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Building up is hard to do
By Melissa Radler
In mid-August, nearly one year after the World Trade Center was destroyed in the September 11 terrorist attacks, architects and landscape designers as well as families of the 2,819 victims and ordinary New Yorkers were invited to a series of public hearings by the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation to share their visions of rebuilding at Ground Zero.
The LMDC was established last year by then-mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Governor George Pataki to head the rebuilding effort and revitalize the city's downtown area after one million square meters of office space, 55,000 square meters of retail space and a 40,000 square meters hotel were destroyed in the attack and more than 100,000 jobs were lost within the three months following the attacks.
In July, the LMDC and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the 6.5.-hectare site, unveiled six rebuilding proposals so lacking in creative vision that they prompted a near-universal outcry from the press, public and design professionals alike. The August hearings were a sign that the rebuilding effort - an architecturally and emotionally mammoth task that will be judged by the civilized world for generations to come - had, not surprisingly, gone awry.
After the six proposals were rejected, the LMDC launched an international design competition, announced in newspapers around the world in 20 languages. It hopes to start the rebuilding in September 2003, the second anniversary of the attack.
It also launched a listening tour of New York's five boroughs and New Jersey, and on August 20, top officials from the LMDC filed into a sparsely filled Brooklyn auditorium and sat quietly as audience members took turns outlining disparate visions of a future downtown that included stately and small towers, memorial gardens and reflective pools, underpasses, overpasses, outdoor markets and commercial-free zones.
"We're quickly discovering the science of worldwide public input," says an LMDC spokesman, Matthew Higgins.
The officials declined to answer the audience's questions, noting that not a single concrete decision on the rebuilding process had yet been made.
They listened as participants pitched ideas for the new Ground Zero that went from realistic to wacky, and while the officials, including LMDC president Louis Tomson and a host of VPs, pledged to take all suggestions into consideration, it remained unclear just how outlandish proposals such as imposing Egyptian pyramids on Lower Manhattan, or leaving the top half of the world's tallest buildings empty, would actually be implemented.
A woman named Gail started off the night.
"I saw the World Trade Center come down, and I think all the programs that have come forward are spectacularly failing in imagination," she says.
Like most of the audience, and unlike the planners, Gail had the details for the new World Trade Center mapped out. She suggested a garden area, cloistered archways, public squares and a place to meditate and watch falling water. Helene, an anthropologist, called on the LMDC to build what she calls an interactive memorial, where New Yorkers could reflect, perform, leave poetry and prayers, and perhaps even help build from scratch.
John from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, says that the 110-story Twin Towers should be rebuilt with an American flag draped or painted over the top 60 floors in lieu of tenants, and he recommended lining the walls of the memorial with glossies and bios of the victims.
Another audience member, a young girl named Lauren, called on the builders to emulate the ancient Egyptians and build pyramids.
"The pyramids were gateways to heaven for the Pharaohs. I think this would be right for the people who died there, that they would go straight to heaven."
Some even came with professional-looking design plans. An elderly woman named Bertha wearing a red, white and blue-striped shirt handed out intricate sketches featuring an Eiffel Tower-type reincarnation of the Twin Towers, complete with stairwells on the sides for people to walk up and down. At night, she says, the city should illuminate the towers, as it had illuminated 3.2 km.-long beams of light for 30 nights this past spring in a tribute to the fallen buildings, "so that New Yorkers will remember and have pride."
The audience erupted into applause, and repeated itself every time someone recommended rebuilding the towers to their former glory.
The LMDC's six plans had set out to revitalize all the commercial, retail and residential spaces in downtown Manhattan and included a transportation hub under a memorial and public space on the trade-center site and surrounding land.
The plans were designed by the architecture firm Beyer Blinder Belle, and all featured a blank memorial area sandwiched between four to six densely packed towers, all between 32 and 85 stories high. Though lacking any detail, the buildings appeared to resemble the boxy, 1960s urban-jungle type of architecture that people had once derided the Twin Towers for being. Just one plan, the "memorial promenade," was met with any positive feedback, winning praise for having a long, grassy boulevard connecting the trade-center site to a park several blocks south, lined with trees to remember the 2,819 victims of the attacks.
