Ground Zero Rising

Abroad in New York

By FRANCIS MORRONE
September 6, 2007

In the nearly six years since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, ground zero has remained a hole in the ground that is a considerable embarrassment to New York City and to America.

But, alas, things appear to be taking shape. Construction proceeds on the site, timetables exist, and exciting designs by several of the world's most famous architects flash across computer screens in splendid animations. Those images come from the blandly named Lower Manhattan Construction Command Center (www.lowermanhattan.info), established by Governor Pataki and Mayor Bloomberg in 2004 to coordinate the construction activities that promise to bring new life to lower Manhattan, if ever the jackhammers stop.

Back in late 2001, some of us foretold the fiasco that rebuilding ground zero would become. Whatever was to be built had to be meaningful. But we'd spent the better part of the last century cheerily jettisoning symbolism that reeked of humanity's past, yet failing to replace it with anything but crude literalism and minimalism. Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. succeeded because what it commemorates had become so controversial that the memorial's silence seemed — certainly seems to the millions of visitors for whom the memorial is unquestionably wildly popular — appropriate. But what of ground zero? The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation chose a "Freedom Tower" design by the Bronx-bred, Berlin-based avant-garde architect Daniel Libeskind. Its principal symbolic gesture — retained in the much-revised version of the design by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill's David Childs — consists in its 1,776-foot height. Because modern design lacks the words for courage or grief, we resort to commemorating the terrorist attacks by reference to our breaking free from our staunchest ally. I suppose we've mitigated the unintentional insult by hiring Norman Foster and Richard Rogers, British "star-chitects," to design two of the four towers slated for the site. (The fourth tower we gave to the Japanese Fumihiko Maki.)

In addition to the four towers, the site shall hold a cultural center by the Norwegian architects Snøhetta, a memorial park by Michael Arad and Peter Walker and, most exciting of all, a transportation hub by the supremely gifted Spanish engineer Santiago Calatrava.

Meanwhile, on September 11, the Municipal Art Society, the City of New York, and others will again present the "Tribute in Light," the two great beams pointing to the sky from the site of the Twin Towers. In the elapsed years, these twin beams have yet to fail to move us. If possible, take a seat on the Promenade in Brooklyn Heights as dusk descends. If seeing the beams framed by the Statue of Liberty and the Brooklyn Bridge does not move you, nothing will.

Outside the World Trade Center "bathtub" itself, not everything is so shameful. Yes, there's the Deutsche Bank Building, a balefully ugly building to begin with that then stood years in a shroud. (Even dismantling it added yet another tragic chapter to its neighborhood's history, when a recent blaze there killed two firefighters). But the glass Winter Garden of the World Financial Center, across West Street from ground zero, shattered when the towers collapsed, came miraculously back to life within a year. Funny how good-looking we never knew it was before. And Larry Silverstein, unencumbered by the constraints on the main site, got the new 7 World Trade Center built efficiently and expeditiously, and David Childs's tower fairly gleams.

As for ground zero, we await a lot of high tech-style stuff — hard-edged, finely tooled, very shiny buildings by architects who know from purveying such fare. None of it looks to me to be outstanding, though I am sure it will all add up to a striking, if not inspiring, image. The exception, of course, may be the Calatrava train station.

From the viewing platform at the east end of the Winter Garden, one looks right down upon ground zero. Looking beyond it, one sees St. Paul's Chapel, until now and for the near future the de facto World Trade Center memorial, the out-of-town crowds filing through the handsome 1760s church in numbers that, six years on, still impress. One also sees three buildings, each of which once claimed the title of tallest office building in the world. Just beyond St. Paul's stands the twin-cupolaed Park Row Building, a gawky edifice that won its title in 1899. To the left of St. Paul's, at Barclay Street, rises the 1913 Woolworth Building, to the glorious lobby of which the building's post-Woolworth owners have unconscionably forbidden public entry since well before the terrorist attacks. To the right of One Liberty Plaza, 40 Wall Street rises to a green pyramidal top. In 1929, it ranked number one in height. A year later, however, its architect Craig Severance's former partner, William Van Alen, built the Chrysler Building on 42nd Street and stole the title.

The Twin Towers themselves briefly, before Chicago's Sears Tower went up, claimed the tallest-buildings title. Today, Taipei, Dubai, and Kuala Lumpur have the really tall buildings. New York has a big hole in the ground.