Amy Sultan has lived on Warren Street in Tribeca since 1983. She and her husband and son were displaced from their apartment for 12 weeks following the Sept. 11 attacks.

Amy Sultan stared at the silvery model of the “kissing” twinned towers proposed by Lord Norman Foster to be the tallest buildings in the world. Words that spoke of excess kept rolling from her lips.

“It’s too big. It’s too big. Too much, too big…”

As far as this longtime Warren Street resident was concerned, Foster’s vision was just one of several soaring architectural structures that were too much and too big. She had considered the World Trade Center towers “hideous”—nice from a distance but cold and dark for those who lived nearby—and it seemed that many of the designs she was seeing in the Winter Garden made the same mistake. It bothered her that she could not judge the impact of the buildings on her neighborhood.

“It’s hard to know how much unshadowed, unwindtunneled, comfortable, beautiful, real outdoor space there is for real people,” she said.

Strolling toward the Peterson/Littenberg display, with its two 1,400-foot towers and walled garden, Sultan mused on the idea of putting something more like a Shaker village on the site. “Tis a gift to be simple…” she began to sing.

A man named Frank Angelicola, from Wolcott, Conn., who said he had come downtown to pay his respects at the site as well as to look at the plans, volunteered his own opinion.

“I like the three towers, personally,” he said, referring to the “Sky Park” plan by the architect team called THINK. “Saw it in the paper. Last one is the biggest—2100 feet.”

“You’d want to work there?” Sultan asked.

“No one’s going to want to insure them anyhow,” he said. That’s the big problem. As an American I want to be defiant, and make them bigger, too.”

“Do you think as an American you have to be bigger?” she rejoined.

“Just to show them that they’re not going to deter us.”

“Let me tell you, it’s a guy thing,” Sultan said, smiling. “Think about it.”

Sultan was drawn to two designs.

She called the Daniel Libeskind plan a “gesture of beauty and hope,” with its soaring sheath-like structure thrusting a vertical garden into the sky. Looking seven stories down into the open “bathtub” from a cantilevered, glass-walled museum would be “extremely moving,” she said. “It seems to try to honor what was here.”

Richard Meier’s crosshatch of towers and bridges above a memorial square surprised her because she didn’t think at first that she’d like it.

“I like the way it frames the sky, and isn’t completely vertical,” she said. “It doesn’t look like any other city.”

For the most part, however, Sultan was not impressed with what she saw. Skidmore, Owings and Merrill’s nine towers rising above Ground Zero made her heart heavy. And the latticework twin towers of THINK looked “like something the Jetsons would land in,” though she liked the impact of its frame on the skyline. United Architects’ five sloping buildings belonged in Chicago.

As she reached the end of her tour, Sultan reflected on the sadness behind the displays that are drawing visitors by the thousands. She recalled that on the morning of Sept. 11, her son Sam walked to P.S. 234 by himself for the first time. And that after seeing falling bodies, he asked why the workers had not been given parachutes.

“Life changed in this fundamental way,” she said. “There’s no way on earth I can ever say to my child, don’t worry, it can’t happen here.

“Maybe not enough time has passed for those of us who really experienced this in a close way,” she added. “Maybe we’re not the best to judge.”

Charles Wolf, a Greenwich Village resident, lost his wife Katherine on Sept. 11. He serves on an advisory council of the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. and is the founder of Fixthefund.org, a web site that advocates on behalf of victims compensation issues. Until he came to look at the plans last month,

Until he came to look at the plans last month, Charles Wolf had not been to the Winter Garden since the afternoon of Sept. 6, 2001, when he met his wife Katherine for lunch. It was only her second week of work at Marsh & McLennan, in Tower One.

“I can just see her walking across the bridge. I can remember what she was wearing.”

Remembering is what should come first in the redevelopment process, Wolf believes. He said the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. made a mistake when it chose to first focus on designing the site.

“How can you decide on the land use plan without knowing how you’re going to treat the memorial?” he said.

Nevertheless, Wolf called the plans at the Winter Garden “great starting points for thinking and opening the mind and expanding creativity.”

At the Libeskind exhibit, he said he liked the “shaft of light” idea—placing the buildings so that shadows would be absent on the site on Sept. 11, at the times the planes struck. But the deep void of the open slurry walls—the entire pit kept open—left him cold. Cemeteries are settings of beauty, he said.

“If this is where I’m going to come to pay tribute to my wife, I’m not sure I’d want to be down underground. It’s dark.”

In the Peterson Littenberg plan, the twin towers’ footprints are contained within a public garden. On one is a pool, on the other an amphitheater. Wolf did not object to the use of the footprints. He compared them to another sacred place, the Church of St. John the Divine, where concerts and even high-wire acts take place.

But in the Peterson Littenberg plan, Wolf saw the meaning of those footprints somehow being lost. “You get a busload of kids from Massachusetts, they’re not going to get it at all. There’s nothing there to tell you that something happened here.”

Wolf moved on to Skidmore, Owings and Merrill’s “vertical city” of nine towers and likened it to “sea anemone on the ocean floor.”

“Let’s forget this,” he said, “they’re giving people who don’t want tall buildings an option with density.”

Richard Meier’s plan shows the twin towers’ shadows represented by a grove of trees and a floating garden on the Hudson. Wolf called the idea “brilliant,” but on further thought decided it could only be appreciated from the air, or looking down at an architectural model, and he dismissed it.

High in the air is where Wolf wants to see a memorial, a place of contemplation separate from the public space. “That’s where the people died,” he said. He liked the United Architects plan, which includes a “sky memorial” in one of five proposed buildings, for looking down onto the footprints.

Wolf finished looking at the exhibits and sat down beneath a Winter Garden palm tree. He talked about the struggle of getting through the holidays, and putting his personal life back together.

