Scrappy! But his plan may be scrapped

For a long while, it seemed the planning process at New York’s World Trade Center site couldn’t possibly get any more depressingly contentious. But the last six weeks have brought an entirely new level of grandstanding and ill will to the project. Indeed, as Daniel Libeskind, the master planner for the site, arrives in Los Angeles for a lecture Tuesday night at Walt Disney Concert Hall, he leaves behind a rebuilding effort that has flown almost completely off the rails.

Real momentum has been gathering behind the notion that the best thing to do at this stage is simply start fresh with a new master plan -- produced, presumably, without significant input from Libeskind. Those discussions are happening behind the scenes, to be sure; they have also been playing out, in ridiculous as well as meaningful ways, in the New York press, for all to see.

There was Donald Trump on the cover of the tabloids two weeks ago, using trouble at ground zero as a way to promote the flagging third season of “The Apprentice,” and calling Libeskind an “egghead” who had produced an “egghead design.”

Trump holds no power over the site and has no hope of gaining any. That didn’t keep him from holding a news conference to say he wanted to take over and rebuild the towers almost exactly as they were -- but one floor taller, proving to the terrorists that although we may not have read our Jane Jacobs, we do mean business.

Then there was Ed Hayes, Libeskind’s lawyer and a close ally of New York Gov. George Pataki, the only politician with direct control over the site, telling New York magazine that the rebuilding had become a total “mess.” Except the adjective Hayes used was not “total” but something much more emphatic.

Finally there was Paul Goldberger, usually a voice of reasoned, even cautious criticism, writing in the New Yorker last week that ground zero had become “a planning and political catastrophe,” and suggesting that the whole master plan be tossed out in favor of experimental architecture and housing at the site.

Libeskind’s plan has been in trouble before. He has battled with developer Larry Silverstein, who holds a 99-year lease on the site. He has endured a tense collaboration on its signature building, the Freedom Tower, with Silverstein’s handpicked architect, David Childs. He has adjusted to a series of infrastructural changes mandated by bureaucrats deep within the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the land where the twin towers stood.

But through it all, Libeskind didn’t just soldier on but wore a happy, even giddy face. He was confident that the most-watched architectural project in American history, if nothing else, would prominently bear his name. After all, he had won that right in a sometimes tense international competition in 2003.

His scheme for the 16-acre site combined the rawness of a wound -- it included a major section open all the way down to bedrock -- with a soaring collection of jagged, crystalline skyscrapers, capped off by the 1776-foot-high Freedom Tower. Alone among the master-plan contenders, Libeskind had managed, with a forest of metaphor, to camouflage the preposterous idea that the site should be rebuilt to hold the same 10 million square feet of office space as did the old World Trade Center, despite a moribund market for commercial real estate in the area.

So what if every questionable concession to Silverstein, every bit of frantic spin when things went wrong, made Libeskind’s long-standing reputation as an avant-garde architect look more absurd?

The title alone -- Master Planner, Ground Zero -- was a golden ticket. It earned him admission into the rarefied world of celebrity architects and bold-faced names and onto the sort of lecture series, such as the one at Disney Hall, that includes Bill Clinton, Tom Brokaw and Queen Noor of Jordan. It helped him land new work around the world, including condominium jobs in Denver and Covington, Ky. and a casino commission in Singapore.

It also turned him almost overnight from a deep-thinking, black-clad architect with one significant project to his credit -- the Jewish Museum in Berlin -- into an operator. The surprising thing was how enthusiastic, if sometimes amateurish, Libeskind proved to be in that role.

Even on the darkest days -- when Michael Arad’s memorial design was chosen despite its obvious incompatibility with the master plan, for example, or when Silverstein unexpectedly won one round of his insurance lawsuit late last year, giving the developer more cash and clout -- it must have seemed like a pretty good trade-off.

Even after all this time, the truth is that the master plan exists mostly on paper. Though Pataki held a self-congratulatory “groundbreaking” ceremony for the Freedom Tower last July 4, construction has yet to begin on that building -- or on the memorial, for which money is still being raised.

The unveiling of a handsome if bloated design for the museum building on the edge of the memorial, by the Norwegian firm Snohetta, did bring a measure of good news. But Frank Gehry’s performing arts complex, also awaiting funding, remains merely a concept.

The event that spawned the latest chaos was a letter last month from the New York Police Department and its commissioner, Raymond Kelly, raising issues about the safety of the proposed Freedom Tower. However serious the NYPD’s concerns, which have to do mostly with the building’s vulnerability to truck bombs, they arrived belatedly, to say the least.

Yet Libeskind’s hold on the Freedom Tower has been so tenuous in recent months that the letter -- which had “pretext” written all over it -- was enough to knock him off the job altogether. Pataki quickly announced that he was asking Childs alone to produce a new design for the skyscraper in six weeks -- just in time, perhaps, for another Fourth of July news conference.

At the same time, the governor was taking administrative steps to reassert his power downtown, naming his chief of staff, John Cahill, to a newly created position that might be called rebuilding czar.

As Pataki made those chess moves, Libeskind could do little but fall back on his cheery refrains, which are full of folksy idioms bordering on cliche. In a phone interview last week from his New York office, he reached deep for one last burst of optimism, calling the latest upheavals “bumps in the road.”

“Look, this process is not easy,” he said. “I don’t want to mislead anyone, but this is democracy. You fight for what you believe in, and it can be a struggle. But in the end I think the results will speak for themselves, despite all the naysayers.”

He added that the main components of his master plan remain in place. “You’ve got a memorial at the center going down to bedrock,” he said. “And you’re distributing 10 million square feet of space in a spiraling configuration of towers, ending in the Freedom Tower. In a sense, maybe what’s happening now is that we’re going back to fundamentals.”

If you wanted to be cynical about it -- and when it comes to ground zero, that’s the only approach now that seems to make any sense -- you could argue that Libeskind might have the last laugh. He may be able to float calmly away from the planning process in the coming months on a golden parachute arranged by Pataki, his former champion. It has probably dawned on Libeskind that once the public understands the extent to which the rebuilding process has been mismanaged, then being directly connected to it will be a liability rather than a career boost -- a lesson that Pataki, more than anyone, seems poised to learn the hard way.

Meanwhile, Libeskind, freed of Lower Manhattan headaches, would be able to turn his full attention to finishing all those buildings that have come his way since winning the big job in New York. Those projects, located far from the intense spotlight trained on ground zero, offer a substantial measure of control to Libeskind and the chance to prove himself a serious talent, which is about the most any architect can ask. After what he has been through, getting them built may seem refreshingly uneventful.

And so far, at least, nobody has spotted Donald Trump, David Childs or Ray Kelly sneaking around Covington, Ky.