The New Yorker: Why we should build apartments at Ground Zero

[fioco]

The New Yorker
May 30, 2005

The Sky Line

A New Beginning
Why We Should Build Apartments at Ground Zero

By Paul Goldberger

In the lives of cities, boldness and vision rarely follow catastrophe. Chicago rebuilt itself in sturdy but mundane fashion after its great fire, in 1871; it was thirty-eight years before Daniel Burnham created the sweeping master plan that gave the city much of its grandeur. After the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, the city set aside a plan to remake itself with grand boulevards and focused instead on reconstructing as much as it could on its four square miles of burned ruins. Berlin tolerated the wasteland of Potsdamer Platz in its center for more than half a century, from the Second World War to the nineteen-nineties; the void at its heart was then filled with slick but banal commercial buildings.

Still, it seemed reasonable to hope that things would be different at Ground Zero. In the anguished months after September 11th, when people eventually began thinking about what should happen to the sixteen acres that had been the site of the World Trade Center, they talked either of ambitious, utopian projects – international centers for peace, memorials in the form of great towers – or of leaving the entire site as an open public space dedicated to the people who died in the terrorist attack. There were calls to hand over a portion of the site to Frank Gehry’s audacious design for a new GuggenheimMuseum, which had been proposed for another location in lower Manhattan. Architects from Michael Graves to Paolo Soleri offered creative schemes for Ground Zero, and although many of the plans made little sense, they heightened the expectation that something extraordinary was likely to happen there – indeed, that something extraordinary had to happen, that vision and imagination were the only proper response to the tragedy.

Ground Zero, sadly, has become not a place of vision but, rather, the site of a planning and political catastrophe. In public, the planning process has been surrounded by lofty, often sanctimonious rhetoric; in private, the numerous officials and designers have squabbled ceaselessly over power and money. In the next few weeks, the planners will present a revised design for the project’s centerpiece – the FreedomTower, a seventy-story office building topped by a crown of latticed steel cables so enormous that it would have made the structure the tallest skyscraper in the world. The new design will undoubtedly look better than the present version, a clumsy hybrid of the work of two rivals: David Childs, known for his corporate skyscrapers, and Daniel Libeskind, the official master planner for Ground Zero, who is a creator of extravagant sculptural forms. Officially, the current design was derailed by security concerns. But Larry Silverstein, the tower’s developer, had been struggling for months with the planners over whether he would pay for the latticed top, or for any other element that would make the tower more than an ordinary office building.

The FreedomTower, with or without its fancy spire, is an unnecessary building. The planned skyscraper, which will contain 2.6 million square feet of commercial office space, doesn’t have a single tenant – an unsurprising fact, since the demand for commercial office space in lower Manhattan is so small that it can barely be said to exist. The tower, it seems, is being built not to ennoble, enliven, or enrich the city but to satisfy the narrow, self-interested agendas of Silverstein, who leased the TwinTowers in 2001, and the Port Authority, which build the WorldTradeCenter and still controls the land. Silverstein, for his part, is largely building with insurance money instead of borrowing, as developers usually do, and he figures that he will be well positioned in the unlikely event that the lower Manhattan office market rebounds. Meanwhile, the Port Authority receives ten million dollars a month in rent that Silverstein still pays, under the terms of his lease.

Governor George Pataki, who has overseen the rebuilding effort, bears the greatest responsibility for the failure of imagination at Ground Zero. Though he has spoken frequently about wanting to have an open and public planning process, his most important decision about the site was made in private. Not long after September 11th, he agreed to let Silverstein and the Port Authority continue to treat Ground Zero as a platform for ten and a half million square feet of commercial office space. In the emotional atmosphere that followed September 11th, it would have been easy politically for Pataki to have said he wanted to use some of the billions of dollars in insurance proceeds to buy the land back from the Port Authority and end Silverstein’s lease. But Pataki, perhaps thinking that it was in his political interest to get something built as soon as possible, was unwilling to oppose these entrenched forces.

