Carl Glassman / Tribeca Trib

The Winter Garden stairs are sometimes turned into seating for audiences and for performances. Here, a string trio plays on the stairs earlier this year.

Members of Community Board 1 hope they can dissuade Brookfield Properties from its apparent plans to knock down the grand marble staircase in the World Financial Center’s Winter Garden. Representatives of Brookfield, owner of the World Financial Center, agreed to meet with the board’s Battery Park City Committee on Sept. 7.

“[Brookfield] knows how important that Winter Garden staircase is to our community, and the symbolism it has for us,” said Julie Menin, the board’s chairwoman.

According to documents obtained by the Trib, the demolition would be done primarily to accommodate a pedestrian tunnel that will connect the World Trade Center transportation hub to the World Financial Center. Brookfield intends to overhaul much of the retail space inside the Winter Garden where it meets the tunnel.

The semicircular staircase was rebuilt after it was crushed on Sept. 11, 2001.

Earlier this year, Brookfield proposed removing the stairs so that pedestrians leaving the tunnel would see the Winter Garden and the view west. New escalators would be installed on the east end of the atrium to connect the first and second floors.

After City Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden panned the preliminary designs in a letter to the company this summer, Brookfield chairman John Zuccotti defended the plan, saying that the 88-foot-wide, 15-foot-high wall supporting the stairs was a “significant physical and visual barrier” and would be “a major inconvenience” for pedestrians exiting the tunnel into the atrium.

“[Keeping the stairs] would require people to maneuver around the wall as they enter the Winter Garden from the new transit center, creating choke points,” Zuccotti wrote.

In her note to Zuccotti, Burden said to eliminate the staircase would “create a significant void” in the Winter Garden, noting both its physical dominance of the space and its practical worth to atrium visitors.

“We think it highly questionable as to whether there is a compelling rationale for removing the stairs, which are used by a broad range of people throughout the day, seven days a week,” Burden wrote.

Today, visitors climb the staircase to reach the expanse of windows that overlook the Trade Center site and the stairs are used by workers on their way to offices in the Financial Center. The stairs also are often used for seating during performances.

In interviews on a recent weekday morning at the World Financial Center, reactions to Brookfield’s plans were mixed. Some tourists, seeing the Winter Garden for the first time, gasped when told of the stairs’ possible demolition.

“We’re not even from here, but that seems like it would be a really tragic loss,” said Las Vegas resident Rusty Ellis.

“It’s so beautiful and unique, why would they want to get rid of it?” wondered his wife, DaLea.

By contrast, some Financial Center workers expressed indifference.

“I don’t really think we need them,” said Laura Saunders of Merrill Lynch. “We’ve already got escalators on the other side [of the atrium].”

One American Express employee, who asked not to be identified, said she wasn’t concerned with the stairs themselves, but worried about what their loss would mean to the serenity of the atrium.

“If that happens, I’ll be very unhappy,” she said. “This is our little oasis here, and I don’t want to lose it.”