Port Authority of New York and New Jersey

Even before the fires were extinguished at ground zero, everyone agreed that St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church at 155 Cedar Street — crushed by the collapse of 2 World Trade Center — would rise again.

For 10 years, however, no one has agreed exactly where it would rise, what sort of engineering would be needed to build it, how large it should be and who should pay for it. Discussions turned into negotiations. Negotiations turned into litigation. And the tiny congregation of St. Nicholas remained homeless. (The members now worship at SS. Constantine and Helen Cathedral in Brooklyn.)

On Friday, after a combined feat of political arm-twisting and reverse engineering, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo; Archbishop Demetrios, the primate of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America; and Christopher O. Ward, the executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, announced that the new church would be constructed at Liberty and Greenwich Streets, exactly where it was envisioned three years ago but on a plot of 4,100 square feet, about two-thirds the size of the site in the earlier plan.

“We lost St. Nicholas Church in the destruction of Sept. 11, and for too long its future has been uncertain,” Mr. Cuomo said in a statement issued after the agreement was signed in the governor’s Midtown office.

The church, which is to include a nondenominational bereavement center, will sit on a platform above the helical underground ramp of the vehicle security center, through which trucks and buses will travel from street level to the subterranean loading and parking areas serving the new World Trade Center.

A smaller church building will allow engineers to take advantage of the current design of that helical ramp, thereby eliminating the need for the extensive redesign and structural reinforcement that the larger plans would have required. Because there will be no fundamental change to the underground layout, officials of the state and the archdiocese said the St. Nicholas project would not delay or impede construction of the vehicle security center, which is expected to be completed in 2013.

The Port Authority estimates that it will spend about $25 million to construct the platform on which St. Nicholas will sit and provide the necessary utility hookups. The authority had balked at earlier estimates of $40 million, and it will not make a $20 million contribution to the archdiocese, as had been contemplated in earlier discussions.

From the platform up, financing would be the church’s responsibility. While it is impossible to estimate the cost with any precision until the church has been designed, the Rev. Mark Arey, the ecumenical officer of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese and a spokesman for the rebuilding effort, said a $10 million construction budget would not surprise him. With a base of several million dollars of spontaneous contributions, in addition to insurance proceeds, Father Arey said that sum could be raised quickly.

St. Nicholas is effectively swapping the empty parcel it still owns at 155 Cedar Street for the right to build its new church at Liberty and Greenwich Streets. The agreement also calls for an end to the lawsuit that the church brought in February against the Port Authority in federal court. Mr. Cuomo inherited the impasse and moved forcefully to resolve it: The New York Post reported last week that he brought in the construction executive Peter M. Lehrer to serve as a kind of mediator and expediter among the parties. “We are finally returning this treasured place of reflection to where it belongs,” Mr. Cuomo said Friday.

Father Arey said it was too early to predict whether St. Nicholas would have a dome. “It will look like an Orthodox church,” he said, “while the emphasis will be to be spiritually and contextually harmonious with the neighborhood.”

Speaking of the 2001 attack, Father Arey said: “It wasn’t just an act of terrorism. It was an act of religious hatred at some level. Rebuilding the only house of worship destroyed on 9/11 is important for the psyche and the soul of the nation.”