When Ground Zero was finally cleared after the fall of the twin towers, New Yorkers trusted that thoughtful, ambitious urban design could make the city whole again. Why have they been so badly let down?

You see it when you whip over the Brooklyn Bridge, or look downtown crossing Sixth Avenue: eight isosceles triangles of blue glass, taller than anything else on the skyline. One World Trade Center, finally approaching completion after 13 years of trauma and backbiting, has become a familiar, serene sight to New Yorkers – from a distance, at least.

Up close, at the foot of the tallest building in America, it’s a different story. Trucks pull in and out of construction sites. Commuters trek through scaffolding and mazes of blue tarp. Office workers shove aside dawdling tourists, or try to. Advertisements promise forthcoming luxury boutiques, while street merchants sell New York Police Department jackets for dogs. It is at once a place of frenzy and flatness. From some angles it looks like the future of New York – from others, not like New York at all.

In the plaza that many New Yorkers still call Ground Zero, two towers are open for business: 7WTC, a smaller building north of the site completed in 2006, and 4WTC, a sublime new office building to the east. But 1WTC – thankfully no longer called the “Freedom Tower” – has had its opening pushed back several times, and now seems set to welcome its first tenants in early 2015. Two further towers are deferred: 3WTC has had construction halted at eight storeys, while 2WTC has not yet begun to rise, and may never.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest One World Trade Center seen from Fulton Street in the financial district

Also delayed is a new public transportation terminus for the World Trade Center site: the PATH (Port Authority Trans-Hudson) train, which connects Manhattan to New Jersey. Designed by Santiago Calatrava – currently being sued by his hometown of Valencia in connection with his crumbling Palau de les Arts – it should open in 2015, a full six years behind schedule, and comes with a $4bn (£2.5bn) price tag that exceeds the initial budget twice over.



And sitting in the middle of all of this is the memorial: two gargantuan fountains, each filling the exact footprint of one of Minoru Yamasaki’s destroyed towers, ringed by bronze railings bearing the victims’ names and set in an oversized, largely bare quadrangle. The only building on the superblock where the towers once stood is a small pavilion leading into the underground National September 11 Memorial Museum, which finally opened in May complete with airport-style security checkpoints.

Greenwich Street, a north-south axis eliminated by the old twin towers superblock, may have been reestablished to connect the site with Tribeca to the north. But the World Trade Center has not yet cohered into an organic, constituent part of the city. Office workers are nearly absent on the giant parvis, while tourists snapping selfies on the site of a mass murder stick to a few well-trafficked routes, beelining down Liberty Street and Vesey Street, as if the place was divorced from New York’s thrumming grid.

You would have thought that, 13 years after the attacks of 9/11, the outcome of the largest and most closely watched building project in the United States would be clearer. But the World Trade Center is still in limbo, its future as uncertain as New York’s.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest One World Trade Center reflected in the glass facade of Four World Trade Center

A global, national and local catastrophe



The murder of nearly 3,000 people on 11 September 2001 was a national and international disaster. So were the wars and retributions that came after. But it was also a local catastrophe with an immediate political impact: it redeemed New York’s unpopular mayor, Rudy Giuliani, and opened the door for the election of Mike Bloomberg, the second Republican in a row in this overwhelmingly Democratic city. And there were hellish consequences for downtown’s infrastructure and economy; this was an attack on buildings and streets and tunnels and infrastructure, and its consequences not just political but urban too.

In the wake of the attacks George Pataki, a Republican then serving as governor of the state of New York, established the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC), a commission of experts tasked with disbursing federal funds and supervising reconstruction efforts. The LMDC was challenged to imagine a new World Trade Center, but it also had to satisfy two big stakeholders: the site’s owner, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (a laughably incompetent and allegedly corrupt agency that also manages New York’s decrepit airports and bus terminal), and Larry Silverstein, a billionaire real estate developer who had leased the twin towers in a privatisation scheme in July 2001, and thus had a legal right to rebuild.

