If you have not laid eyes on the World Trade Center site for a while, the view now is nothing short of astonishing. It looks like a space for human beings. Much of the plaza has been set up; swamp oaks have been planted; fountains are running inside the two giant squares that were the footprints of the towers destroyed 10 years ago; the names of the dead are inscribed along the borders of the squares.

Every week, a new floor rises at the main skyscraper, 1 World Trade Center. As of Tuesday, it stood 78 stories tall, on the way to 104.

Not long ago, the 16 acres of ground zero seemed hopelessly lodged in the permafrost of 9/11. Now the first great public works project of the 21st century in New York is emerging. We live in an age in which some things do actually get done.

In 2008, a man named Christopher O. Ward, who had held government jobs in New York for 25 years, once ran a stevedoring business, and had a master’s degree in theological studies from Harvard, took over the project; he was named executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey by Gov. David A. Paterson.