Can the World Trade Center Sphere Ever Return Home?
It’s the 22-and-a-half-ton question to which no one seems to have an answer.
Of all the artifacts recovered from the wreckage of the former World Trade Center, Fritz Koenig’s bronze sculpture Sphere perhaps best symbolized the city’s resiliency following the Sept. 11 attacks. It had stood for 30 years in the World Trade Center plaza between the two towers, and was buried beneath them on Sept. 11 only to emerge, damaged but mostly intact.
How can it be, then, that such a symbol remains absent from plans for the new World Trade Center?
Not one group among those involved in the development of the site—Port Authority, the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, or Silverstein Properties—has yet expressed a desire to bring the 45,000-pound sculpture back to the site.
After its rescue—and to great fanfare—the sphere was installed near the northeast corner of Battery Park as a temporary memorial. It was thought that someday the sphere would leave the park for a rebuilt World Trade Center. Last month, Conservancy director Warrie Price said that day is coming.
“[The Sphere’s] real story is not a Battery Park story; it’s a World Trade Center story,” Price said at a recent Community Board 1 meeting. “To really interpret it properly, it has to have a place of honor there.”
The Conservancy is preparing for the final phases of its renovation of Battery Park, work that includes new landscaping in the section of the park in which the sphere is located. Price would not say when the sculpture would need to be removed, but said most of the renovation would be completed by the end of 2011.
In April, Port Authority officials told Community Board 1’s World Trade Center Redevelopment Committee that, structurally, the sphere could be installed close to where it originally stood, between what are to be the two reflecting pools marking the footprints of the Twin Towers. Last month, though, the agency was wary of committing itself to bringing the sphere back to the site.
“We’re discussing it, but no final decisions have been made on whether or not we will move [the sphere] back to the World Trade Center site,” said Port Authority spokesman Steve Coleman. “There are areas on the site other than the Memorial tract where the sphere could be located, assuming it were to be returned to the site, but since these internal discussions are still very preliminary, I can’t talk about specific locations.”
Joe Daniels, president of the National September 11 Memorial & Museum Foundation, said museum staff are currently studying the sphere, but only to determine what it would take to move and care for the sculpture.
“Before any move of the sphere may be considered, conservators are examining it to determine its preservation requirement,” Daniels said in an Email. A spokeswoman for the museum foundation said she “did not want to speak hypothetically” when asked if the foundation would be willing to put sphere either in the museum or somewhere on the 8-acre memorial plaza, if it were structurally possible. She also declined to say whether the foundation believes the sphere should be brought back to the World Trade Center site at all, regardless of whose property it becomes.
Silverstein Properties, which is responsible for the construction of three mammoth office towers on the eastern half of the site, also declined to comment on the Sphere.
“The time is ripe to find a permanent home for Koenig’s Sphere,” said Catherine McVay Hughes, who chair’s CB1’s World Trade Center Redevelopment Committee. “Its temporary home is a kind of exile, nearby but clearly outside the envelope of memory and honor and renewal that is the future Trade Center.”
Michael Burke, who lost his brother, firefighter William F. Burke, Jr. on 9/11, said he thought it was "a shame" that sphere seemed to have been forgotten in the planning of the new World Trade Center.
"I think everybody wants that sphere to come back," Burke said. "People will stand on that site and see nothing that reminds us of what happened there."
By Matt Dunning