Pataki tried to cloak expediency in the garb of majesty, but he hasn’t been able to carry off either one. The planning process has been presented as an effort to transform the site into a symbol of grace and renewal; in reality, the planners have been fixated on figuring out a way to cram a huge amount of office space into a small site. In addition to the FreedomTower, the master plan calls for four additional office towers – even though there are no prospective tenants for them, either. Less than half of the site has been set aside for a memorial and cultural buildings, not enough to make public space seem central to the project. With the focus on generating profit, it is increasingly hard to see what makes Ground Zero different from any other real-estate project in New York, except for its size and, of course, for the way in which its land became available.

Since there has never been a true public dialogue about what Ground Zero ought to be used for, it’s impossible to say what New Yorkers would prefer to see built there, but it’s clear that the answer isn’t a crowded cluster of office towers. (Donald Trump last week advocated building replicas of the TwinTowers, one story higher than the originals, but the idea of spending billions to repeat one of the major architectural mistakes of the twentieth century is even worse than the current plan.) Ground Zero doesn’t need simply to be rebuilt; it needs to be reimagined as a new district of the city, one that is both inspiring and useful. And what lower Manhattan needs now, more than anything, is housing.


In the traumatic period after the TwinTowers collapsed, most people found the notion of living at Ground Zero to be upsetting, even ghoulish. Many apartments at Battery Park City were abandoned after September 11th, and the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, the agency in charge of revitalizing downtown, had to offer subsidies to persuade new tenants to occupy them.

This aversion to living in lower Manhattan was surprisingly short-lived. There are now more residents in the area than ever before. As it turns out, September 11th only briefly interrupted a long-term trend. Manhattan has suffered from an apartment shortage for more than a decade, and people who once wouldn’t have considered living below Fourteenth Street have begun exploring options on the island’s southern tip. When the WorldTradeCenter was built, in the nineteen-seventies, almost nobody lived in lower Manhattan, but when the TwinTowers fell, there were more than fifteen thousand people living in their shadow. In the past few years, dozens of old office buildings have been transformed into apartments, bringing thousands of additional residents to lower Manhattan, and the pace of conversions ahs made many of the area’s slender prewar towers much more valuable as apartments than as offices. Even the building overlooking Ground Zero – an ornate, mansard-roofed 1907 office tower by the architect Cass Gilbert, which was badly damaged on September 11th – is being converted into a luxury-apartment complex. New condominiums have, in turn, inspired the creation of restaurants, stores, gyms, and day-care centers. Wall Street now has nearly as many residential buildings as office buildings, and Whole Foods recently signed a lease to build a supermarket on Greenwich Street. An area that once contained a scattering of isolated homesteaders is coming to seem as domestic as Carnegie Hill.

There is still time to create an intelligent plan for Ground Zero, although it is going to be harder politically, and more expensive, than it would have been if Pataki had wrested control of the site from Silverstein and the Port Authority. Fortunately, we have one advantage that we did not have then, which is that we are beyond the time when we looked at the skyline of lower Manhattan and felt a sense of shock at the absence of the TwinTowers. We can now comfortably make long-term decisions about the site.

In an ideal plan, most of Ground Zero would be devoted to housing, hotels, and retail space. Lower Manhattan currently has a range of housing options: the converted lofts of Tribeca, the converted office buildings of Wall Street, and the retro-style apartment complexes at Battery Park City. The one thing missing is experimental architecture. Ground Zero would be the perfect place for an inventive alternative to the prim, packaged urbanism of Battery Park City. Here is a chance to rewrite the city – to produce “green” buildings that generate their own energy or have walls made from recycled materials. Architects have developed a new generation of prefabricated modern houses, and Ground Zero could be the place to expand these sleek glass-and-metal boxes to monumental urban scale. Another possibility is to create modular lofts that could be easily adapted to the needs of a succession of tenants, or to integrate large gardens into high-rise living. With several blocks to build on, Ground Zero provides an opportunity to think not in terms of single buildings that are stand-alone works of sculpture but of ensembles that fit together to make coherent streetscapes and complete neighborhoods – something modern architecture has rarely succeeded in doing, in New York or anywhere else.

