Community Meeting June 26 on 55 Water St. Plaza Redesign A year after Goldman Sachs abandoned its controversial plan to construct a building on the elevated public plaza behind 55 Water St., now the city’s most massive office tower, the complex’s owners have decided to redesign the plaza into "a vital destination that contributes to the cultural life of Lower Manhattan." The owner, the Retirement System of Alabama, is sponsoring a design competition with the Municipal Art Society to come up with a plan to make the isolated, unadorned plaza into an attractive public amenity for Downtown residents, workers and tourists. To solicit input from Downtown residents, the owner and the Municipal Art Society, together with Community Board 1 and the Alliance for Downtown New York, are hosting a community meeting on June 26 at 6 p.m., in the conference center on the concourse level of 55 Water St. Residents are invited to hear the owner’s plans for the plaza and to share their input on what they would like to see in the 41,000-square-foot space, which commands views of the East River, the Brooklyn Bridge and Governor’s Island. Anyone interested in attending should contact Mandy Knox at the New Water Street Corp. (which manages the building for the owner), at 747-9120 or mknox@55water.com. The deadline for preliminary submissions from architects and urban planners is July 8. Six finalists will be selected in July and given $10,000 stipends to come up with more refined plans by mid-September, and a winner will be chosen in late September. Construction is expected to begin in the spring of 2003. More information on the project and the design competition can be found on the Municipal Art Society’s website.