"The rejection of the planning concepts was a rejection of what was there before," says Rick Bell, executive director of the American Institute of Architects New York chapter, and one of the founders of New York New Visions, a coalition of 20 architecture, planning and design groups that advises the LMDC on the rebuilding process.
"This shouldn't be just about what fits into a 16-acre box. From the tragedy, something truly significant and better than before can come," says Bell.
The New York City Council also criticized the six designs, and its Committee on Lower Manhattan Development noted in an August report that "New York and the nation deserve far better than these unimaginative proposals."
The council, whose contribution to the rebuilding suggestion box was an open market where Speaker Gifford Miller told reporters he'd buy bananas at lunchtime, urged the site designers to concentrate on the memorial and public spaces before rebuilding what collapsed.
"Planning should begin with a vision of what the memorial and public spaces will be like, such as the amount of space required, complementary uses and types of activities people will be engaged in," the committee wrote.
The LMDC noted that certain rebuilding parameters that were mandated by agencies with legal control over the site, particularly the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, had set the tone of the designs.
As the owner of the site, the Port Authority has a financial interest in restoring every single square meter of commercial space - in 2001, the agency was expected to earn $120 million in rent from office, hotel and retail space located in the trade center. But with many companies relocated in Brooklyn and New Jersey since the attack, it is doubtful that Lower Manhattan, which has an estimated 10 percent to 20% commercial vacancy rate, can quickly absorb a vast amount of new space.
SINCE the design plans' release, the Port Authority has indicated it might relax its rebuilding requirements.
"Everyone's top priority is the creation of a fitting memorial at the WTC site," says a spokesman for the Port Authority, Greg Trevor. The agency lost 75 employees on September 11, including its executive director, Neil Levin and 37 police officers.
"In terms of final composition, our position is that we are listening. We are committed to remaining as flexible as possible on the outcomes," says Trevor.
Larry Silverstein, a New York developer who negotiated a $3.2 billion, 99-year lease on the site two months before its destruction, soon after the attacks called for the Twin Towers to be rebuilt in their entirety.
That call has been complicated by his demands that his insurers - who wrote a $3.5 billion policy to be paid "per occurrence" of a catastrophe at the site - will pay out $7 billion on the grounds that the two airplane crashes constituted two catastrophes. While Silverstein put the September 11-related losses at $8.7 billion, the insurers recently offered him just $1.8 billion, meaning billions less for the rebuilding effort. In all, damage to New York City's economy was estimated at between $80-100 billion.
Earlier this month, the Bloomberg administration followed suit with another whammy - a proposed land-swap that would give the Port Authority control of the land beneath two city-owned airports in return for the 6.5 hectares under the trade center. Silverstein hasn't commented publicly on the proposal.
"This is where the legal realities are right now. The land is encumbered by leases," says Higgins. The LMDC, he added, sees the proposals as "a starting point for discussions" rather than an end product.
INDEED, the plans' unveiling prompted increased public debate on the rebuilding effort, which soon generated some consensus.
First, all interested parties agreed on the need to rebuild a "distinctive skyline" with revitalized commercial, retail and residential space, a recognition that the "footprints," or areas where the towers once stood, should be left free from commercial development in order to show respect for the 1,207 bodies that were recovered or identified from the wreckage and the 1,612 people whose remains were never found.
Beyond that, it is also generally agreed that there should be public open spaces, that a street grid should be restored so as to integrate walking or driving access to the site, and that a central transit center and cultural institutions should be included in the rebuilt area.
Public support for rebuilding the towers at their previous height has diminished as the reality of working on a floor located 460 meters in the air - a tough sell even in pre-September 11 times due to inconvenience of ascending 110 stories and memories of the 1993 attack - has set in.
In addition, the desire to prove to the terrorists that they failed to destroy New York by replicating what was there before, has waned as talk of building something better, though not necessarily bigger, than the first World Trade Center has taken hold.