Pataki, who in those years of terror and illiberalism deluded himself that he might be president one day, milked his moment in the spotlight by insisting that “we will never build where the towers stood. They will always be a lasting memorial for those that we lost.” It was the first of many political decrees with direct, and not altogether salutary, urban consequences. From the start, the new World Trade Center could not be a living place that also memorialised the dead. It had to make their deaths visible at demagogic scale, 180 feet square times two.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest One World Trade Center from the top of Four World Trade Center

Such was the backdrop for the design competition, a roller-coaster of an architectural showdown that brought out the worst in New York. A first round of entries was thrown out. Many big names stayed away – Rem Koolhaas, always the smartest man in the profession, figured out fast that he’d have more luck building in China. And the two finalists offered strongly divergent masterplans.



One, featuring a sunken memorial surrounded by a ring of five towers, came from Daniel Libeskind, who declared himself “the people’s architect” and took to wearing an American flag lapel pin at meetings. The other proposed a pair of massive, ghostly latticework structures, with a museum, a conference centre and theatre suspended above the twin towers’ footprints. This ambitious, less commercial proposal (which Libeskind publicly called “Stalinist”) was the work of Think, an ad hoc international team led by Rafael Viñoly, Shigeru Ban and especially the late Frederic Schwartz, a civic-minded architect often called the conscience of Ground Zero, who attended every meeting and ceremony and spoke frequently to victims’ families.

On 25 February 2003 – three weeks before the start of the Iraq war, which George W Bush tried to wage in the name of the World Trade Center dead – the LMDC chose Think, and informed Schwartz and Viñoly that they had won. They thought the decision was final. But the next day, Pataki and Bloomberg overruled their own committee (“There’s no goddamn way I’m going to build those skeletons,” Pataki told its chairman). Libeskind suddenly got the job, setting in motion all the compromises and confusion that have come since.



By overruling his own committee, and by imposing Libeskind’s more traditional sequence of towers over Think’s innovative lattice structure, Pataki played directly into the hands of the man who more than anyone has shaped the new World Trade Center. That man is Larry Silverstein, a developer who not only sued his insurers for a double payout (there were two planes – pay me twice!) but also United and American Airlines for allowing the hijackers onboard. Proprietor of the twin towers for less than two months before they were destroyed, Silverstein has since pressured federal, state and city governments for billions of dollars in subsidies and tax abatements, shovelling risk and expense on to the public while ensuring profits accrue to himself. A grandmaster of state capitalism, Silverstein has held on through the endless delays, defections and budget overruns, outplaying not just Libeskind but the Port Authority too, and leaving no one in doubt that the most public tragedy in New York’s history took place on his private construction site.



Silverstein is no philistine – he is a significant philanthropist in New York – but he was not about to let aesthetic concerns override financial ones. On his watch, Libeskind’s designs were simplified almost to the point of disappearance, minimising their jagged forms into corporate quiescence. 1WTC – which Pataki (not Libeskind, as is often erroneously assumed) smarmily christened the “Freedom Tower” – would henceforth be designed by David Childs of the mega-firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. The pinnacle height remains 1,776 feet (after the year of the Declaration of Independence), but only thanks to an accounting trick: that measurement counts the antenna. Libeskind, after suing Silverstein and then settling with him, still has the title of master planner of the World Trade Center, even though almost nothing on the site is his idea.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The new New York skyline: Lower Manhattan from the Empire State Building

A tranquilised New York

The tallest tower may glint on the New York skyline, but the site itself has receded from the public imagination. Delays became commonplace, markets collapsed, and major developments that should have stoked democratic anger elicited, in Bloomberg’s tranquilised New York, only bored acceptance. Back in 2006, at the end of his 12-year governorship, Pataki and Bloomberg brokered a deal to have the Port Authority take over construction of 1WTC, providing Silverstein a huge cut in rent on the remaining towers. It made New Yorkers perpetual landlords of a commercially unviable goliath, but nobody cared. Even when Occupy Wall Street electrified downtown New York in the autumn of 2011, neither the protesters nor their antagonists paid much attention to the giant tower rising one block away, which has cost $3.8bn in public funds – the world’s priciest skyscraper by far, more than twice the cost of the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai – and is at least partly to blame for climbing tolls on the city’s bridges and tunnels and a lack of funds to repair the city’s reprehensible infrastructure.

