What’s now under construction is looking like a fairly typical twenty-first-century business district.Tourists still flock to the World Trade Center site, almost sevenyears after the attacks of September 11. What they find when they getthere is not a scene of destruction but a busy construction site. WhileI’m grateful to see Ground Zero filling up with fresh concrete andsteel, there’s something about the utter normalcy of the scene thatmakes me long for that heady period in 2003 and 2004 when the planningprocess for the site, a grand public pageant bursting with visionaryzeal, promised to generate a place brave and powerful enough to healthe city’s wounds. But as the concrete hardens, I can almost see thebanality setting in. The only person speaking with any frequency these days about his“vision” for the site is its developer, Larry Silverstein. Lately, he’sbeen giving what amounts to a stump speech, promoting the vitality ofLower Manhattan and touting his revised schedule. “The buildings willreach street level approximately one year after the start ofconstruction, and Towers 3 and 4 will top out in mid-2010, with Tower 2following in 2011,” Sil­verstein told the Downtown Association inApril. “Can you count on this schedule? You bet.”So Silverstein, once thought to be the site’s weak link, is now itsmaster builder. His deal with retail developer Westfield, which for atime was off, is back on so the towers’ lower floors will be lined with500,000 square feet of shopping and dining. The latest renderingsreleased by Silverstein Properties show four gleaming skyscrapers{including the Freedom Tower, now being developed by the PortAuthority} flanking the eight-acre memorial. The most obvious thingsuggested by the images is that none of the architects—Skidmore, Owings& Merrill, Norman Foster, Richard Rogers, and Fumihiko Maki—hasturned in their most inspired efforts. All of them appear to have beenreined in by the limitations of Daniel Libeskind’s oddly conventionalmaster plan; even Foster deferred to Libeskind’s crystalline aesthetic.Back in 2003, Libeskind thrilled us with his rhetorical wizardry, butthe portion of his vision that has survived looks utterly unremarkable.“It turns out that Silverstein is the one who’s implementing Daniel’splan,” observes Alex Gar­vin, who for 15 crucial months in 2002 and2003 was the planning czar of the Lower Manhattan DevelopmentCorporation {LMDC}, shepherding Lib­es­kind’s plan to victory. TheSilverstein towers stair-step up in height from the southeast to thenorthwest corner of the site. “One of the things that nobody paidattention to,” Garvin says, “was this spiral that went around up to thetop of the Freedom Tower. That’s still there.” Across a newly remapped Greenwich Street, the National September 11Memorial & Museum, once scheduled for completion in 2009, is nowprojected to open in September 2011, presumably on the tenthanniversary of the attacks. Mayor Michael Bloomberg stepped up as thememorial board’s chairman in October 2006 to spearhead flaggingfund-raising efforts, personally donating $15 million. As of April, the$350 million fund-raising goal had been reached for a project that iscurrently estimated to cost $530 million {the rest of the budget comesfrom the LMDC}. The memorial still bears a resemblance to architectMichael Arad’s competition-winning design in that it has twowater-filled voids in the shape and approximate locations of the TwinTowers’ footprints. But what was once a brooding, minimalist shrine hasbecome a more cheerful, tourist-friendly place. There are some 350trees, courtesy of landscape designer Peter Walker. The victims’ names,which in Arad’s scheme were to be underground in a sort of tomb, willbe inscribed in the sunlight on the parapets of the fountains,something surviving family members advocated. The underground spacewill be largely o
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