Gretchen Dykstra

In last night's interview with Dominic Carter, Attorney General and gubernatorial front-runner Eliot Spitzer rips the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, and characterizes Friday's departure of Gretchen Dykstra from the Memorial Foundation as a symptom of the agency's political inertia.

Speaking from Albany on the NY1 political program Inside City Hall, Mr. Spitzer said:

What we have now seen with [the] memorial, and unfortunately Gretchen Dykstra has just resigned, somebody of great competence, and I regret that she has left. I had always gotten along very, very well with Gretchen. But I think she left partly because there was nobody willing to make decisions. The LMDC - let me be very clear - the LMDC has been an abject failure, and those who were running the LMDC deserve an enormous piece of the criticism. I don't know where they have been, what they've been doing, or what they've been up to.

Get to the video via Bob Hardt's ItCH column.

- Tom McGeveran

It's an old trick of the trade to release bad news late on a Friday.

How about awkward and embarrassing news like the resignation of someone who had been publicly upbraided by her patrons?

That would be Gretchen Dykstra, who announced her departure from the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation just now, after 5 p.m., on the Friday before a long weekend which most people started around 3 o'clock yesterday afternoon.

This is another good reason why The New York Observer is committed to keeping its employees working until 6 p.m. or later every single Friday of the year. We never want to let anything slip by us!

Download her passive-aggressive resignation letter--"There is general agreement that the multiplicity of authorities makes it difficult for anyone to move expeditiously. Perhaps it would help if there were one less player."--here (PDF).  read more »

-Matthew Schuerman

Gretchen Dykstra, president of the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation, goes on a 15-city tour today to "help engage individuals, businesses and communities," even though the foundation has called off fundraising. -Matthew Schuerman

Gretchen Dykstra, president of the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation, which is raising money and overseeing construction there, has some questions about Mayor Bloomberg's statement today that $500 million should be enough for the memorial. Here's her statement:

The foundation is delighted that conversations are happening between the Mayor and the Governors of New York and New Jersey and looks forward to further clarification of the statements made today.

We imagine her questions may include: Is the $500 million supposed to cover the underground Sept. 11 museum too? And the shrinking Snohetta building? And just what is the city, which so far has not pledged money to the memorial, planning to do to help? For that matter, what is Michael R. Bloomberg, one of the city's leading philanthropists, planning to do to help? (His name does not appear on the foundation's most recent list of major donors.)

-Matthew Schuerman

Back in the heady days of 2003, no one seemed to want to talk about how much the World Trade Center  read more »

The Post quotes two board members (anonymously) for the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation, ripping into their president, Gretchen Dykstra, for raising too little money.

"We're coming up on the fifth anniversary [of 9/11] and where's the fund-raising campaign? There's only one fifth anniversary."

Hey, not a bad idea.

-Matthew Schuerman