Daring residential design is finally beginning to appear all over Manhattan. There is, for example, a spectacular glass condominium by Winka Dubbeldam a dozen blocks north of Ground Zero, on Greenwich Street; Richard Meier’s exquisite glass apartment towers, in the WestVillage along the Hudson River, may be New York’s most coveted new address. A housing market that was once defined largely by white brick is more amenable to new architecture than it has ever been. We are at a point in time when strong architecture carries minimal risk.

What does seem risky is building office space. Not only does Larry Silverstein have to find tenants for the FreedomTower, if he builds it, but he also has to fill another building, across the street from Ground Zero, which he has already constructed: a seven-hundred-million-dollar glass tower built as a replacement for SevenWorldTradeCenter. That building, designed by David Childs, will be ready for occupancy next year. Predictably, it has no tenants.

These days, many planners and public officials try to justify building office towers at Ground Zero with words like “balance.” They argue that the demand for housing in lower Manhattan has become so great that the area is at risk of losing its identity as a strong commercial center. This view seems excessively dire: Wall Street is hardly fading into oblivion. Moreover, it seems foolhardy to interfere with the larger shifts in the evolution of lower Manhattan, especially when those trends are so healthy.

Lower Manhattan hasn’t been a truly diverse neighborhood since the nineteenth century, when the city’s center of gravity began creeping uptown and office towers started surrounding TrinityChurch, crowding out residential life. Now that the cycle has reversed, the planning for Ground Zero seems frozen in the past. Surely, it would be better to knits its sixteen acres into the vibrant new fabric of downtown.

The only element of the current plan that is worth salvaging is the need for a potent memorial. A memorial has to be not only the physical center of those sixteen acres but also the sould of the project. Daniel Libeskind, in his master plan for Ground Zero, adopted in 2003, had the brilliant notion of leaving a large section of the excavated site below ground level and incorporating a concrete retaining wall that survived the fall of the TwinTowers. This sunken space would break up the normal urban experience, creating a disquieting disruption in city life. But when a competition was held to design an actual memorial, the winners, Michael Arad and Peter Walker, produced a scheme that raised most of the memorial area back to street level. Libeskind, whose ideas for the site have been slowly undermined by Silverstein and others, was right in this case. Although the Arad and Walker plan is refined and intelligent, the danger is that the memorial will feel like an elegant park lost amid office towers.

In its current form, the memorial also feels squeezed by one of the two cultural buildings planned for the site: a wood-and-glass structure designed by the Norwegian firm Snøhetta, which will contain both the Drawing Center, a small museum, and the International Freedom Center, a new institution with the ambitious, if hazy, mandate of “helping people understand, appreciate and advance freedom as a world historical movement.” The design, which consists of a large, boxy structure made of wood set with thousands of small glass prisms, is among the most innovative pieces of architecture so far proposed for Ground Zero – a shimmering object, neither opaque nor transparent. Unfortunately, it hovers on the edge of the memorial site and, as a result, may dwarf it. And if the master plan is realized, both the Snøhetta building and a performing-arts center across the street, which is being designed by Frank Gehry, will cower directly beneath huge office buildings. The Gehry building, for its part, faces an uncertain future, owing to funding problems, and its design remains incomplete. A replanned Ground Zero would put the public realm first and the private realm second.

Moreover, most of the cultural institutions involved are marginal. Ground Zero doesn’t need expensive cultural buildings for small outfits that can’t afford them. One of the many mysteries of the planning process is why strong cultural groups that wanted to come to Ground Zero, such as the New York City Opera and the New York Hall of Science, were turned away in favor of less well known organizations, such as the JoyceInternational DanceCenter and the Signature Theatre Company. Why wasn’t space at Ground Zero given to City Opera? The planners adopted the misguided notion that smaller, populist groups were needed, when pride of place should have been given to major institutions that could make Ground Zero a cultural magnet. Perhaps City Opera was turned down because an opera house would have cut into some of Silverstein’s lobby space in the FreedomTower. An essential aspect of a revised plan for Ground Zero would be a much larger allotment for cultural buildings – enough land for an opera house, for example.