When the plans were unveiled, some family members of the victims complained that too much emphasis had been placed on restoring the center's commercial value at the expense of remembering the dead, and although Giuliani's surprise call in late August to preserve the entire site as a memorial to the victims was roundly criticized as unrealistic, the general public and City Council lobbied successfully to have the memorial placed at the figurative center of the rebuilding process.
"I was not pleased with the designs," says Jennie Farrell, whose 26-year-old brother, James, an electrician, was killed in the attack. "I don't think all the revitalizing in downtown Manhattan has to take place on those 16 acres. All the office space, all the commercial rebuilding has to reflect the memorial.
"When people come a thousand years from now, what do we want people to see? It has to be a historical account of what took place that day. This was a horrific attack on America," she says.
In an effort to establish memorial precedents, the LMDC and Port Authority researched the architectural foundations of eight memorials, among them the preserved hulk of the USS Arizona, which commemorates Pearl Harbor's 1,177 dead, the Oklahoma City National Memorial, which features 168 symbolic chairs for each victim of the 1995 blast, and a symbolic gate representing the moments before and after the attack, and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington that features a sculptural cut into the ground and lists the names of all the 57,000 killed in action and missing.
"That's really a problem," says Bell, the head of the architects' association, "how the memorial is going to relate to the rest of what's there."
"The memorial site needs to be designed or framed so that it is a place that provides solace for the people who lost their families, and for everyone across the country," says Katherine Mathews, a landscape architect and member of the New York New Visions master-plan task force.
"The designers I've been involved with think that the design of the memorial should really be done concurrently with the overall plan. We're all frustrated, because we haven't seen that happening yet," he says.
Monica Iken, a spokeswoman for a nine-member coalition of families who lost their loved ones on September 11, says that the architects should start the design process over from scratch and put aside deadlines.
Iken is cautioning the LMDC against rushing the rebuilding process.
"We're still grieving, we're still trying to understand the process that's involved in interpreting the space. We can't rush this, because it's the most important committee of the 21st century," she says.
Iken, whose husband, Michael, worked on the 84th floor of the south tower and was killed when the second plane hit, suggested the memorial constitute an open space, a museum and a children's monument.
"The issue right now is not really the physical aspects, but trying to define quality and quantity of that space," she says.
Sally Regenhard, mother of firefighter Christopher Regenhard, a 28-year-old former marine who was killed on September 11 while trying to rescue people, founded the Skyscraper Safety Campaign, which is calling for a federal investigation into the towers' collapse, including the buildings' design, evacuation procedures and fire-safety methods, and the lack of security cooperation between emergency services at the time of the attack.
Regenhard, and the City Council in its report, have noted that the Port Authority didn't abide by certain New York City fire codes, and she's also pressing to reform the existing fire codes to make buildings safer.
On the rebuilding effort, Regenhard calls for a memorial surrounded by a park area, with no building on the footprints and the area of a Marriott hotel that once stood there, and a small amount of commercial redevelopment. A memorial should have an income stream so that its upkeep can be maintained, she says. But before that goes ahead, she wants someone to be held accountable for the buildings' collapse.
"Even though those evil, demonic barbarians sent the planes in to hit the buildings, they shouldn't have collapsed. I have to fight everyone who has done the wrong thing and won't admit it. I want accountability and responsibility. I want City Council hearings and a public inquiry," she says.
And so, a year after the World Trade Center was destroyed and New Yorkers vowed to rebuild it, it remains to be seen what the new World Trade Center site will look like and whether the interests of the families of the victims, the owners and leaseholders of the site, city officials or ordinary New Yorkers who witnessed the attack and felt its aftermath will be taken into account in the rebuilding process. And whether a combination of their preferences will emerge, or whether, after all the public hearings, committee meetings and task forces, anyone will be satisfied in the end.
"I think that everyone has the best intentions. It's just a matter of making it happen," says Mathews, the landscape architect. "Someone needs to step up to the plate and say, it must be happening now, it must start tomorrow."
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