NEW YORK, 11 September 2005 — As the families of victims of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks prepare to mark a fourth anniversary of the deadly day, plans for the World Trade Center site remain mired in controversy.

Looking at everything from a proposed Freedom Tower skyscraper to a cultural center at the site that is now a weedy dusty pit, families are criticizing the plans as irrelevant to the lives lost.

“There is something within the national psyche that recognizes this spot as graveyard,” said Colleen Kelly, whose brother died in the towers felled by two hijacked jets. “A lot of the conflict is stemming from an internal reaction recognizing this is a sacred space.”

While politicians try to put on brave faces and stage various groundbreakings in the area known as Ground Zero, relatives complain that the cultural center is inappropriate.

A dispute erupted between architect Daniel Libeskind and Trade Center leaseholder Larry Silverstein over the design of the centerpiece skyscraper. The first design was criticized for security flaws.

This week, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said although the next six months will see $10 billion of public and private construction, he isn’t satisfied. “Given the magnitude of the project, the progress probably wasn’t adequate,” he said. Plans called for the cultural center to house an International Freedom Center museum and an art gallery called The Drawing Center. But the Drawing Center drew criticism for displaying political art and withdrew. The Freedom Center has been forced to submit more detailed plans later this month. The center’s signature exhibit, called the “Freedom Walk”, would link 9/11 victims with what officials call “freedom heroes of history.”

“The poignant tragedy of Sept. 11 will be portrayed in the light of other great sacrifices” in world history, according to the group’s Web site. Other exhibit subjects include President Abraham Lincoln, slain civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the rise of the Solidarity movement that opposed Poland’s Communist regime.

That drew the ire of Debra Burlingame, whose brother was a pilot on the hijacked jet that crashed into the Pentagon.

She formed a group called “Take Back The Memorial” after writing an opinion piece published in The Wall Street Journal in June, saying the center’s exhibits have no place on “the site of the worst attack on American soil.”

The visiting public would “come to see 9/11”, she wrote, but instead “will be given a high-tech, multimedia tutorial about man’s inhumanity to man, from Native American genocide to the lynchings and cross-burnings of the Jim Crow South, from the Third Reich’s Final Solution to the Soviet gulags and beyond.”

The controversy has been compounded by editorials in New York’s newspapers, with The New York Times saying Burlingame’s campaign should “not be allowed to dictate the future of the entire area.” The New York Post retaliated by saying the families were right to insist any “anti-American activism of the sort implicitly embedded in the IFC and the Drawing Center is inappropriate.”

A mediator was appointed to sort out the dispute this week, and the center has named a family advisory panel.

Monica Iken, whose husband Michael died in the attacks, said the Freedom Center had “no relevance to 9/11.”

“The families oppose the International Freedom Center being anywhere near the memorial site,” she said. “It has no relevance, and it will dilute the message the memorial will be trying to make about the people that were lost and about honoring those lives.”

Jeremy Soffin of the Regional Plan Association, a nonprofit think tank on planning and development issues, said just a small number of family members oppose the center.

“A small minority of families who have always had concerns about the master plan are now rallying behind this issue,” he said. “The whole site can’t be a memorial because this is a living, breathing part of the central business district. Kelly said she found the resistance “bothersome.”

“What I don’t understand is why is the Freedom Tower OK but the Freedom Center is not? Why is an opera house OK but a Drawing Center not?” she asked.