Groundwork; how the future of Ground Zero is being resolved.(The Sky Line)(New York City)

For much of the eighteenth century, Greenwich Street marked the western edge of Manhattan. It ran along the Hudson River from the southern tip of the island to a rural precinct -- Greenwich Village -- two miles north. By 1800, after landfills had been thrust into the river, Greenwich Street was a couple of blocks inland. It was once a fashionable place to live, but, as docks were built to the west, the neighborhood became crowded with boarding houses and industrial buildings. "This section of the metropolis is beginning to pass all toleration," George Templeton Strong, a Greenwich Street resident, wrote in his diary in 1845. Strong moved to Gramercy Park. In 1868, an elevated railway was built on Greenwich Street, from the Battery to Cortlandt Street. Toward the end of the century, the city's first Arab community, mostly immigrants from Lebanon and Syria, settled on the street's southern blocks.

In the mid-twentieth century, the area around Greenwich and Cortlandt Streets was filled with run-down office buildings, old warehouses, and the largest collection of electronics stores in the world, an amalgam of small shops known as Radio Row. And then, in 1968, a big chunk of Greenwich Street ceased to exist. Five blocks of it, along with three streets that crossed it from east to west, were obliterated to make way for the World Trade Center, which required sixteen acres of unbroken land. The architect who designed the Trade Center, Minoru Yamasaki, believed that streets were relics of a messy and rambunctious past. Superblocks -- big, open expanses of concrete that served as podiums for modern buildings -- were much more appealing.

Between the completion of the Trade Center, in 1973, and its sudden destruction, on September 11th last year, there were two Greenwich Streets -- a short, stubby remnant that extended for a few blocks south of Liberty Street, and a longer section that began just north of the Trade Center and went uptown to Gansevoort Street in the West Village. In 1987, a developer, Larry Silverstein, built a huge slab of a building, 7 World Trade Center, which created a wall between the northern section of Greenwich Street and the rest of the Trade Center complex. The building, which housed the command center of the city's Office of Emergency Management, burned and collapsed late in the afternoon on September 11th. Now that it and the twin towers are gone, it is possible to look up and down the original route of Greenwich Street for the first time in more than thirty years.

The terrorist attacks of September 11th were mass murder on a scale that still seems unimaginable, but it hasn't been possible to remain paralyzed by the horror. In coping with the physical damage, we have been forced to rethink a part of the city wholesale, and we have the opportunity to fix a lot of mistakes. The elimination of Greenwich Street to make way for the World Trade Center represents what was wrong with an entire generation's worth of architecture and planning.

That Greenwich Street will be restored to its original state, at least as an unimpeded thoroughfare, is one of the few things that seem certain about the future of the World Trade Center site, which has inspired more public forums, hearings, debates, op-ed articles, and design proposals than any urban-planning question in the city's history. There won't be firm plans for the site until the end of the year, at the earliest, which irritates some people -- like Andrew Cuomo, who is running for governor, and the members of the editorial boards of the New York Times and the New York Post. They think that the planners are being unreasonably slow. But if you consider the enormity of what happened on September 11th and the magnitude of the task of rebuilding, they are working fairly quickly. Dealing with the site is the greatest logistical challenge the city has faced in modern times, and deciding how to handle this challenge is, in effect, a referendum about what the city's symbolic center should be.

When the World Trade Center was conceived, in the early nineteen-sixties, city planning was still dictated by autocrats like Nelson Rockefeller and Robert Moses, who was the public-works czar of New York for nearly half a century. But Moses's approach was being undermined by that of the critic Jane Jacobs, who celebrated street life and neighborhoods, and who helped to kill the Lower Manhattan Expressway, a Moses project. Autocracy has now given way almost completely to populism. It seems a little incongruous that a patrician, John Whitehead, has been assigned the task of coordinating the plans for the rebuilding of lower Manhattan. Whitehead was the co-chairman of Goldman, Sachs. He has an elegant office filled with antiques in a sleek glass skyscraper in midtown, where he tends to his philanthropic activities and oversees his art collection. A Matisse watercolor hangs in the reception room, and there are boxes full of Sotheby's catalogues in an assistant's office. Whitehead worked on Wall Street until the mid-nineteen-eighties, when he left to join the Reagan Administration as George Shultz's deputy secretary of state. He has no experience in building or construction. Nevertheless, last fall, when Governor Pataki decided to set up the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, he evidently felt that he needed someone well connected to the financial world who could bring a statesmanlike gravitas to the rebuilding process, and he asked Whitehead to become the L.M.D.C.'s chairman. "I was at a phase in my life where I was getting out of things, gradually reducing my workload," Whitehead said to me recently. "But the Governor twisted my arm quite hard."

Whitehead is gracious and affable. Although he is not a native New Yorker -- he grew up in Montclair, New Jersey, and didn't move into the city full time until his children were grown -- he has close ties to both the business and civic communities. I had lunch with him a few weeks ago at the Links Club, a small private club in a neo-Georgian town house on East Sixty-second Street. Whitehead is a man of medium height, with gray hair and a craggy look that calls to mind a prosperous New England farmer. He is eighty, but he looks ten years younger. "I didn't realize how complicated this problem is," he said. "Everything is interrelated. You can't build a building without subways to get to it, and power and communications -- all of this has to be planned. The other thing that surprised me is the complexities of the constituencies. There are the families of the victims. They have suffered the most. Then, there are the residents of the area, and the commuters who come from New Jersey, Staten Island, the Bronx -- they all have a harder time now. And there are small shopkeepers whose businesses were badly damaged, and developers, and heads of big companies, and culture and the arts and education. There are fifty thousand students down there. All of this has to be taken into consideration."