The Sphere was first moved to The Battery in March 2002, for the six-month anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. In 2013 it was moved again, to this location in The Battery, in order to make way for the reconstruction of the park. Photo: Carl Glassman/Tribeca Trib
A final decision may be near on a permanent home for the World Trade Center Sphere, the battered sculptural survivor of 9/11.
According to several Community Board 1 members, a Port Authority official has encouraged them to support the siting of the 45,000-pound brass orb in Liberty Park. Due to open this summer, the park is an elevated, one-acre green space atop the Vehicle Security Center that overlooks the Sept. 11 Memorial Plaza.
The board members said that Glenn Guzi, the authority’s program director, mentioned during a recent tour of the park that the agency would be “very open,” as one member put it, to the board’s backing for the move from its longtime temporary home in The Battery.
“I think it was a really great olive branch to say, would the community board like to weigh in,” noted committee member Wendy Chapman, who was on the tour. “To me it was almost like asking us to ask for it.”
“The easiest spot for [the authority] is to plop it down in Liberty Park,” said committee member Anthony Notaro. “If we just say, ‘OK, that’s a good idea,’ then that’s what they’re going to do.”
Since March 2002, Fritz Koenig’s Sphere, formerly the centerpiece of the World Trade Center plaza, located between the two towers, has resided among many other memorials in The Battery. It is a site where many people—including Warrie Price, president of the Battery Conservancy—say it does not belong.
A Port Authority spokesman would not comment on Guzi’s discussions with community board members, but said the agency continues to support the Sphere’s return to the World Trade Center site. “No decisions have been made yet about doing so,” the spokesman, Steve Coleman, said in an email. “And it hasn’t been determined where on the site it would go assuming it were to be returned.”
There are still those who call for the sculpture’s return to the plaza. “The Sphere should really go back to where it originally was,” said CB1 chair Catherine McVay Hughes.
Memorial officials have continually rejected the idea, saying the Sphere does not fit in with Michael Arad’s spare design for the Memorial, called “Reflecting Absence.”
“Our position remains the same,” Memorial spokesman Michael Frazier told the Trib last week in an email.
While some on the committee said it is unrealistic to think that the Memorial will change its mind, others continue to hold out hope.
“It belongs in the Memorial [Plaza], it doesn’t belong in Liberty Park,” said committee member Tammy Meltzer. “Putting that in Liberty Park turns it into a Liberty Memorial Park. “I really would hope that it doesn’t go in Liberty Park.”
In the meantime, however, the Port Authority did move a war sculpture to Liberty Park—the horse soldier statue “De Oppresso Liber,” commemorating the Army Special Forces in Afghanistan.
Meltzer said she could imagine the Sphere on the plaza north of the Memorial Museum and away from the plaza’s main attraction, the two pools. Not surprisingly, she found agreement from Michael Burke, a persistent and leading advocate for siting the Sphere on the plaza.
“Liberty Park should be left for Downtowners and the Memorial Plaza is where any and all 9/11 material belongs,” said Burke, whose firefighter brother, Capt. William Burke, died on Sept. 11.
The board invited Memorial officials to discuss the matter at its June 13 Planning Committee meeting. In response, the Memorial deferred to the Port Authority for that discussion, according to Diana Switaj, CB1’s director of planning and land use.