But looking at the rebuilding plans, he said, was therapeutic for him and other family members who want to “move on.”

“I don’t know what’s going to be in my personal life,” he said. “But at least we’re reconstructing the physical life here—something we can look at. And that’s good."

Joe Wightman has owned Mail Boxes, Etc., on Greenwich Street below Chambers, for 10 years. His shop was closed for seven weeks following the attack. During much of that time he operated in a vacant storefront on Chambers Street.

Joe Wightman was getting angrier by the minute.

Moving past United Architects’ five futuristic buildings (“too tall, too fat”), he came to the Peterson Littenberg proposal. There, he glared at the amphitheater, with seating for 2,970—the number of victims in the tragedy.

“If there’s a need for a stadium, put in a stadium. But just to put in a stadium with the same number of seats as the number of people who died is almost an insult to those people. Make it an even 3,000.”

Skidmore, Owings and Merrill’s grouping of nine buildings were “claustrophobic.” They would obliterate the skyline, Wightman said. And how will they handle all the people who will be working there? Wightman needed information that wasn’t there.

“I want to see them address issues that they didn’t when the trade center was designed,” he said. “How many people are going to be working here, entertained, moved by transportation. I don’t see that. I’m seeing models.”

Now he was at Richard Meier’s model, the criss-cross structure with the twin towers’ “shadows” leading into the water. Wightman slapped his cheek and shook his head in disbelief. “What do the shadows of the original towers have to do with anything?” he declared. “A lot of this is schmaltz.”

He looked at the THINK team’s giant enclosed plaza and wondered why it couldn’t be open. And it bothered him that the architects were calling it a “Gateway to the City.”

“We don’t need a gateway: we’ve got the George Washington Bridge, the Holland Tunnel, the Lincoln Tunnel. It makes no sense. It’s architecture by buzzwords.”

Then there was THINK’s World Cultural Center, twin towers of wire-like structures meant to contain arts institutions in the air.

“A cultural center 50 stories high? Why do you need to put a huge theater that high up? I don’t get it.”

Wightman said his business is down abot 20 percent since Sept. 11, and he welcomes the rejuvenation and rebuilding of Downtown. “But not at the expense of good architecture,” he added. “I’m not that desperate.”

Wightman did find something he liked in the Think team’s Sky Park, with its wide open plaza surrounded by separate buildings and without, as he put it, “bridges and bellies and balloons” like the others. He said he was beginning to come up with his own criteria for a good plan: a site easily accessible from all directions, with one easy-to-reach memorial; public space at ground level. But for good architecture, he said, they need to start searching elsewhere.

“Look at the World Financial Center,” Wightman said, gesturing toward the Winter Garden’s glass roof. “They did a nice job. Call that guy up.”

Until Sept. 11, Dave Stanke, his wife and their four children lived opposite the World Trade Center at 114 Liberty Street. Now living in Battery Park City, the family has yet to return to its apartment because of an insurance dispute. Stanke is the president of the community group BPC United.

“On a day like this the World Trade Center would disappear into the clouds,” Dave Stanke said as he paused on the Winter Garden’s marble steps.

It was a drizzly Friday morning, the first day for public viewing of the architects’ plans, and Stanke was pleased to see buildings proposed that would reach as high or higher into the clouds.

But as a Liberty Street resident whose apartment faced the towers from across the street, Stanke mostly missed the life that brought to his neighborhood. The trade center had been like a personal playground for his family. After office hours and on weekends it was right there for shopping or taking a walk.

“I felt like we were part of the trade center more than anything,” he said. Now, he asks, “What kind of front yard is it going to be? Is it going to be a place where you can go and do things and have a good time?”

Stanke hoped he would find in the plans a “balanced” site, one that would integrate office buildings, open space and a memorial with vibrant commercial street life. “Making it right” for those who live nearby is what will make the area grow as a residential community, he said.

He liked Norman Foster’s 1,764- foot towers, with its facade of triangles and the way it would angle away from his front window, rather than facing it flatly. He liked being able to see, from certain angles, the gardens and the park between the buildings. “This one doesn’t have anything objectionable,” he said.

Not so for others. Stanke looked at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill’s dense cluster of towers and envisioned darkened streets below. “It’s not very friendly and inviting,” he said. “Everything has to be indoors.” And he dismissed the 16 acres of “sky gardens” that the architects propose for the upper floors of the buildings. “Nobody takes elevators up there as part of their daily lives.”

Stanke walked to the next exhibit, what he and others are calling the “tic tac toe” buildings designed by Richard Meier. He couldn’t figure it out, but presumed it was inspired by the skin of the towers that was left standing after the collapse. What he liked, however, was the way the footprints of the two towers extended symbolically onto platforms in the Hudson, replicating the shadows that the buildings cast on Sept. 11.

“It is one step removed from the horror and creates places for people to walk,” he said.

As a resident who lives near the site, Stanke feels strongly that the memorial should not be a “blatant” reminder of that horror. And the sinking of the footprints in some of the plans, he said, “come too close to preserving the murder scene.”

“I want to go back to [remembering Sept. 11] when I choose to do it,” he said. “I don’t want to have it in my face. And it will be in all of our faces if it is too stark a reminder.”

One of the starkest reminders is contained in the Daniel Libeskind plan, in which the slurry walls of the entire “bathtub” remain exposed. Stanke had just begun to criticize the idea when, standing nearby, Livia Jackson, from Grand Street, began to sing its praises. She said she had an emotional need to touch Manhattan bedrock as a way to mourn and “reconnect to earth energy.”

“For a sorrowful place, it’s good to be close to the earth,” she said. “Even if it’s just a shaft where you can go down. It’s like a mythic journey.”

Stanke listened respectfully.

“I like the idea of going up to the sky better,” he replied