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A Turning Point for WTC Rebuilding
“This is the World Trade Center,” he said, his finger pointing, his voice booming with emotion. “You’ve got one shot to get this right. Please get this right!” It was a rare forum, held in July, where the public had the ears of six of the most powerful men behind the redevelopment of Ground Zero. And it was Edwards’ few words, more than anyone’s, that captured the years of frustration, simmering anger and unresolved questions surrounding the stalled progress at the site. Edwards got no response from the men at the hearing room table—a deputy mayor and the heads of the Sept. 11 Memorial & Museum, the Lower Manhattan Development Corp., Silverstein Properties and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, owner of the site. Their appearance, requested by Community Board 1 chairwoman Julie Menin, had come on the heels of a gloomy report issued by the man seated at one end of the table, Port Authority executive director Christopher Ward. Dates and budgets set for completing the site are not real, Ward said in his report. In addition, he listed a mind-numbing tangle of construction coordination problems yet to be solved among the many agencies involved in the rebuilding. On Sept. 30, the Port Authority is expected to release a landmark second report, this one detailing how many more unbudgeted dollars and unanticipated years of construction it will take to finish the site. And there will be “tough tradeoffs,” Ward warned. “We now stand at a crossroads in the rebuilding effort to achieve a fully rebuilt site on an acceptable schedule,” he said. Caught in the crossfire of egos, emotions and competing interests, progress often stalled along the way. But the rebuilding has also been a centerpiece for civic engagement, a place where thoughtful minds have come together, hoping to “get it right.” The Trib talked to many of those planners, community leaders, officials and others who participated in the planning process from early on for their understanding of the rebuilding’s troubled past, and its uncertain future. In the months leading to the selection in early 2003 of Daniel Libeskind as the master planner for the Trade Center site, recovery and rebuilding were on the minds of thousands of New Yorkers. Architects, planners, residents, academics, artists, victims’ families, ordinary people—they came by the hundreds and thousands to public meetings, offering their visions of the reconstructed site and a rebirth of Lower Manhattan.
As early as January, 2002, a standing-room-only crowd packed the Stuyvesant High School auditorium to give their opinions on restoring the Trade Center site, Downtown and, especially, “normality.” A few days later, more than 600 people attended “Listening to the City,” a forum convened in the South Street Seaport by the Regional Plan Association and its newly formed Civic Alliance to Rebuild Downtown New York. And in July, 2002, a second, extraordinary Listening to the City event drew 5,000 participants to the Javits Center to speak out on six development options that had been presented by the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation. The crowd roundly rejected all of them. Those who participated in Listening to the City proudly recall that the event put the skids on those plans, deemed “too dense, too dull and too commercial” for focusing mainly on restoring the towers’ 10.5 million square feet of office space. “We said, ‘slow down, you need to get some consensus on what you’re going to do,’” recalled Eva Hanhardt, who organized rebuilding workshops around the city for the Municipal Art Society’s own “listening” program called Imagine New York. “The 16 acres were looked at more as a real estate development site than the site of a tragedy that changed the world.” From that experience the LMDC turned its efforts to holding a site plan competition and the eventual selection of Libeskind in February, 2003. “THOUGHT THEY'D BEEN BURNED ” But beyond the glare of press events and public euphoria over magnificent schemes, the experience stunned rebuilding officials, according to Petra Todorovich of the Regional Plan Association, who organized Listening to the City. “There was a real retrenchment in terms of public outreach and public process,” Todorovich said. “I almost felt like LMDC and the Port Authority thought they had been burned by Listening to the City.” After Libeskind was selected as the master planner, Todorovich said, there was a “steady erosion” of the architect’s plan—including design guidelines that the Port Authority shelved—and the reasons were not always clear. “There was no real forum or outlet for expressing concern over those changes after they were made,” she said. That was in the spring of 2003, Todorovich said, around the time that the LMDC’s planning director, Alex Garvin, resigned. Garvin, she said, had regularly exchanged ideas, informally, with architects and planning professionals in the design community.
“The scope of public participation was great when I was there,” he said. “It was the central feature of what I thought was necessary in New York. There’s been nothing like it since and I think it’s sad.” “GREATEST MISTAKE AFTER 9/11 ” Fast-forward to August, 2007, and Garvin’s words echo in the aftermath of the fatal Deutsche Bank fire. Community Board 1 had urged the LMDC to beware of the John Galt Company, subcontracted to take down the hulking 9/11 ruin. “We were the ones that warned LMDC not to hire [subcontractor] John Galt,” said CB1 chair Julie Menin. “If they had listened to us from the get-go, I think we would be in a very different situation right now.” City Councilman Alan Gerson, whose district includes Lower Manhattan, sees a “direct link” between fatal errors at the LMDC-owned Deutsche Bank building and the concentration of power over Ground Zero. “The greatest mistake in the aftermath of 9/11 was the governance structure put in place,” he said, citing the absence of City Council and state legislature oversight of decisions made by the mayor and governor. “Decisions were made in the least transparent and the least open manner that was legally permissible.” Gerson, who had signed a letter opposing the selection of the John Galt Company and had demanded a fire response plan from the LMDC, believes more democracy around the Trade Center site might have saved the two firefighters killed in the blaze. “We could have legislated criteria for how subcontractors are retained, but we legally did not have that authority,” he said. Just how little authority, Gerson said, revealed itself in the words of the LMDC’s first president, Lou Thomson, following an appearance before the City Council. According to Gerson, Thomson told him he would not be attending future Council meetings, because he didn’t have to. Regional Plan Association president Robert Yaro remembers a meeting on the rebuilding with Thomson, Pataki and staff and asking to see a Gantt Chart, a timeline of progress benchmarks and deadlines common in the construction industry. “They said, ‘What’s a Gantt chart?’ There was no public timeline. And once they created it, it was fiction.” With both the LMDC and Port Authority executives largely under Pataki control, many point to political expediency and the governor’s presidential ambitions as the driving force behind the delays and budget mess. The Santiago Calatrava-designed PATH station, for example, was budgeted at $2.2 billion when its design was unveiled in January, 2004. Estimates now run as high as $3.4 billion and its much heralded birdlike design, already scaled back, is expected to take more cost-saving hits from the Port Authority.
