The wrecking ball; the little pavilion that could.(The Talk of the Town)

Given how much architecture was destroyed in lower Manhattan on September 11th, you might think that the last thing anybody would want to do now is to get rid of more of it, especially if the building in question is one of Battery Park City's most admired, if tiniest, gems. But that is exactly what the Museum of Jewish Heritage is planning to do with an elegant glass entry pavilion that it erected in 1997. The pavilion, a pair of trapezoids, was an afterthought, designed in enormous haste when museum officials decided, just before their new building opened, that its design, a granite hexagon by the architect Kevin Roche, didn't include enough room for ticket sales and security screening of visitors and packages. The only solution was a small, separate entry structure. The museum turned to Claire Weisz and Mark Yoes, a young husband-and-wife team of architects who had previously designed a prototype security kiosk for Battery Park City.

"The museum people came to us because they said they wanted someone who knew about security booths," Claire Weisz said last week as she walked through her building for what may have been the last time. Weisz and Yoes gave the museum rather more than it expected. They produced a crisp, sharply angled structure with a glass roof and glass-and-metal walls that seemed exhilarating amid the earnest and dutiful brick and stone buildings of Battery Park City. Weisz and Yoes managed to get it designed, approved by the Battery Park City Authority and city officials, and fully constructed, in just eight weeks. "We made it out of any materials we could order and have delivered fast," Weisz said.

The building, which was known as the visitors center, was never meant to overshadow the museum. But Roche's granite structure turned out to have such functional limitations that the visitors center was soon being used for office space. The little glass pavilion wasn't in most guidebooks, but in time it became the part of the museum complex that architects, especially younger ones, talked about. In a city with few strong modern public buildings, it was a kind of minor, underground icon. In the immediate aftermath of September 11th, when the museum was closed, the visitors center was taken over by the Police Department, which used it to store gas masks.

Before the terrorist attacks, the ...