Ideas for Ground Zero: Where’s the Imagination?

For those who have been following the development process at ground zero, the six master plans for the 16-acre site in Lower Manhattan will offer no bold surprises. Bland and conventional, the proposals represent the kind of no-nonsense, ho-hum design we have come to expect from the average real estate development.

The plans, produced by Beyer Blinder Belle Architects & Planners, were unveiled Tuesday by the Lower Manhattan Development Corp., the agency charged with developing the site. They will be presented today at a town hall meeting at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in Manhattan. The agency’s intent is to use the plans as a starting point for a more detailed public discussion over the site’s future.

The designs vary widely in detail, in particular in how they deal with the memorial park--proposed sizes range from five to 10 acres. Three proposals would build over the footprint of one of the former Twin Towers, a move strenuously objected to by the families of the victims and New York Gov. George E. Pataki.

But ultimately, the designs reveal how fixed many of the initial planning decisions seem to be. In each, significant portions of the street grid that was removed in the 1970s would be rebuilt, dividing the 16-acre site into smaller parcels. Part of West Street would be replaced by an underground tunnel to connect the site to nearby Battery Park City. About 11 million square feet of commercial office space and 600,000 square feet of retail space would be replaced. And all of the plans include a museum and one or two cultural venues. Most of these ideas were formulated within months of the September attacks.

What the proposals lack is any sense of the site’s importance as a monumental expression of one of the most tragic events in the nation’s history. Instead, in applying conventional development formulas to a site so loaded with symbolic meaning, the plans are the equivalent of an act of psychological repression. They seek to forget the past rather than come to terms with it. As such, they fail to rise to the level of thoughtfulness that the public has a right to expect.

One proposal should be dismissed out of hand. In it, a new street grid would cut through the site of the South Tower, which would be partially covered with commercial buildings.

In two other designs, a museum or pavilion would be built on the site of one of the towers.

These proposals are apt to encounter intense resistance from victim’s families, who have stated that they consider the footprints of the Twin Towers sacred territory. Building on top of them--without even acknowledging their presence through the design--is a startling offense to memory.

The three other proposals concentrate the bulk of commercial development in a series of towers clustered along the site’s northern and western edges, with memorial parks located where the towers once stood. All three set the museum along West Street, an obvious effort to provide a cultural bridge between the site and Battery Park City to the west.

The most unusual plan calls for an oblong Beaux Arts-inspired park that connects to a grand boulevard extending all the way down to the tip of Battery Park City. The park’s formal layouts suggest the kind of imperial grandeur associated with Washington rather than New York, and it seems particularly inappropriate for a site that is more about mourning than civic power.

In effect, all six designs mirror the kind of New Urbanist thinking that has dominated conventional development design for a decade. Wholly unimaginative, they seek to replicate the fine-grained fabric of traditional cities, but on a massive scale. The result is theme park architecture.

When the plans diverge from that model, they usually tend toward the bizarre. In one proposal, a multilevel public walkway would flank the memorial park on four sides. The arcade has no discernable relationship to the various buildings, and it serves to isolate the park from its surrounding context.

In another, an elevated pedestrian deck would span West Street, linking the site to the upper level of the World Financial Center’s winter garden, effectively draining pedestrian life from the street.

What all of these proposals share is an inability to resolve the colliding interests of developers and the public. The LMDC has been under intense pressure to come up with a final master plan for the site by December. Yet it has yet to determine which parts of the site should be given over to commercial development and which should remain an inviolate part of the public realm.

Developers and businessmen have been lobbying the agency to rebuild as much commercial and retail space as possible to buttress downtown’s flagging real estate market. The Port Authority, which owns the land, also has a vested interest in the plan’s commercial component, which is expected to generate more than $120 million a year in revenue for the agency. It is in its interest to begin reconstruction as quickly as possible.

The public, meanwhile, expects a plan that will reflect the pain it now associates with the site. It’s becoming increasingly apparent that the public requires more time to absorb and understand the scope of the catastrophe. Without that time, it may be impossible to find a meaningful expression of how best to rebuild.

Rather than try to come to terms with such complex issues, the LMDC has chosen to adopt the kind of public-private development process that has become the primary vehicle for large-scale development in most American cities. They have sought the advice of mainstream developers and the type of architects that typically serve their interests instead of opening up the process to a variety of urban thinkers.

Soon after the September attacks, for example, Larry Silverstein, the developer who holds the lease to the World Trade Center site, retained Skidmore, Owings & Merrill to develop its own master plan for the site. Similarly, Brookfield Properties Corp., which owns the nearby World Financial Center, commissioned Cooper, Robertson & Partners to develop its own scheme. Both plans have had a significant impact in shaping the current designs.

The result is a series of proposals that neatly parcels off the site’s competing interests into separate zones, commercial on one side, memorial on the other. The inclusion of housing as a major component of the plan, an idea that has been suggested by a number of outside urban planners, has been dropped because it would require a compromise, mainly on the part of the development community.

In an effort to meet its December deadline, the LMDC may end up simply acceding part of the site to commercial developers. The agency will then have more time to turn its attention to the project’s public components--the memorial park, the museum and the cultural buildings. In a best-case scenario, it will organize a competition and invite the world’s most celebrated architects to take part.

This would be a compromise solution. It would effectively guarantee the creation of a cluster of unimaginative towers at one end of the site.

But it may avoid a worse tragedy: allowing a substandard design team to rush to complete a rigid master plan, and then asking architects and artists to plug in their designs for the memorial and one or two cultural venues.

It would certainly preclude the kind of complex, imaginative urban project that could have risen to the high standards that the site demands. At best, it will produce a development similar to the nearby Battery Park City, with one or two exceptional architectural landmarks lost in a sea of conventional buildings.

That would be acceptable anywhere else. But a decade from now when the reconstruction of ground zero is finally complete, it will exist as a symbol of the best this country can produce, of its most lasting values as a culture with immense power and influence on the world. Those responsible for its development would do well to remember that simple fact.