In Libeskind’s original vision, 1WTC was to be a jagged asymmetrical spire, rhyming somewhat with his fractured Jewish Museum in Berlin or Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. Under Childs, it has become a leaden, compromised behemoth, whose chamfered corners resolve into a ho-hum sequence of triangular curtain walls. It’s tall, you can give it that – but at ground level, and for 15 storeys above that, 1WTC is a grim, unfenestrated fortress, cloaked in glass but made of concrete, on the orders of the New York Police Department. The post-2001 security state is inscribed on the World Trade Center, in visible and invisible ways. The new buildings incorporate extra emergency stairwells and bomb-resistant cores, while the streets are studded with bollards, and well-armed officers patrol the memorial square.



Silverstein has redeemed himself somewhat with the opening of the first of his three large towers – one of the finest works of architecture to arise in New York in years. At 978 feet, 4WTC is the seventh tallest building in New York, but unlike other recent skyscrapers – Renzo Piano’s New York Times headquarters in Midtown, say, or the outrageous One57, a supertall condo for absentee billionaires – Fumihiko Maki’s tower, composed of two blocks of broad dark glass, withdraws into the sky and almost disappears on sunny days. 4WTC also has a commercial facade facing Church Street, one block east of the memorial, which will reportedly host a branch of the gourmet Italian food market known as Eataly, whose mobbed Chelsea location sees legions of gluttonous patrons snapping pictures of themselves with imported hams. Here you can see New York’s urban future more clearly: luxuries before necessities, consumption as culture – this is the grand Bloomberg legacy, and it is written across downtown everywhere from Broadway to Battery Park.



As for 2 and 3WTC, their fate remains uncertain, since nobody seems too keen on leasing in the buildings that are already on the market. Condé Nast, publisher of Vogue and the New Yorker, has rented 25 floors in 1WTC, aided by millions of dollars in tax incentives – the Port Authority even took on Condé’s current lease in Times Square. But despite the cachet of Anna Wintour and friends, 1WTC remains almost half empty. In the last three years, just one private company has inked a lease in the tallest building in New York, an advertising agency that took the 87th floor. The 16 floors beneath that are all yours if you want them, though even after a price chop last spring they’re still $69 a square foot, well above market average.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A timelapse film of the construction of One World Trade Center, courtesy of EarthCam

4WTC, which belongs to Silverstein even while being funded with $1bn in financing from the Port Authority, had no renters for years except the city of New York and the Port Authority itself. (This May, 4WTC finally landed a private sector tenant, another ad agency.) 3WTC, designed by Richard Rogers, now seems a goer after yet another ad agency, this one a WPP subsidiary, signed on as principal tenant. 2WTC, Norman Foster’s, has had interest from bailed-out Citigroup but nothing definite.



But economics were never the motivating factor at the World Trade Center at least on the government’s side. Lower Manhattan lost approximately 11 million square feet of office space on 9/11, but the 5 million square feet of 1 and 4WTC got dumped on the market in the wake of Lehman Brothers’ collapse, which led to significant restructuring in the financial sector – traditionally the biggest renters downtown. The urban design of the World Trade Center has always been negotiated at the unhealthy conjunction point of sentimentality and commerce, with political and emotional desires jostling against hard-edged business motives. Cannier private developers have played that sentimentality to their advantage. Public interests have not been so lucky.

Short straw

If you really want to see how the public drew the short straw at the World Trade Center, go underground. Public transportation should have been the glory of any downtown redevelopment: nearly all of the city’s subway lines converge in Lower Manhattan, along with the commuter train from New Jersey. Yet in the summer of 2014, commuters are still trudging through a maze of temporary structures, while the World Trade Center Transportation Hub, designed by the disastrous Calatrava, languishes unfinished. The hub has metastasised into by far the most expensive rail station in history, an insane $4bn for a low-traffic terminus (the city’s 10th busiest) that doesn’t even expand capacity. Half a decade overdue, outrageously over-budget, the final design will not even incorporate Calatrava’s spiffier elements: the “wings” of the roof that could be opened on sunny days are now non-functional. It is a bona fide catastrophe, especially considering the woeful state of New York’s subways; a new line along Second Avenue has now been delayed for 85 years.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest One World Trade Center

