Residents Give Libeskind Thumbs Up

by Carl Glassman

Away from the political fanfare and flurry of press coverage that accompanied Daniel Libeskind’s ascension on Feb. 27 to chief architect of the World Trade Center site, many local residents looked on with quiet but keen interest. And many of those who had lent their voices to the selection process said they could support the vision that has emerged.

Daniel Libeskind visited Ground Zero the day after he was announced winner of the design competition for the site. Photo by Allan Tannenbaum

Libeskind’s winning plan calls for a 1,776-foot-high spiral-topped office building—the tallest in the world—a sunken 4.5-acre memorial garden and a transit center. Four other office towers, a hotel, museum and a performing arts center are also part of the concept. Mayor Bloomberg said he believes all but the office buildings can go up within five years.

Libeskind’s design was one of three endorsed by Community Board 1. (The THINK team’s plan, Libeskind’s competitor in the final round, was not among them.) Michael Connolly, a North Moore Street resident who helped draft the CB1 resolution, called Libeskind’s design “by far the most thoughtful and the most emotionally effective.”

“What is best about the entire plan is that it seems like a design we could live with that will enhance our neighborhood,” Connolly said. Like other residents

familiar with the plan, he lauded what he called the “vibrant street life and rational street plan.”

Libeskind’s design includes about 880,000 square feet of retail space—approximately half of it at street level—with shops and restaurants lining the restored Greenwich and Fulton streets that will run through the site.
“He was seeing the city the way I see it, from the ground we walk on and not from a bird’s-eye view,” said Roland Gebhardt, a longtime Vestry Street resident who serves on the steering committee of the civic group Rebuild Our Town Downtown, which had endorsed Libeskind’s design.

Gebhardt, like many who live in the community, have favored reconnecting Greenwich Street and re-extending Fulton Street to West Street. (The plan shows Fulton Street as a pedestrian walkway and Greenwich Street open to traffic.)
   

“There is no longer this fortress that blocked the view,” said Gebhardt, referring to the Trade Center complex. “Libeskind’s plan enlarges our Downtown and makes it more accessible and easier to live with. He was the one who expressed it in a very clear way.”

But there are big questions about access to the site between Battery Park City and Downtown east of the site. The centerpiece of Libeskind’s plan, the sprawling memorial park 30 feet below street level, exposes the Trade Center’s foundation walls on the east and west sides of the park. (His plan also includes a second memorial space that would extend the full 70 feet of the pit to bedrock.)

“Before [in Libeskind’s first proposal] it was a big barrier. Now it’s less of a barrier, but there are ways it could be better,” said Sudhir Jain, who heads the World Trade Center Res- idents Coalition.

Madelyn Wils, chair of Community Board 1 and a member of the Lower Manhattan Development Corp.’s board of directors, praised the overall plan but said that access through the site was a problem. “This connects two neighborhoods but not four,” she said, adding that connections from the west and south had yet to be worked out. “We must do better and I think we can.”
Wils said she objects to the designation of all 4.5 acres solely as memorial space.

“It should be a park where people can go when they feel like sitting and eating their lunch, or throwing a frisbee, or mourning,” she said.
 
 
Libeskind’s vision includes a 1,776-foot-high office tower, with a restaurant on the 110th floor.
Nancy Owens, a landscape architect and co-chair of CB1’s World Trade Center Redevelopment Committee, said she was relieved to see that Libeskind’s reworked plan shows the “bathtub” as green space, 40 feet shallower than first envisioned. But she is still critical of what she calls “that hole.”

“I think this whole process has been manipulated by emotions and not good urban design for the future,” she said.

Maria Smith, another Community Board 1 member and a resident of Battery Park City, said she had been skeptical about the pit, fearing that it would be a permanent and depressing reminder of the horror, but was reassured by what Libeskind said about the memorial at the Feb. 24 Winter Garden ceremony.
“He felt that those retaining walls withstood the awful impact, the terrible attack, so he saw it as a real symbol of strength. To be honest, I hadn’t thought about it that way before, and that gave me some comfort.”

“If it gets done as the model shows, it’s in no sense morbid,” said Jeff Galloway, a Battery Park City resident who worked on the CB1 planning committee.

The footprints of the twin towers remain exposed within a 4.5 acre garden.

The memorial itself, the subject of an international design competition to take place this year, will be built within the park. Monica Iken, a spokeswoman for victims’ families, whose husband, Michael, died in Tower Two, said after Libeskind’s presentation that the plan was “intriguing,” but that her main concern was overcrowding. She said she believed the annual number of tourists will be triple the five million projected by the Port Authority.

“I don’t want to have to shuffle through people to visit my husband’s final resting place,” she said. “My concern is having Disney World at the site.”

Iken, as well as many residents interviewed, said they viewed Libeskind’s plans as only a starting point in a process that they hope to influence in the coming months, partly through direct discussions with the architect.

“We have the right context and the right feeling, but this is a conceptual plan and things change from the concept,” said Madelyn Wils. “This is the time when you roll up your sleeves and get down to the details.”