Nine years have passed since the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. Are New York City residents concerned about another attack? How much progress has been made in rebuilding the World Trade Center site? Political reporter Jay DeDapper spoke with the Marist Poll’s John Sparks.
Read the full transcript below.
John Sparks
Let’s talk about Mayor Bloomberg’s predecessor just for a moment, Rudy Giuliani. Rudy was certainly at center stage following the attacks on 9/11. You and I were there at NBC covering it that day, and we’ve got the ninth anniversary of the attack coming up next week. The Marist Poll asked New Yorkers if they’re worried about another major terrorist attack in New York City. I’m no longer in New York. I don’t have any idea. You are. Any thoughts on that? Are they in fact concerned about another attack?
Jay DeDapper
I mean, I haven’t seen any polling on this, so this is more of a gut check than it is something based on any data. I don’t really hear that. I don’t hear it from anybody in conversation that I overhear, in conversations I have with people, in policymakers, in cocktail party conversations, whatever. Wherever I hear people talking or wherever I talk to people, I don’t really hear that. I think that that moment, that that fear has, as you would expect, has ebbed pretty substantially even. And, the reason I think that is that with what happened in Times Square not long ago with the truck that — the pickup truck attempted bombing, it was very, very quickly that things returned to normal. It wasn’t like after 9/11 where normal was many years later. It was within a week people were back in Times Square. People weren’t talking about it, being worried about it. People… you didn’t hear people fretting about what would happen, put together your emergency kit. Do you have your plans in case something happens? None of that was discussed as it was after 9/11, so I don’t think that New Yorkers right now are particularly concerned about that.
John Sparks
Now, what’s going on down at the site of the Towers? Where do things stand right now as far as any rebuilding?
Jay DeDapper
The rebuilding has obviously taken a very long time to get going. But the Freedom Tower, which is the — kind of the centerpiece of this in terms of the rebuilding that is most obvious and most visible … the steel is well above the ground. There’s several hundred feet above ground, and it is on track for an opening in a couple of years. They’ve signed some big leases to have tenants in there, and there has been talk among private real estate interest in buying into it, in buying some sort of a way into it from the Port Authority because … you’ve got to believe that private real estate investors are interested. They see this as a viable building. That’s the commercial side of it. There are three other towers. One of them is also going up. Two others are delayed, and there’s a long battle that’s been going on with Larry Silverstein who’s the leaseholder of the World Trade Center, and that has not been resolved. All these years later, two of the four towers, who knows if they’re ever going to be built. The actual site, though remember, most of the actual site is going to be turned over to the memorial. And if you go there now, you can see not just the outlines of the reflecting pools that are going to be built where the two towers stood, you actually see the entire form. They are very far along on the memorial. It took a very long time to build the understructure of this, because there’s parking garages, there’s security, there’s a PATH train system, there’s all kinds of things that had to be built underground. They have done that, and they’re at ground level and the memorial, if you go down there now, the memorial, you can see what the memorial’s going to look like because the structure is in place. It’s going to take awhile to finish, but they’re on track to open that on time now as well. So, there’s been real progress in the last year and a half, real visible progress, that I think for people who visit the site, I think it’s reassuring that finally they’ve gotten past the morass of four or five years of nothing happening, and things seem to be happening pretty quickly now.
John Sparks
As you and I are speaking, Marist is also polling asking people if they feel the government has done too much or too little take care of the families of the 9/11 victims and those first responders who worked in the days following the attacks. We really don’t have an idea of what those results will tell us. Do you have any feel for this from the people that you talk to?
Jay DeDapper
Well, I mean nationally or locally, I think that it’s hard to find … you would be hard pressed to find people who are going to vociferously talk about how the first responders haven’t — we haven’t done enough for the first responders. Whether people think privately though that that is the case, I don’t know, and I don’t know if you’re going to find that in polling. It’s a super sensitive issue. It’s a live wire still. I think that we’ve seen, at least politically, that bills that have been advanced to fund to the tune of several billion dollars additional medical help and other kinds of help for first responders that were there and that are suffering medically, I think you’ve seen opposition of that and politically from politicians who aren’t from the Northeast and aren’t from New York. Whether that reflects a broader measure of their constituents’ feeling like this is welfare for first responders on Ground Zero, I don’t know. I don’t know that you’re going to get that answer in polling, but certainly there has been evidence of that, at least politically there’s been evidence of what’s been called first responder fatigue by some commentators.
John Sparks
I’d like to ask you one more thing. A number of folks I talk to miss seeing you at NBC and I’m just curious about what kind of things you’re up to these days.
Jay DeDapper
I’ve been running a production company, video production company, and we’re making videos, especially for the Web, for lots of clients — nonprofits, organizations, companies, and it’s a lot of fun. It’s a lot of fun to make videos that are different than what I’ve done for the 20-25 years I was in television news. Branching out from everything from doing cooking things with chefs to a biography of a huge soccer star for a sports network, so it’s been a lot of fun doing different kinds of things and I’m enjoying that a lot.
John Sparks
So if anyone was interested in engaging your services, do you have a Web site, a company name?
Jay DeDapper
Yeah, dedappermedia.com. Last name D-E-D-A-P-P-E-R Media dot.com. That’s the Web site.