Then there are the memorial and museum, which have had mixed fortunes. The museum, which opened in May and elicited criticism for its exhibitions and its tacky gift shop, has been attracting visitors – out-of-towners mostly – despite its $24 admissions charge (a consequence of he-said she-said bickering between federal and local governments as to who should support the institution). Its main exhibition spaces lie down at bedrock, facing the huge slurry wall that kept the Hudson River from flooding the lower levels of the twin towers, and which held fast on 9/11. Whatever the museum’s faults, this moist industrial wall, stretching 68 feet up, is something to see. It is the one major evocation of the original World Trade Center that remains on site, and the only place where I feel the sadness, hope and civic righteousness that the new World Trade Center ought to inspire.



Libeskind’s masterplan would have placed the memorial to the dead against the slurry wall, but that got scrapped too. Instead it is at street level, in a massive new square whose few trees and benches don’t do enough to make it work as a public space. The memorial, designed by Michael Arad, does at least evade the rightwing kitsch of some other 9/11 commemorations (nearby is a despotic bronze statue of an American soldier on horseback, paid for by private funds). But its remembrance-for-dummies style – the names of the dead plus waterfalls, at the giant scale Pataki demanded – hasn’t commended it to New Yorkers, and while it looks alright from the 57th floor balcony of 4WTC, at ground level it remains divorced from the fabric of the city.

On three visits this summer, I found the site busy every day. Children run about, untroubled by the security apparatus, and the volume is loud; it is a site of amusement rather than meditation. Fine, but then where are the office workers, where are the apartment dwellers of Battery Park? If it isn’t contemplative, shouldn’t it be urban? What should have been the centre of a massive redevelopment, one for locals and visitors alike, has instead become a lacuna in New York’s grid, a foreign exclave in the middle of a city of eight million.



As for the future of culture at the World Trade Center, that may be the trickiest problem of all. Numerous cultural institutions, among them the Signature Theatre, the Drawing Centre and the now-defunct New York City Opera, had envisioned a move downtown. But during the planning process Pataki, still in presidential-wannabe mode, proclaimed: “We will not tolerate anything on that site that denigrates America, denigrates New York or freedom” – and this threat of censorship was enough to send many prospective tenants packing. A site is still designated for a cultural institution, but its location between 1WTC and the PATH terminal guarantees headaches for construction, and Frank Gehry, the project’s initial architect, was dismissed last week. Still, there will be Eataly, there will be 50 different kinds of olive oil to buy! In the city that Bloomberg made, that may be culture enough.

The view from 4WTC

Street-level politics

When the pit was at last cleared, the remains of the dead accounted for and the carcinogenic rubble carted away, New York was ready to wager that thoughtful, ambitious urban design could make the city whole again – or remake it, actually, as something even better than the financial capital disrupted by Yamasaki’s superblock. It didn’t happen. But 13 years on, it’s easier to see the World Trade Center as something more complicated than an autonomous urban design debacle. Rather, it is a symptom of larger urban conditions that, even with the election of the leftwing Bill de Blasio as our new mayor, show no signs of abating.



In the early 2000s, lower Manhattan was principally a site of trauma. In 2014 it evokes other, fresher troubles, among them massive income inequality, the impunity of the financial sector, a do-nothing Congress and a state government corrupted beyond redemption, and a record tourist influx that’s the flipside of the city’s gentrification and pacification. Politics play out on the level of the street. Aesthetics and design are not enough.



Ultimately, the moral of the new World Trade Center is that you can’t just plug an urban scheme into a grid and wait for results. You need community, solidarity and civic virtue – ideals that flickered for a moment in the hazy, uncertain days of late 2001, but that disappeared in the era of Bloomberg and were replaced by the privatisation and oligarchy that are the hallmarks of the 21st century.

Public infrastructure has languished while private arrangements have grown. Billions and billions of public dollars have been drained while private cash has been hoarded. And New York now has a modestly improved street plan, one great tower, a few OK ones, an acceptable museum, an unworthy memorial, a scandalous transit hub and, sooner or later, a lot of new places to shop. The World Trade Center: it could have been worse! But if that’s all we expect from New York, then maybe we should move somewhere where the average rent isn’t $3,451 a month.

Vivienne Gucwa’s new book is NY Through the Lens