Bronze businessman reclaims his seat at World Trade Center site

NYT: Familiar Figure Reclaims His Seat, and He's Not Moving
By DAVID W. DUNLAP
Published: June 2, 2006


Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times
"Double Check," a sculpture by J. Seward Johnson, sits unobtrusively in the former Liberty Park, renovated and renamed for John E. Zuccotti.

The man with the attaché case is back.

The lifelike, life-sized bronze businessman preparing anxiously on a park bench for his next meeting was a fondly regarded figure and a symbol of Lower Manhattan's survival after 9/11. Cleaned up and dusted off, he returned to his seat yesterday cater-corner from the World Trade Center site.

Construction barriers came down before dawn around what was formerly known as Liberty Park, a privately owned public space of slightly more than half an acre. Its 10-month, $8.2 million renovation was financed by Brookfield Properties, the owners of 1 Liberty Plaza, a 54-story skyscraper across Liberty Street whose original developers were permitted in 1968 to build 500,000 extra square feet of office space in return for providing the park.

Almost nothing about the park — renamed for John E. Zuccotti, the chairman of Brookfield in the United States — resembles the place that existed before Sept. 11, 2001. It had been little more than a barren expanse in the years after the attack and had been closed off since the renovation started last year.

J. Seward Johnson's "Double Check," as the man in bronze is called, is now hunched on a granite bench under a London plane tree at one corner of the park. Visitors rubbed his harder-than-Brylcreemed hair yesterday and added their own impromptu touches: An eighth grader from Houston, Mark Lupton, briefly accessorized the businessman with his sunglasses and baseball cap.

In redesigning the park, Cooper Robertson & Partners sought to soften the abrupt 13-foot grade change across the site by inclining the entire park, almost imperceptibly, at 2 degrees. They planted 54 honey locusts and one plane tree....

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