometimes heated argument all along about whether these were the best plans, and whether they justified the cost, which CNBC estimates runs $14-$16 billion in public funds and billions more from private developers like Larry Silverstein, who built the Freedom Tower and several of its satellites.
Cramer spends a modest part of the hour asking how this is all working out. He finds some sentiment on the side of “very well” and some on the side of “we really don’t know yet.”
The documentary then stops short of nuts-and-bolts numbers, seemingly content to leave with a general sense of optimism.
What might concern some viewers is the assertion by the new chairman of the Port Authority that Oculus didn’t need to cost $4 billion. It could have been just as functional for half that, he argues.
This dovetails with Ground Zero’s report on how some building workers were on the job seven days a week to get key structures finished on time. One of the managers comments that this reflects the workers’ appreciation for the emotional significance of the site.
Without suggesting that isn’t true, let’s wonder aloud if the amount of overtime they were earning might also have been a factor.
Cramer (left) asks Silverstein how his buildings are working out as a financial investment since he’s got millions of square feet of office space that he needs to rent out.
He admits that financially, he’s not sure, though he quickly adds that for New York, building the Freedom Tower was “eminently the right thing” to have done.
The show does acknowledge what the business press has at times called a significant challenge: getting people back into a building tied to such a tragedy.
Ground Zero Rising shows a clip of comedian Chris Rock doing a routine in which he says, “It’s called the Freedom Tower. It should be called the Never-Going-In-There Tower.”
Several potential major clients declined to return or to come on board, we’re told. Condé Nast comes off as the hero for taking 24 floors.
The son of a firefighter who died on September 11 offers a different perspective. What matters is that there are distinctive structures that collectively commemorate those who died there, he says. In a few years, no one will care about or remember the cost.
Between now and then, though, someone is going to ask. Ground Zero Rising offers, in effect, the first round.