UP FROM ZERO.(Brief Article)

When Larry Silverstein, the developer who leased the World Trade Center from the Port Authority, said that the best thing to do after September 11th would be to rebuild the twin hundred-and-ten-story towers in the form of four fifty-story towers, nobody took him seriously. His idea had neither the dignity that the circumstances demanded nor the daring to inspire something brilliant and new. Silverstein's plan seemed hopelessly banal.

Never underestimate the power of banality--at least, not in the world of New York real estate. Last week, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation unveiled what it billed as six different "concept plans" for Ground Zero, and all six of them looked a lot like what Silverstein proposed nine months ago. That isn't surprising, because, while the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation was created to figure out what to do at Ground Zero, the Port Authority has been setting the parameters, and what it wants is for the site to keep producing cash. The schemes do include a few amenities, like streets, that had been overlooked when the Trade Center was designed, in the nineteen-sixties. They also include a bigger, grander train station, which would link the subway to the PATH trains, in a "Grand Central for downtown," and they set aside a portion of the sixteen-acre site for a memorial. But they all start with the idea of building a cluster of medium-sized skyscrapers that, as the Port Authority required, would replace all the office space that was destroyed--eleven million square feet of it, as much as there is in downtown St. Louis. In addition, the six plans call for building more than half a million square feet of retail space, which is the equivalent of dropping a good-sized suburban mall into lower Manhattan.

That would be fine if lower Manhattan were Tyson's Corners, or the Houston Galleria, or one of those pseudo-cities that dot the American landscape. But it wasn't like those places before September 11th, and it is even less like them now. The issue isn't whether there should be commercial development at the site. The terrorists wanted to destroy the business of the city, and it is right, even necessary, that commercial life should flourish as part of the act of restoration. But the starting point of any design has to be what is best for the city, not what is best for the balance sheet of the real-estate developer and the landlord.

People feel proprietary about Ground Zero, and their passion makes planning all the harder. Everyone has his or her own notion of what to do, and those notions are subject to change, for a variety of motives and reasons. Governor Pataki, who, along with Governor James McGreevey, of New Jersey, controls the Port Authority, is fond of using words like "hallowed ground" when he talks about the site. But the people who report to him talk about "obligations to leaseholders" and "obligations to bondholders." The Governor certainly wouldn't use such words in an election year, but his tacit approval of the six plans suggests that he is perfectly comfortable letting the Port Authority regard Ground Zero mainly as a real-estate opportunity. In fact, if there was ...