August 01, 2003

From the NYT:

...in announcing that a renowned Spanish architect, Santiago Calatrava, had been selected to design the site's new transportation terminal, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the 16-acre trade center site, essentially ruled out the idea of building an office tower atop the terminal.

Just yesterday, I took the faster route across the West Side Highway, skirting the edge of Ground Zero. The acreage of the big hole in the ground is now about one third-covered with the new transportation terminal: an unfinished structure almost as high as the top edge of the old foundation wall, topped with multiple shiny aluminum air conditioning units. I think it's supposed to be finished in September, not that I'll be using it, myself. It will serve PATH and subway trains, and I'll stick with my waterborne open-air ferry ride, thanks.

As I bustled along the pedestrian overpass and looked down onto the new terminal's roof with its glimmering machinery, it suddenly occurred to me: the new structure wouldn't support any significant structures above it, such as another tower. And they certainly wouldn't be building it just to tear it down to make room for the foundational elements of large buildings.

But they started building the new transportation terminal long before they picked the winning design back in February.

What that means, of course, is that someone had already decided that the towers would not be rebuilt, before the city went through the motions of soliciting the public's opinion on the matter and holding the "design competition." While it's true that none of the six finalist designs featured new towers on the footprints of the old, some of the other designs did.

I'm not saying that the towers should be rebuilt, mind you...but it's a strange thing to suddenly realize, when it's been staring me in the face for so long: that's it, they're gone, and there won't be anything like them again, not in downtown Manhattan, not in my lifetime.

Should they have told us? I'm not sure. One the one hand, it makes a mockery of the idea that there was still a debate to be had about rebuilding them. But perhaps announcing flat-out that the towers would not be rebuilt would have been...too harsh. Perhaps it's better to let the reality of the towers' vanishing settle in, deep down, and turn into certainty over time.

UPDATE: I have a co-worker with a contractor friend who's working in Ground Zero. He told me that his friend has been warned that all construction and plans for construction are "very, very flexible"--to the point that they might indeed tear down something they've spent months putting together. So, I'm probably wrong about what was decided, and when.