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By Cathleen McGuigan
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On a lovely spring Saturday, half a dozen people were hunched over a map of lower Manhattan, with architects' tracing tissue stretched across it. They took turns sketching feverishly: a swath of green marker here for a park, a pair of brown lines there for a new street, two crisp squares of green to mark the sacred "footprints" where the Twin Towers once stood. Elsewhere in the New York City meeting room, other groups were similarly coming up with big ideas for the World Trade Center site. For the most part, these people weren't pros, just ordinary New Yorkers who'd leapt at the chance to be part of a program called "Imagine New York." "I never felt the average person's feelings were taken into consideration until today," said Steven Fromewick, a lawyer more used to wielding a brief than a pen.
Two weeks later, at a conference for planners held at a midtown-Manhattan hotel, another ordinary citizen, Diane Horning, of suburban Scotch Plains, N.J., stood up to make her feelings known. She told a panel discussing the issue of a memorial that the WTC "site is a cemetery without tombstones." Horning, who lost her 26-year-old son, Matthew, in the Twin Towers collapse, wants the land to remain empty. "If you put an arts center there," she said, "you'll be dancing on his grave."
Neither Horning nor Fromewick has any official role in deciding what will be built at the World Trade Center site. But how their opinions--and those of the public at large--should shape the process of redevelopment has become a subject of hot debate. There's no Robert Moses at work here oblivious to the cares of the little guy. But the complex jumble of bureaucracy, politics and business interests involved in the rebuilding have overshadowed the little guys. Just a few weeks ago the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. was caught in a public squabble with the Port Authority, which owns the 16 acres where the Twin Towers stood. The issue: who would pick the urban-design team to create a plan for the site. Now the two entities are jointly interviewing candidates for the job--though they're moving so swiftly that some observers are dismayed.
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As early as next week officials will choose the winning team--who will have until July 1 to propose six different schemes. "It's not enough time to allow a consultant to consider the public input," says Holly Lieght of the Municipal Art Society, which organized more than 250 "Imagine New York" public workshops and has expected to share the results with the LMDC. Lou Tomson, president of the LMDC, maintains, "The public process has been going on for a long time. We have advisory councils, and we've had input from civic groups." In July, there'll be a chance for public response to the six options. The final plan is due in December.
There's clearly some consensus between the public's ideas, as seen in those workshops, and what officials are talking about, including a significant memorial and park. Other priorities are upgrading the transit system (already one subway line is being rebuilt) and threading some of the old streets, from the pre-Twin Towers era, back through the site. OK, this isn't glamorous stuff, but it will make a more lively neighborhood.
Big questions loom, especially about those eight acres or so that will be commercially developed. Does lower Manhattan really need all of the 10 million square feet of office space lost when the Twin Towers collapsed? And will such commercial architecture be as stunning and innovative as the momentous site demands? By last week, just at the edge of the site, excavation had started where 7 World Trade Center, a lower office tower that also collapsed on September 11, will be rebuilt. A preliminary design, by David Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, has promise--a sleek glass high-rise, shaped like a parallelogram, with a stainless-steel-mesh base. But for many of the designs yet to come, all we can do is grab our colored markers and hope.
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