The proposition that new institutions devoted to freedom can flourish in Lower Manhattan after September 11, 2001, is a fundamental one for the editors and owners of this newspaper, whose parent company was founded in October of 2001 and which shortly thereafter rented a newsroom a few blocks from ground zero. So it is with sadness that we learned last evening that the International Freedom Center, a museum and center dedicated to freedom, has decided to fold its tent after Governor Pataki declared that the center “cannot be located on the Memorial quadrant” of the ground zero site. “We consider our work,” the center said in an unsigned statement last night, “to have been brought to an end.”

The Freedom Center was not like a privately funded newspaper, of course; the Freedom Center was to be built with private money but on land owned by the Port Authority and would have received at least some other government funding. As the Freedom Center’s board and staff have now learned following Senator Clinton and Governor Pataki’s decisions to undercut the project, reliance on government funding and approval isn’t always conducive to freedom.

Still, they could press ahead. There’s a surfeit of commercial real estate available elsewhere at the ground zero site – so much that Governor Pataki was in Communist China last week trying to rent space to the various state-owned companies. The Freedom Center could rent some of the space that Larry Silverstein has available and already built at Seven World Trade Center, and it could be off to a running start.

While the center was at times naive or clumsy in its execution or presentation, it was admirably idealistic in its goal – a goal shared by President Bush and by so many Americans who hung flags after the attack – of making September 11, 2001, about more than just death and destruction, but about renewed patriotism and commitment to the freedom attacked on that day. There were some wonderful people involved with unalloyed commitments to freedom and impeccable ideological credentials. We speak of, to name but two, Natan Sharansky, the Israeli politician and former Soviet refusenik who is on the center’s board, and Richard Pipes, the historian of the Soviet Union who served in the Reagan administration and who is a professor emeritus at Harvard, where he taught us that the Bolsheviks were not real revolutionaries but a gang of self-serving thugs.

With so many university faculties full of members of the blame-America-first crowd and with even public school history classes often pureed into a politically correct “social studies” pablum, as Diane Ravitch has documented, our own view is that museums will play an increasingly important educational role in the years ahead. We think of the wonderful site at Ellis Island that focuses on immigration and is maintained jointly by the National Park Service and the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation. Or the recent exhibit on Alexander Hamilton at the New-York Historical Society. Or the exhibit on slavery in New York that is about to open there. Or the excitement that attended the recent opening of the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.

We can understand the decision of the leaders of the Freedom Center not to go ahead. They have been subjected to withering attacks from some family members of September 11 victims; we share a number of Debra Burlingame’s concerns. Starting a new institution from scratch is a capital-intensive, time-consuming process, and there are always plenty of people out there rooting for one to fail. If the leaders of the International Freedom Center don’t think it is feasible to soldier on under these circumstances, they can at least know that New York is a city, and America is a country, with vast resources devoted to explaining and advancing freedom.

Both the Freedom Center’s critics and its backers can go forward with the hope that at least some of the worthy programs and activism and education that would have been carried out by the Freedom Center will go on under the banner of other institutions, whether Freedom House or the Hudson Institute or the New-York Historical Society or the New York Public Library or Ellis Island or Federal Hall National Memorial or the City University of New York or the Smithsonian Institution or the Cold War Museum or some other institution that is still yet a glimmer in the imagination of some entrepreneurial New Yorker.