“Ground Zero has been a showplace for people to get recognized,” said Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, a Democrat and harsh critic of the former Republican governor. “The governor was always concerned with his picture and looking like he was doing something.” Silver recalled Pataki’s plans to stand beside President George W. Bush for the unveiling of the Freedom Tower cornerstone during the Republican Convention in 2004. “I told him if you make this into a political football I will expose it. So instead he did it on July 4.” “There was no viable plan for the building to be built there,” Silver added. Two years later security concerns caused the Freedom Tower plans to change and the 20-ton cornerstone, a “symbol of strength and confidence,” as Pataki had called it, was in the way. It now resides back in Hauppauge, L.I., with the company that manufactured it. Even as rebuilding delays mounted—the redesign of the Freedom Tower included—Pataki unveiled plans for a cultural center to house the International Freedom Center and the Drawing Center. “This Cultural Center will be a fitting celebration of the humanity which triumphed in the face of evil on September 11,” Pataki proclaimed. The celebration did not last long. The governor withdrew his support after the centers came under attack by some victims’ family members who claimed that the building, designed by the Norwegian firm Snøhetta, would become the stage for anti-American art and propaganda. “The family members became the focal point of how everything got dictated,” observed Madelyn Wils, the former chair of CB 1 who was an LMDC board member until taking a job last year as vice president of the city’s Economic Development Corporation. “The governor empowered them so much that it became unacceptable not to listen to them.” “IF BLOOMBERG WERE THERE IT WOULD HAVE BEEN BUILT BY NOW.” Some say a proposed “land swap” could have sent the rebuilding process on a faster, steadier trajectory. The idea, floated by the city in 2002, would have given the city control of the WTC site in exchange for the land beneath La Guardia and Kennedy Airports. Such a deal, it was argued, would put the city, rather than the bistate Port Authority, in charge of the rebuilding and loosen Pataki’s grip on the process, as well as limit the governmental entities involved at the site, now numbering 19.
There was cooperation among the agencies early on, recalled Wils. She remembers, as an LMDC board member, helping to mediate between agencies like the MTA and Port Authority that rarely faced each other in the same room. That ended, of course, like much of the good feeling and cooperative spirit after 9/11. “There were so many things to think about and all the agencies had their own priorities,” she said. “It’s like people stepping all over each other, but not necessarily walking in the same direction.” Today, construction proceeds apace at the WTC site. And despite the problems, almost everyone interviewed for this article talked of successes as well as the troubled history. For one, said Yaro, “The development community and the public agencies got the message that design matters.” And officials heard the call early on: for an iconic tower; transportation hub; memorial; and a revived street grid—Greewich and Fulton Streets will again be through streets that connect the site to the wider neighborhood. The 16 acres were, and are to be, a place of commerce, culture and remembrance. “I’M FEARFUL THAT THE PERFORMING ARTS CENTER IS BEING LEFT OUT.” It is the culture component that has many observers worried. No fundraising has begun for the center, to be located where the temporary PATH station now stands, and planning for it has yet to begin. “I’m really fearful that the performing arts center is being left out,” said Rick Bell, president of the New York chapter of the American Institute of Architects and co-founder of New York New Visions, a coalition of design and planning groups organized after Sept. 11. It would be, as Bell sees it, “a link that connects the more sacred ground of the memorial quadrant to the more vibrant blocks with transportation facilities.” “We need a public process [on planning for the center] and that’s what CB1 has tried to do,” said Catherine McVay Hughes, chair of the board’s committee on the reconstruction. “But we have not been able to get a presentation on it.” CB1 and others also want to know how visitors will arrive at the site. The picture they envision is not pretty: a wall of tourist buses along Greenwich Street, idling next to the memorial plaza as drivers wait to enter the vehicle holding area under Liberty Street. “We’re trying to figure that out, “ said Joe Daniels, president of the National September 11 Memorial & Museum. “We don’t have a solution yet.” But Daniels, who sits on a newly formed steering committee that now holds the decision-making reins of the rebuilding, said the problem has yet to be addressed “not because of lack of priority,” but because of its place in the sequence of decisions yet to be faced. In the meantime, the memorial is the only building on the site that stands a chance of opening on 9/11/11. And that, too, remains in question. The memorial plaza needs more support than the columnless mezzanine of the new PATH terminal below it would provide without complex engineering. Memorial officials are pushing for a redesign of the station that would add column supports to the mezzanine and speed construction. “If the right decision is made on a key design question it’s going to put us on a hopeful road for opening,” said Daniels. “Otherwise, the climb uphill is going to be much steeper.” Uncertainties like these were once far from the minds of many New Yorkers, captivated by grand plans and eager to see greatness rise from the rubble. “They created such high expectations and now we don’t even know when things are going to really happen,” said Hughes, who has been close to the public planning process since early on. “I think that’s the most frustrating part.”
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