World Trade Center Site

World Trade Center Site

Once a tribute to the towering achievements of American business, the World Trade Center site has become, after 9/11, a moving reminder of our cultural vulnerability and national harmony. The site is perhaps a more popular destination now than ever, a place for mourning, remembrance, and reckoning. A complex of seven buildings, the World Trade Center became world-famous for its two central skyscrapers, which became known as the Twin Towers and were, for a time, the two tallest structures in the world. (Their destruction in 2001 restored the Empire State Building as the tallest in the city). The towers, which each offered four million square feet of office space, were slow to fill, but the complex was nevertheless immediately recognized as a worldwide symbol of commerce and prosperity and quickly became a huge tourist attraction. Today, the site of the main plaza, bounded by Church, Barclay, Liberty and West streets, is little more than a vast construction site ringed with impromptu memorials, vigils both casual and planned, and an overwhelming air of loss. The site has been completely cleared up since 2001, and where once lay tons of rubble and ash now sits a large concrete pit recalling, among other things, the dry concrete river beds of the Los Angeles River. Though developers have officially "broken ground" on the construction project that promises to rebuild the site, that project remains substantively stalled by competing commercial interests, bureaucratic infighting, and significant differences of opinion on how the area should be redeveloped. Though developers and metropolitan authorities settled on a design put forth by celebrity-architect Daniel Liebeskind several years ago, the redevelopment has been stuck in a kind of purgatory as Liebeskind, the commercial lease-holder, the Governor, the Mayor, and the Port Authority all fight for their particular visions of the future of the world's most famous disaster.