The LMDC is the organization set up after Sept. 11 to help plan and coordinate the rebuilding of Lower Manhattan. Its Web site contains a wealth of resources about the rebuilding process, including images from the master plan and memorial design competitions, a timeline of the rebuilding process, and other information for residents and businesses in Lower Manhattan.

The Port Authority's Web site has more information about the critically praised transit hub for Lower Manhattan designed by Santiago Calatrava.

Silverstein Properties' Web site for the redevelopment of the World Trade Center complex contains information about the planned office space in the Freedom Tower and the other five office towers planned for the site.

This portal page on The New York Times' Web site is continuously updated with articles and editorials about the rebuilding process. On the right hand side of the page are interactive features in which architects discuss their various ideas for Ground Zero. [Note: The New York Times requires free registration.]

The Gotham Gazette's Web site about the rebuilding process includes a nice overview of stats and facts about the Sept. 11 attack and its aftermath, a virtual tour of Daniel Libeskind's site plan for Ground Zero, and a calendar of public events and forums.

The Civic Alliance To Rebuild Downtown New York was formed after the Sept. 11 attacks and advocates "a new Downtown that is alive 24 hours a day, a place where people stroll along the narrow historic streets that anchor America's leadership of the global finance system, while simultaneously serving as a home to diverse and economically integrated residential communities, to shops and restaurants, schools, universities and to new industries." Its Web site includes a report from the group's "Listening to the City" event, attended by more than 4,000 people, who responded to the initial round of planning for Ground Zero. [Note: The report is a pdf file; Adobe Acrobat is required.]

This coalition of 21 architecture, urban planning and design organizations issued a set of seven guiding principles that helped direct the rebuilding process, including an open and transparent process to determine a memorial and a mixed-use plan for the site that would include housing, retail, business and cultural space.

In this New Yorker article, which describes the compromises made to Daniel Libeskind's master plan with the Freedom Tower and the memorial design by Michael Arad and Peter Walker, architecture critic Paul Goldberger asks, "Is Libeskind a masochist, or simply more of a politician than the politicians? Twice in the space of a month, he stood next to the governor, the mayor, and officials from the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation and the Port Authority -- his clients -- as they made announcements that altered key portions of his master plan for Ground Zero." [The New Yorker, Feb. 9, 2004]

The Web site for Daniel Libeskind, designer of the master plan for Ground Zero and collaborating architect on the Freedom Tower, showcases Libeskind's most well-known projects and features articles and essays in which he explains his buildings and his philosophy.

Skidmore, Owings & Merrill is the architecture firm of David Childs, who was the lead architect on the Freedom Tower. There's a biography of Childs on the site, as well as profiles of the firm's wide variety of projects.

James Russell writes in his ArtsJournal blog, "Though tricked up with gizmos intended to make it safer and topped by an awkwardly tacked-on mini windmill farm … this mammoth tower embodies the same deadening business culture that has been giving the skyscraper a bad name for a couple of decades now." (ArtsJournal, July 7, 2004)

Upon the laying of the Freedom Tower's cornerstone, Christopher Hawthorne wrote, "This is what it has come to at Ground Zero: A premature, election-year press conference held on Independence Day to celebrate the start of construction on a building called the Freedom Tower, which is designed to be precisely 1,776 feet tall and to rise next door to a vaguely conceived but lavishly outfitted museum called the Freedom Center. Who says patriotism is dead?" (Slate, July 2, 2004)

According to New York Post real estate columnist Steve Cuozzo, "The Fourth of July is not a day to revisit arguments about vacancy rates. It is a day to recognize the coming of a new Downtown icon. No one knows how soon the Freedom Tower will find tenants. But Gov. Pataki, the Port Authority and the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. finally recognized what was obvious to millions of ordinary citizens: Our financial capital can afford an office building that may sit empty for a while. We can't afford an empty hole in the ground or in the sky." (New York Post, July 4, 2004)

After the unveiling of the compromise Freedom Tower's design in December 2003, Peter Slatin wrote, "Last Friday, the world got a glimpse of something like architecture when it saw, unveiled at Federal Hall in Lower Manhattan, sparkling renderings of a soaring, turning, tapering tower etched against an achingly beautiful blue sky -- almost as blue and deep as it was on September 11. These images indicate something surprising: the possibility that from the too-watched cauldron of discord that has been bubbling away on this design recipe may have emerged something better than the ingredients that went into it." (The Slatin Report, Dec. 21, 2003)