At 8:46 a.m. on September 11, 2001, the first of two hijacked planes rammed into one of the two World Trade Center towers in New York. It eventually took 102 minutes before both the towers crumbled. And it will take a lifetime for the victims who survived, the families of those who didn’t, the men of Arab origin who’ve been arrested by an angry government—with no information on their whereabouts—to fathom the full import of those 102 minutes that shook the US and the world. The story here, courtesy The Indian Express’s exclusive arrangement with the Los Angeles Times-Washington Post service, captures some of the pain, the fear, the hope and the courage. Life has returned to the World Financial Center. Merrill Lynch is back, its building no longer a gouged wreck. Staffers of American Express and the Wall Street Journal fill the corridors of these grand structures once again. And the 10-story marble and glass Winter Garden atrium, smashed to bits in the collapse of the World Trade Center, gleams for its reopening later this month. Renewal is rolling forward in some parts of Lower Manhattan, feeding the momentum to which city leaders naturally cling as they intone the mantra of revival. But just across the street, across West Street, stands the crucible. That gash in the city’s soul, that massive hole in the ground, is a developmental challenge like no other in American history. Rather than revival, it speaks, still, of terrorism’s toll. Construction workers found more human remains on the roof of an adjacent building just the other day, pieces of someone’s skull, someone’s ribs. This 16-acre site is so fraught with raw emotion, so drenched in symbolism that its fate remains the subject of an intense civic debate here about just what should be created on it and what values should lead the process. With one false start behind them, in the form of those six design plans that were resoundingly rejected this summer by experts and citizens who called them mediocre, leaders of the development effort continue to grope for an inspired and overarching vision for what is likely to be the city’s most treasured site for decades to come. ‘‘People want the heroic thing, and that could and should happen on a memorial site,’’ said Robert Yaro, president of the Regional Plan Association, an urban planning group. ‘‘Everyone’s looking for a higher order of thing to happen here.’’ In effect starting from scratch, the Lower Manhattan Development Corp (LMDC) and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which are jointly running the redevelopment effort, last month invited a new round of designers to compete for position in a design study for the site. This time, the LMDC opened the competition to a far broader spectrum of the national and international design community, and a selection is expected by the end of this month. And officials overseeing the development of a memorial expect to begin their design competition next year. But the process already has become ‘‘tortured,’’ said John Belle, a partner of Beyer Blinder Belle, the master planning firm for the center’s redevelopment. The firm produced some of the rejected designs. To be fair, this has never been done before, at least not in the US. The process was conceived within an emergency and amid a tangle of competing interests. Families of the dead want as much space as possible preserved for memorials. Yet a primary driving force has been the substantial commercial interests at play between the leaseholder of the old trade center and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the trade center land received a hefty revenue from trade center leases. The Port Authority and the LMDC are jointly leading the redevelopment effort, creating yet another tangle as well as some jurisdictional jostling. ‘‘This is sort of being made up as we go along, because there’s no model,’’ said Billie Tsien, the only architect on the development corporation’s politically appointed board. ‘‘I think everybody has the same aspiration, but people don’t agree on how to go about it,’’ she said of the board, with which she has had public disagreements. ‘‘Everybody acknowledges that we don’t want to just do business as usual. But what’s so hard is sitting around that meeting table, looking at all these different people, who all have the best intentions and who all have deep feelings and who have such different ideas about what should happen.’ It’s not like the old days in New York real estate, when an authoritarian developer could dictate a grand urban renewal scheme and ride roughshod over it to completion. New York these days is a place of consensus-building, Thus the six designs, unveiled in July with much fanfare. Each called for a dense stacking of skyscrapers of about 50 stories each. And each design plan included variations on a memorial theme: a memorial plaza, square, triangle, garden, park or promenade. But architecture critics, designers, planners, city officials and the public pooh-poohed the plans as unimaginative, unworthy. Belle said the plans were intended only as starting points, not as full-fledged architectural designs. ‘‘This is a terrific example of how the voice of the public has a lot of power, and to their great credit the Port Authority has since told us to reevaluate the program,’’ Belle said. ‘‘The six schemes undoubtedly are only a reference point now for whatever moves on.’’ Ron Shiffman put a finer point on it, saying the designs are ‘‘dead in the water.’’ Shiffman, a former city planning commissioner, directs the Pratt Institute Center for Community and Environmental Development, which plans to launch a study group for architects, civic leaders and other decision makers in the redevelopment process. They will travel to European cities to study redevelopment. Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, divided by the Berlin Wall and crumbled by bombs, tops the list. It is roughly the same size as the trade center site and has undergone a massive and cutting-edge rebuilding over the past decade.
