DESIGNING DOWNTOWN.(re-developing the World Trade Center site)

The first six proposals for rebuilding the World Trade Center site were unveiled last July, at a press conference in Federal Hall, on Wall Street. John Beyer, of Beyer Blinder Belle, the architectural firm that drew up most of the plans, sat on a platform in the hall's grand marble rotunda, as did Louis Tomson, the president of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation. Alexander Garvin, the L.M.D.C.'s head of planning, stood at the back of the room, and when the presentation was over he slipped out a side door. He knew the proposals were a disaster: six variations on the same theme, none of which rose to the historic occasion. The designers seemed to be concerned primarily with arranging eleven million square feet of office space around Ground Zero.

Garvin's absence from the stage wasn't entirely by choice. He had lost several battles about the direction the plans were to take--mainly with the Port Authority, which built the original World Trade Center and still owns the land and wants to restore the commercial space that was blown to bits on September 11th. But Garvin also had arguments with his colleagues at the L.M.D.C. Louis Tomson, a longtime associate of Governor Pataki, favored working with the Beyer plans. Two members of the corporation's board, Roland Betts, founder of the Chelsea Piers sports complex in Manhattan, and Billie Tsien, an architect, were less enthusiastic. "I felt really uncomfortable when those schemes were publicly presented, and I wondered why I was on this board," Tsien told me.

A few days after the press conference in Federal Hall, a public meeting was held at the Javits Center to hear a broad range of responses to the new proposals. The meeting took place on a sweltering Saturday, but nearly five thousand people showed up anyway. They sat at round tables and answered questions on electronic instant-polling devices. They were asked to evaluate the six schemes as excellent, good, adequate, or poor, and in every case the largest number of votes fell into the category of poor. When the participants were asked to select the feature of the plans that bothered them most, the highest number of votes went to "Schemes not ambitious enough." The second most troublesome thing, according to the poll, was the excessive amount of office space that all the plans included.

The L.M.D.C. had been saying all along that the plans were only conceptual and shouldn't be viewed as if they were finished designs, and that a long period of public dialogue was expected, but it was hard to have a dialogue about something that everyone seemed to hate. Daniel Doctoroff, the city's deputy mayor for economic development and rebuilding, who shared Garvin's reservations about the plans, made no attempt to hide his delight that they had been so roundly rejected. "It strikes me that what occurred today has been profound," he told the crowd. He was reminded, he said, of Abraham Lincoln's "Right makes might" speech in 1860 at Cooper Union. Like that occasion, the event at the Javits Center would change history.

The meeting at the Javits Center was, in fact, an emblematic event in the history of city planning, but it could perhaps be better compared to the time, in 1968, when the author and critic Jane Jacobs destroyed the records of a public hearing about the expressway that Robert Moses wanted to run across Lower Manhattan. Jacobs's act of civil disobedience--those were the days when people burned draft cards to protest the Vietnam War--was intended to stop a big project. For the next generation, most public activism in the realm of city planning was intended to prevent things like highways and sewage plants and tall buildings from being built. Since you don't get reelected by proposing unpopular things, over the years fewer and fewer big public projects were initiated in New York. That is one of the reasons the original plans for Ground Zero were so cautious, and so bland. Nobody wanted to be Robert Moses anymore.

Alex Garvin didn't want to be Robert Moses, either, but in the course of the day at the Javits Center he began to act like a man who realized that something was happening that might save his job. He wandered around the floor, listening to conversations and watching the polling results flash onto screens high up in the center of the room. "Five thousand people in a room arguing passionately about urban design!" he said. "This fills me with hope."

It was clear that the six plans would probably have to be junked altogether, and Billie Tsien and Roland Betts soon emerged as the prime movers in an effort to shift the direction of the process. They encouraged the rest of the L.M.D.C. board to listen to Alex Garvin. He had no power to make the Port Authority change its position, but he could do something to erase the memory of the six discredited schemes. Garvin, who is sixty-one and has spent most of his career teaching planning at Yale and working in city government, is a trained architect whose first job was working for Philip Johnson. With the support of ...