There Are Other Issues Besides a Memorial

We’re all out there, scrambling to be heard, struggling to influence what will be built on the World Trade Center site. There are meetings, focus groups, conferences. I’ve been to a few of them, and I have come away with one clear opinion.

The memorial is the Trojan Horse. As soon as talk steers that way, any real input on the project is lost.
The land is owned by the Port Authority. If I were one of them, I would encourage as much attention to the memorial as possible. That way, no groundswell of public outrage could derail whatever I wanted to do with the site.

A memorial is important, and in my next column I will outline my own ideas. What is imperative right now, however, is the host of other issues regarding what will replace the most mammoth building project in history.
How tall will the next buildings be? Will there be a return to the street grid, or will it remain a megablock?
Will hazardous materials—asbestos, mercury, PCBs—be used in the new construction as they were in the old, or will the buildings be "green"—environmentally savvy?

Will the subsurface infrastructure—transit, water, electrical, and communications—remain vulnerable to collapse from above?

What will occupy the buildings—will they include community space?

Will West Street be made below-grade so that the new project can connect directly with Battery Park City and the river?

Will there be open space, parks, active recreation?

Will the transportation hub include the long-awaited rail-freight option, to speed movement of goods without clogging our streets?

The largest of the public discussions on rebuilding the WTC site was an all-day affair that brought together some 600 people. Each participant was given an electronic voting device.

At the morning session, the organizers listed eight rebuilding issues, asking the audience to judge which were most important. Most of the above were not on the list. The highest any issue received was 22 percent, this for a "vibrant, 24-hour mixed use community." Since this is something the Port Authority is guaranteed to want also, it was a wasted vote.

One of the most important real issues, the street grid, got only 5 percent. The memorial got 16 percent, and it was not even part of the morning agenda. The entire afternoon session was dedicated to discussing it.

If I were the Port Authority observer, I’m grinning ear to ear. The field is splintered. I’m free to ignore it all.

Recommendations by the public have to be placed in context. The Port Authority is exempted from building codes, immune to the fail-safes demanded of every other developer. The authority can build what it wants and answer to no one.

It is certain that the authority will insist on building close to the 13.4 million square feet of office space that once stood on that plot. To give an idea how large this is, if built to a uniform height on 100 percent of the property, a building this size would rise nearly 20 stories.

That square footage places strong limits on which public arguments will be heard seriously by the builder. If you want nothing higher than 30 stories, for instance, don’t ask for a huge park. And a return to the street grid could subtract as much as five acres, pushing up building heights elsewhere.

Go ahead, ask for everything. They will laugh and ignore you.

Whatever is built, a clear lesson of 9/11 is that the subsurface transit hub and infrastructure should be "hardened" against the collapse of what is above it.

By my own calculations, the collapse of a single tower had the impact of approximately 15 million tons, or about 25 thousand tons per square foot. No wonder the many levels underground were completely crushed by their fall.

By comparison, when World Trade Seven fell (47 stories) the effect at the bottom was (again, my estimates) on the order of one-twentieth the pulverizing effect of a twin tower.

It is likely that nothing below ground can be made safe from the collapse of too large a tower. This argues that huge monoliths should not be recreated on the site.

This issue did not come to the attention of the 600-person discussion group, which instead spent two hours on the memorial.

I hope smaller buildings and hardened infrastructure are already in the thinking of the Port Authority. If they are left to memorial-dominated town meetings, it all could happen again.