Ground Zero must also make an impression on the skyline. The FreedomTower, for all its faults, would have soared higher than any other structure in New York. Yet an office tower is not the only tall structure imaginable. A great tower can also be a broadcast tower or a cloud-piercing observation tower. It could be a memorial in itself, or a part of a memorial, and if we called it the MemorialTower it would be a feature of the skyline that recognized the lives that were lost within the skyline. The tower would be, in effect, a twenty-first century EiffelTower for New York, which would use the technology of our time as aggressively and inventively as Eiffel exploited the technology of the nineteenth century. It would be a perfect commission for Santiago Calatrava, the Spanish architect-engineer whom the Port Authority commissioned to design the new transportation center for downtown – a lyrical structure that resembles a vast, swooping tent of ribbed metal and glass. It’s the one building proposed for Ground Zero, so far, that almost everyone seems to love.

A great tower by Calatrava or another architect equally adept at turning engineering into poetic form would give New York the defiantly proud icon it has craved since the towers fell. And it wouldn’t require anybody to live or work a hundred stories above the street. Most important, it would be a way of transcending the false divide between commemoration and renewal. A soaring tower can be made to coexist with apartments and museums. The planners at Ground Zero have treated the sacred and the everyday as two distinct spheres. The answer isn’t to spit the site into a memorial sector and a business sector but, rather, to find ways to honor the dead while rejuvenating the city, to acknowledge the past while looking toward the future. Ground Zero is the first great urban-design challenge of the twenty-first century, and the noblest way to honor what happened here is to rebuild the site with the complexity and vitality that characterizes the best of Manhattan.

Volume LXXXI, No. 15, pp. 54-57, May 30, 2005, The New Yorker.

[TomAuch]

Actually I sort of agree with Goldberger on this one. I won't be upset if they eliminate one of the towers on the site and scale back to 8-9 million sqf, and I think that Calatrava would do a better job of designing the FT than Childs (I love his South Street Tower, and besides the WTC, his building will be the next most-iconic in the Lower Manhattan skyline). If they built a CN Tower-style structure, they could just turn that land back over to the PA so Silverstein won't lose money on it. However, I would also like for Lower Manhattan to recover financially, and with the rate that old buildings are being converted, that will shrink Lower Manhattan's vancacy rate to the point where it's not a big an issue.

[Fabrizio]

I often disagree with goldberger but I appreaciate his mature reasoned thinking.... no sensationalism and cheap sentiment...

[billyblancoNYC]

I can see where he's coming from. I do kinda agree about the Freedom Center building. This would be better located in place of Tower 5, and have the memorial take over that space. Next to that building, in the open space, you could put City Opera.

Then, increase the heights of the other 4, and make them all mixed-use...office, hotel, and apartments. That would really make this development more successful financially, it would allow for more height, and be more appealling aesthetically.

I do not think, however, that the area should not have office space built. That's crazy and once everything is settled, and the link to JFK is built, and new parks and schools are added, and more retail is developed, then Lower Manhattan will be almost as attractive as Midtown. Then, the need will be there.

[alex ballard]

One thought to keep in mind is that Lower Manhattan was truly meant to be a buisness center. The minute that real-estate bubble bursts, people will be heading towards the saftey of Soho or the leafy retreats of Brooklyn and Queens. I feel Lower Manhattan's conversion is pure spectaultion. After all, how long will you put up with being a subway ride away from...everything.

Those apartments could always be converted back to offices, and alot easier I suspect. No worries.

[TomAuch]

New York Magazine had a chart for most "at-risk" neighborhoods when the bubble pops. Recently created neighborhoods in the financial district were given a 9 (on a scale from 1-10, with 10 being high risk). Newly gentrified parts of Harlem, second-home regions like the Hamptons and Catskills, and recently gentrified parts of Brooklyn were also classified as at risk. Midtown, the Village/Soho/Tribeca, established parts of Brooklyn, and the suburbs are considered safe or relatively.

