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8

Six Months

Last week—the six-month anniversary of the World Trade Center attack—I walked down to see the towers of light on a foggy evening. The clouds lay low and the effect was startling and dramatic, occluding and revealing the powerful skyward beams shrouding downtown in an otherworldly glow. It was completely beautiful and a little frightening, a genuine sublimity that could be taken for what it was, inspiring a feeling quite different from the embarrassed awe that shamed earlier fascinations with the twisted, mesmerizing rubble at Ground Zero.

The site is now nearly clear, testament to the selfless energy of those laboring there round the clock. As workers reach the bottom of the pile, they are discovering the remains of comrades trapped on lower floors and in the lobby when the towers collapsed, an awful closure. The two shafts of light seemed completely right during the time of transition from removal and recovery to the consideration of what is to come. They were a memorial of both power and presence, and set a high standard for future projects. That this commemoration had come about at all demonstrates the power of the informal consensus that has, for better and worse, begun to determine what can and cannot happen at this place.

For the moment, we find ourselves in a curious interregnum downtown. While no plans have been finalized, there has been intense jockeying for position, both publicly and, especially, behind the scenes. While the newly formed LMDC will have planning responsibility, the actual power to build remains dispersed and uncertain. The site is owned by the Port Authority (controlled by the governors of New York and New Jersey). It sits within the City of New York, is laced with transport and utility infrastructure controlled by various agencies, and has been leased to Larry Silverstein—a New York real estate mogul with particularly dreary architectural sensibilities—and Westfield, an Australian shopping-mall-management company that was to have run the huge retail complex beneath the towers.

In addition to these legal stakeholders, the public has made its sentiments known through a welter of self-organized alliances that have been meeting regularly and working hard to promulgate ideas for reconstruction. One of the most broad-based of these coalitions is New York New Visions, which recently released a preliminary report that includes a variety of sensible findings, most crucially a call to look beyond the immediate site of the towers and consider the planning of downtown Manhattan as a whole. The report recognizes a historic opportunity to reattach Battery Park City to the island from which it has long been isolated, to increase pedestrian links, to unify and augment a series of transit lines that converge but don’t quite meet at the site, to intensify the mix of uses in the area, and a number of other unassailable ideas. And they are not alone; the outpouring of proposals and opinions has been bracing. At no time in my memory can I recall so many people discussing questions of planning so fervently.

As I write this, the LMDC has just released its first statement of principles for the “Future of Lower Manhattan,” and its board—appointed during the Giuliani administration—has been expanded to include four directors chosen by Mayor Bloomberg. The mayor has sent out a clear message about diversity through these appointments, by placing Asian-, African-, and Hispanic-Americans (among them two women) on a board hitherto dominated by white, male plutocrats.

The new principles have been whipped into shape by Alex Garvin, recently appointed the LMDC’s vice president for planning. New York City planning commissioner, professor at the Yale School of Architecture, and co-author of the ingenious and politically adroit proposal for the 2012 Olympics, Garvin has articulated a framework that is both wise and canny. Clearly Garvin has been listening carefully, and his recommendations parallel those emerging from the broader community of interests. The importance of the memorial is foregrounded, infrastructure and transportation are emphasized, mixed use is invoked, pedestrianism encouraged, open space celebrated, and environmentalism tithed.

The principles are sound and should attract wide support, but they skirt the more controversial aspects of any plan that must eventually emerge. The two major issues concern who decides the fate of the site and what actually is to be done at Ground Zero. While the report, and the new LMDC appointments, go a long way toward reassuring the public that decisions will not be reached behind closed doors, Garvin avoids taking a definitive position on the future of the site itself, listing, but not locating, uses and calling for considerable work out of sight underground. At this stage, however, the reticence is appropriate: there is still plenty of time to get it right.

The closest the principles come to a translatable declaration of design intent is in their call for the restoration of “all or a portion of” the street grid obliterated by the construction of the World Trade Center. But the plan specifically mentions only two streets that cross the site—Greenwich Street, running north/south, and Fulton Street, running east/west—not the twelve blocks that originally stood there. Of course, an open space or memorial scheme for the site (or for that matter a commercial, mixed-use development) could establish connections across it without restoring the grid as such. The question therefore remains whether there will be a city block scheme for the site—defining a series of clear development parcels—or some other approach.

Today, the day after the release of the LMDC’s principles, lease-holder Silverstein revealed his own plans for the first site to be put into play, that of the former 7 WTC (which collapsed after the Twin Towers with, miraculously, no loss of life). The 7 WTC site is pivotal both because it holds an electric substation that must be replaced expeditiously and because the destroyed building had eliminated Greenwich Street, which virtually everyone now agrees should be unblocked. In the diagram of the scheme just published by Silverstein’s architect, David Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), the missing street block has been restored, with the result that the footprint of the new building is considerably smaller than that of the original. Although the new tower will be higher than its forty-story predecessor, there is nonetheless a net reduction of 300,000 square feet of space.

This begs the question of what will be done with the leftover development rights, and rumors are flying that Silverstein is trying to renegotiate the terms of his lease with the Port Authority to reflect the diminished carrying capacity of the site. It has also been suggested that this may simply be the beginning of a much more protracted negotiation, to escape any potential financial liability from the consequences of the “official” plan. Indeed, rumors are also circulating that SOM is preparing studies for the entire World Trade Center site on Silverstein’s behalf as part of his strategic negotiation for a new lease.

SOM has been the ubiquitous mover downtown. Marilyn Taylor, chairman of the firm, has emerged as a key player in the New York New Visions report, and is also leading a planning study of lower Manhattan’s east side funded by Carl Weisbrod’s Downtown Alliance, while Childs is designing 7 WTC and doing planning studies for Silverstein. Am I overreacting to the hydra of an interlocking architect/developer directorate and the fact that all the commissions doled out thus far have gone to one firm? There is a huge potential conflict between business and citizenship here, and SOM needs to lay its cards on the table in terms of its own desires and interests in Ground Zero.

The real wild card in all of this, though, is the memorial. In recent weeks the idea that the entire site be dedicated to such a memorial seems to have quietly slipped off the table. Most vocal among the supporters of such a plan have been the tragedy’s bereaved survivors, although this is not a uniform position among them. This community has been disappointed at being excluded from representation on the LMDC and having only been offered a role on the memorial subcommittee. Advocates (myself included) for leaving most of this sacral site open as a civic memorial space seem to be increasingly marginalized. I get the impression that the “cooler heads” in power regard any such scheme as the victory of sentiment over reason (i.e. money) and that the dispassionate, “rational” position is for a mix of economic, cultural, and memorial activities on the site.

2002