Planning for Retail at the World Trade Center Site by Barry Owens Once the World Trade Center memorial is built, the next highest priority for the site is retail-about 1 million square feet of it-according to a retail study presented to Community Board 1 on Nov. 8. "Often what happens is all the other uses get planned and the retail just gets shoehorned in. This should not be an afterthought," said Mary Beth Corrigan of the Urban Land Institute, a Washington, D.C-based nonprofit real estate research and education organization that conducted the draft study, which is expected to be released next month in its final form. The report, commissioned by Friends of Community Board 1, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. and the Downtown Alliance, is the product of a "summit" of experts in real estate, land use planning, retail, and urban development who gathered in October to tour the site and offer their ideas for the development of stores and commerce. It lays out a broad template, but few specifics, for planners to consider as they set out to rebuild the site and the neighborhood around it. "You can't take the site and surrounding blocks and just chop them up into different types of retail. The area needs to have a flow," said Corrigan. In that flow, she said, there should be a mix of boutiques, large "destination type" retailers, perhaps a movie theater and definitely a supermarket. "Let's not forget about tailors, shoe repair and laundry places. We'll still need those," cautioned board member Catherine McVay Hughes. "I don't think we want only big retail." The report estimates the World Trade Center site would be home to 250,000, requiring enough retail space to accommodate them, along with the needs of workers in the 17,500 firms in Lower Manhattan and the 13,700 tourists expected to visit the site each day. The report's list of viable retail options for the site's storefront and concourse levels reads like the Yellow Pages: Restaurants, books, music, electronics, jewelry, apparel, department stores, and museums. "What we're trying to do is create an alternative to traveling up to midtown to get this stuff," Corrigan said. While Corrigan suggested that a "unified" development group should oversee the project for continuity sake, the shopping district should not resemble a mall. "This should be the antithesis of the mall," she said. As the rebuilding of Lower Manhattan moves forward, said Corrigan, at least 300,000 square feet of ground level retail space should be included in the first phase of construction at the site, a "champion" for retail should be selected to push the project, and there should be further consideration of "depressing'" West Street to better integrate Battery Park City into the market place. The proposal to bury a portion of West Street is a controversial one, opposed by an organized group of Battery Park City residents. These are "just suggestions," she told the board.