[pianoman11686]

No surprise, given as all of the neighborhoods rated as stable are places where upper middle class and wealthy families have lived for decades. Downtown is only a recent residential phenomenon. I don't think we should use that historical method to discredit this article's proposal. I think making the WTC mixed use is a great idea.

[BPC]

Goldberger's article is such a piece of crap it makes me want to cancel my New Yorker subscription.

[ZippyTheChimp]

Moreover, most of the cultural institutions involved are marginal. Ground Zero doesn’t need expensive cultural buildings for small outfits that can’t afford them. One of the many mysteries of the planning process is why strong cultural groups that wanted to come to Ground Zero, such as the New York City Opera and the New York Hall of Science, were turned away in favor of less well known organizations, such as the JoyceInternational DanceCenter and the Signature Theatre Company. Why wasn’t space at Ground Zero given to City Opera? The planners adopted the misguided notion that smaller, populist groups were needed, when pride of place should have been given to major institutions that could make Ground Zero a cultural magnet. Perhaps City Opera was turned down because an opera house would have cut into some of Silverstein’s lobby space in the FreedomTower. An essential aspect of a revised plan for Ground Zero would be a much larger allotment for cultural buildings – enough land for an opera house, for example.

It was obvious to anyone familiar with lower Manhattan prior to 09/11 what was lacking in the area - a defining civic institution. That was supposed to be rectified after 09/11, but the imperative to replace the office space and restore the skyline battled with the memorial space, and much of the cultural space was squeezed to the side. The Snohetta building does not relate well to the transportation hub. It would be better placed on the site of Deutsche Bank.

[TomAuch]

No surprise, given as all of the neighborhoods rated as stable are places where upper middle class and wealthy families have lived for decades. Downtown is only a recent residential phenomenon. I don't think we should use that historical method to discredit this article's proposal. I think making the WTC mixed use is a great idea.

I used to be against the idea of cutting back the office space on the WTC, but since residential buildings don't have to worry about entire companies commiting to the upper floors, it may make the WTC sucessful again, since those who are most enthusiastic will live there, as opposed to companies who need near unanimous agreement from their employees to feel comfortable renting there. I just hope that Downtown doesn't suffer too badly from the real estate bubble, because it will give the Anti-Rebuilders and passionate Memorialists another excuse to leave that hole in the ground empty.

[kliq6]

Why they should build apartments there is simple, there is no Lower Manhattan commercial demand anymore, all firm want Midtown, based on so many factors its hard to count.

This is why the Far West Side must be developed

[Nordica]

Why not take Goldberger's concept a step further, build a self contained urban neighborhood. Live, work, shop, soak up culture, ect., all without having to leave the site. A prison of choice with a "get out of jail free" card.
There'd be plenty of takers.
No one has yet come up with a forward-thinking viable idea, or done a real feasibility study on what's on the table. So far it's the same old stuff wrapped in new packaging. The look, height, and political statement have been the main focus.

[Fabrizio]

Here´s my dumb sugestion:

Build a permanent Worlds Fair. Every democracy gets to have a space just like the great World Fair´s of the past. If individual pavillions are impossible because of lack of space, then it will be vertical. It will all take place around the memorial. This way NY will make a great gesture to the rest of the world and the rest of the world will participate.... what better way to "send a message to the terrorists" and not lose face with this tenent-less not-quite tallest building in the world nonsense.

[alex ballard]

Maybe we should simply sell it off to private developers?


Think about it: Run Fulton and Greenwich streets through the site and sell off the plots except the part between West/Futlon/Church/Greenwich, which will be the memorial. The other plots, (about 4) can build about 8 buidlings, so sell 8 plots off.


Then that rasies the money for Silverstien (or maybe Silverstein can sell it himself?) and we get something built.

even if it's a bunch of medicore 60 story office towers, it's the triumph of capitalism. Which is what's really importaint here.

[TomAuch]

Mediocrity can never be accepted on a site that is entitled to something grand. Capitalism cannot be the dominant force in this rebuilding process, but it is simply the type of energy that will be restored to the site.