From Political Calculation, a Sweeping Vision of Ground

Zero
By EDWARD WYATT

Just weeks after the World Trade Center attack, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and Gov.
George E. Pataki began to imagine the rebuilding of Lower Manhattan, and they
immediately saw two problems.

The first was Mark Green, the leading candidate for mayor, a Democrat, and a man neither
Republican officeholder could abide. As mayor, he would assert significant influence over
the rebuilding effort.

The second was Mr. Pataki's own re-election bid the following year. Appearing to exert too
much control over the rebuilding effort would leave Mr. Pataki vulnerable to charges of
manipulating the city's grief to his political ends.

That is why on Nov. 2, 2001, four days before New Yorkers went to the polls to choose the
mayor who would see the city through the first phase of rebuilding, Mr. Giuliani and Mr.
Pataki announced that the effort would be directed by a new agency, the Lower Manhattan
Redevelopment Corporation. The agency would help dole out billions of dollars in federal
aid to the city and oversee the effort to create a fitting memorial to the victims.

The creation of that corporation set off what could have been any government operation —
a plodding, obtuse process run by bureaucrats with little public participation. Instead, it
evolved into a grand public discussion about architecture, public space and the nature of
memory.

A confluence of factors produced that result, from the political races to New Yorkers'
apparent need to work out their grief by reconstructing something that had been lost. But
the greatest factor, it seems, was essentially a large misunderstanding — the public's
perception of an initial round of designs for the site that looked like little more than white
blobs on a map.

From the beginning, it was clear that the governor would control the endeavor. He
appointed 7 of the corporation's 11 board members, including its chairman, and it became a
subsidiary of Empire State Development, the state's economic development agency, run by
one of the governor's closest allies. Another Pataki confidant, Louis R. Tomson, was
appointed president, overseeing the corporation's day-to-day operations.

It was not surprising, then, that last week, nearly 16 months later, Mr. Pataki lobbied for
and ultimately secured the selection of his preferred choice, Studio Daniel Libeskind, as the
architect for the rebuilding of the trade center.
Yet while Mr. Pataki has exerted major influence over the initial rebuilding effort, the
evolution of the agency, known later as the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, is
far from a cut-and-dried case of political muscle.

In between its founding and last week's decision, it transformed itself into an agency with
its own momentum, engaging the public in an architectural project of immense scope in
ways public policy experts never imagined.

"Our greatest challenge has been to restore a sense of optimism to a city still suffering from
a savage attack, and to create a planning process to address the wishes of so many
stakeholders," Mr. Tomson said at a news conference to unveil the winning design. "There
were many times when reaching consensus seemed nearly impossible, and we certainly
made mistakes along the way."

The effect of the process on life in the city, too, was so unusual that it was sometimes
disorienting. Bartenders debated the merits of Mr. Libeskind's design with customers.
Rafael Viñoly, the second-place architect, was discussed on talk radio. At the World
Financial Center, tens of thousands of families, students, young professionals and tourists
viewed an exhibition of architectural models, the tiny balsa-wood streetscapes normally
seen only in the offices of developers and condominium salespeople.

That outcome did not seem likely on Nov. 29, 2001, when the development corporation's
board was introduced. Heavy with business and financial types, it had but one
representative of the downtown residents, small businesses and cultural institutions that
were hardest hit by the attack's economic fallout.

"At least we got one," said that representative, Madelyn Wils, the chairwoman of
Community Board 1, whose responsibilities include the trade center site. "I intend to be a
loud voice."

Others, too, began to raise their voices. Michael R. Bloomberg, who had defeated Mr.
Green in the mayoral race, and who had opposed the formation of the development agency
during his campaign, established himself as both an ally and a counterweight to Mr. Pataki,
and gained a greater role for the city. John C. Whitehead, the development agency's
chairman, and Roland W. Betts, one of its directors, stepped into a void created by Mr.
Pataki's public detachment. Mr. Whitehead began to reassure downtown business leaders
that the corporation would be free from political pressures, a statement Mr. Pataki's staff
members said they could have lived without. And Mr. Betts, known to many of the city's
power brokers as a personal friend of President Bush's, emerged as one of the board's most
active members, overseeing its site-planning committee.

Throughout the winter and early spring, the development corporation was in what Mr.
Whitehead referred to as "listening mode," meeting with advisory committees and groups
of residents, commuters, business people and others. But as the cleanup of the trade center
site progressed faster than expected, concerns surfaced that once the recovery was
complete, New York would be left with a vast hole and no plan to fill it.
To alter that perception, the corporation published an outline of its rebuilding goals in April
that called for critical changes to the downtown area's transportation systems, economy and
traffic patterns for pedestrians and automobiles.

New Yorkers responded with an outpouring of opinion, challenged some of the

assumptions that rebuilding officials had adopted. In January, for example, Mr. Whitehead
said that another 100-story building on the site would not be practical or appropriate. But at
a public hearing in May, the overwhelming message was to put up tall towers.

Several architects in the last round of the design competition proposed just that, and Mr.
Libeskind's plan includes a building with a restaurant at the 110th floor, although
commercial offices would stop at about the 70th floor.

By late spring, most rebuilding officials had agreed to a general outline that re-established
Greenwich and Fulton Streets through the trade center site, cutting its 16 acres into four
parts. The southwest quadrant, where the twin towers had stood, was thought by many to be
the logical place for a memorial.

Such a plan would allow significant space for a memorial, therefore thwarting arguments
by some victims' relatives that the entire site should be left untouched. The remaining three
quadrants could accommodate commercial development, restoring an income stream for the
Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

In July, Mr. Pataki made it so. In the heat of his re-election bid and just before the first site
plans were unveiled, he told a forum of family members, "We will never build where the
towers stood," all but sealing the decision that the memorial would be in that southwest
quadrant.

Days later, a first set of plans, developed by the architectural firm Beyer Blinder Belle, was
unveiled at the historic Federal Hall on Wall Street. Even before the plans became public,
however, rebuilding officials recognized that they were uninspired. Mr. Whitehead said that
if they did not create "the kind of beautiful center that we want this to be, then we will
change our plans."

The plans were overwhelmingly rejected, but not necessarily because they were so different
from what was ultimately embraced. The criticism voiced most often at a meeting of 4,500
people at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center was not that the land-use plans were faulty,
but that the building models were ugly.

The Beyer Blinder Belle plans were presented in a uniform fashion, using what architects
call massing models — nondescript white blocks that represent buildings. Rather than try to
portray architecture, they are simply functional, and they made the plans look uniformly
bland.

The development agency's learned a critical lesson from the July experience: the public
responds less to concepts than to concrete models. A second round of designs was prepared
by seven new teams of architects who were encouraged to include dazzling graphics and
models.

Nearly all their efforts, including that of Mr. Libeskind, took the same four-quadrant
approach to the site. But this time the architects challenged the imagination of New Yorkers
with odd-shaped buildings, public spaces 70 floors above ground, and conceptual
approaches to the memorial that went beyond the design limits that had been set out.

When the plans were unveiled, the first to present his design was Mr. Libeskind. When he
finished, a smattering of polite applause began, then crescendoed to a roar, signaling that
someone had found a way to capture the essence of the tragedy of ground zero and the hope
of a rebuilt, and recovered, Lower Manhattan.