Durst protests Freedom Tower plans

Developer Douglas Durst, who placed an open letter in newspapers yesterday calling for a reconsideration of plans for the Freedom Tower, said he did not expect the letter to stop the Port Authority from going forward with the skyscraper’s construction. He said that he and the letter’s cosigner, fellow real estate mogul Anthony Malkin, simply wanted to lodge their criticism against the project, which they say is being built out of sequence and is overly expensive. The pair are also carrying on a family tradition: Durst’s father and Malkin’s grandfather formed the Committee for a Reasonable World Trade Center in the ’60s to protest the building of the original trade center. more [NYO]