EVENT: Tonight's Downtown Third Thursday seems promising. Pete Hamill, author of Downtown: My Manhattan, will be on hand at 41 Broad Street, a "Classical Revival style building designed by Cross and Cross Architects completed in 1929 as the headquarters of the Lee-Higginson Bank. The original grand banking hall with its marble mosaic columns now houses the Broad Street Ballroom." The NY Times has more on the rarely seen space. 6pm // 41 Broad St //......

As the architect Rafael Viñoly sees it, the Freedom Tower is utterly superfluous. This was the concluding thought of his public presentation on January 18, this year's first Third Thursday lecture sponsored by the Downtown Alliance. Rounding out his half-stoic, half-bitter account of the past five years' WTC design proceedings, he plugged the new book, Think New York: A Ground Zero Diary, which chronicles these affairs from the point of view of the novel......