The End of Ground Zero

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August, 2003

The End of Ground Zero

By Jim Scanlon


What was once known as "Ground Zero", the smoldering, smoking pile of spaghetti like tangled steel that was once the World Trade Center, has been replaced by a bright, open, orderly, sunny space. The viewing stands are now gone as are the masses of tourists, the flags, the piles of dead flower bouquets, simple offerings and dedications that lined sidewalks, fences and walls around the site. Now, you can walk right up to the edge of the hole in the ground and see-a huge construction site, just below street level-not a destruction site. The funeral seems to be over.

It is not at all exactly clear what will be built exactly where, but construction has already been started on a smallish building on the northern edge of the site by Larry "Lucky Larry" Silverstein, a New York property magnate who leased the Towers owned by the Port Authority 12 weeks before they were attacked and destroyed by fanatical Muslims, mostly from Saudi Arabia.

Silverstein had control for three weeks. He had leased the Towers for 99 years, for $3,2 billion paying reportedly $616 million down and, perhaps, $14 million from his personal fortune. He was sensible enough to insure his lease on ten million square feet of office space, space he now wants to replace. He seems to represent the practical, business point of view, that the site must be developed quickly, maximizing its potential for commerce. Honoring the thousands who died there is important, but not most important.

Less clearly defined, but exercising great influence, are organizations representing "The Families" (of victims) and Police and Firefighters who died in the attack, who want little or nothing built on top of the "hallowed ground" over which the Twin Towers once stood. This view has been ridiculed as "the most expensive graveyard in history." For a while, even the residue of the debris left at the Staten Island Dump, from which body parts and personal property were extracted, was referred to as "hallowed ground" but this movement, if it ever was a movement, is now dead.

The vexing problem facing New York is how to combine the two points of view --- and how to come up with the money.

The plan of the Berlin based Daniel Liebskind Studio, the winner of the design competition for reconstructing the site, is at odds with Mr. Silverstein who has, or will have, the insurance money which might be as much as $7.2 billion, certainly not much in Pentagon dollars, but quite a lot in New York dollars, which, if money talks anywhere, it talks, and is understood, on Wall Street, just a few blocks away. The New York Times has been writing very diplomatic editorials on the subject, a sure sign that a quiet but titanic struggle is going on behind the scenes. Very New York!

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