Thanks for a great article. Building new twin towers has been my hope from the beginning. We New Yorkers would regain our iconic skyline and emphasize that our attackers ultimately failed. Let's hope that we can change the ongoing Ground Zero debacle into a positive - and begin on an architectural course that should have been planned from the beginning.

The Freedom Tower is a schmaltzy, shameful monstrosity; it's a monument to a terrorist attack, not to freedom. If it is built, I can envision Osama Bin Laden pointing to a picture of the building and telling his kids: "Look--I built that." And he'll be right.

By contrast, rebuilding the towers largely as they were--perhaps a floor or a few feet taller--would demonstrate to the terrorists that while they may be able to knock the country down, it will get back up on its feet. That's a message worth sending.

I have long thought we should build the twin towers with a sculpture of a large extended middle finger facing east.

Right reason, wrong result.

If we are being given an opportunity to rethink what is to be built on the WTC site, let's take it and build something that adds to the city. Not replicas or near-replicas of the twin towers or the shameful monument park that Liebskind, Pataki, et al. proposed. Let's build a series of places that are interlaced with appropriately scaled buildings with ample workplaces, residential facilities, and shopping that will reinvigorate the Wall Street area and make it a lively, liveable community.

Excellent. City Journal should start a petition drive to rebuild the old twin towers more or less as they were.

My favorite blog linked to your article and I'm glad it did. It's so good to hear that the regular citizens of New York still have the heart - and solid sense - their political leaders seem to have lost long ago.

This idea is truly insane. As a person who has spent a considerable amount of time in four Arab countries, and with a son living and working in Cairo, I can tell you that rebuilding the Twin Towers will amount to jabbing your thumbs into the eyes of an enormous number of Muslims, some of whom will certainly resolve to "do it again" however difficult it might be. I might add that in my view the Twin Towers were an aesthetic atrocity - an eyesore that ruined the NY skyline. The criminal tragedy that occurred there does not sanctify the brutal ugliness of those misbegotten structures.

The fact that the powers-that-be in New York decided to implement Libeskind's design has always made me feel a little embarrassed for New York. It seems to me, from a distance, that New York has decided to bow its head to the threat of terrorism by constructing the "Freedom Tower," which looks like an Edvard Munch nightmare.

It would be more like New York to go bigger and better than smaller and weirder. Building a new twin towers would be a spectacular achievement worthy of your great city.

After all, you can't go around afraid forever can you?