A Public Vision for Ground Zero

In 1993, Adam Honigman was working at the World Trade Center when a truck packed with explosives exploded in its basement. On September 11, he watched the towers collapse from his office in Greenwich Village. "One job more or less," he writes, and "it could have been me there this time." Now, he’d like the City to memorialize its dead by not rebuilding the towers. He writes of the joke about how the Twin Towers were built of the boxes the Empire State Building and Chrysler Building came in, and he pleads that we not "dishonor the dead, missing and this city with ugly, rectangular crates."

His comments can be found, along with hundreds and potentially thousands of other, on www.downtownnyc.org, a website launched on May 20 to host discussion among the public on the redevelopment not just of ground zero and the surrounding areas that were physically damaged, but of all of Lower Manhattan from Houston St. down. Now that the last of the rubble - a thirty foot steel column - has been removed from ground zero, the redevelopment game is officially on; the website is an effort to assure that the public becomes a player.

To address the expanse of Lower Manhattan, the site’s bulletin boards are grouped into fifteen topics. Each of these topics is devoted either to a specific place, like the World Trade Center, or to an issue, like the future of Arts & Culture in Lower Manhattan. Within each there are further categories, and as the website evolves there will be further still, but the structure and design of the site remain simple. You click on one of the topics, choose from one of the sub-topics on that page, and then, as the bright red link says, "Read Comments and Add Your Own."

Appropriately, for a site dedicated to incarnating the will of the public, the ownership of www.downtownnyc.org is unclear. Its main sponsor, the source of its legitimacy, is the Civic Alliance to Rebuild Downtown Manhattan, the largest of the many non-profit coalitions and alliances that have formed in the last eight months to influence the course of the redevelopment. The producer and manager of the site is the Project for Public Spaces (PPS), a New York-based non-profit urban planning firm.

Ownership aside, the purpose of the website is clear, and it is driven by a simple philosophy, that the people who live and work in a place - the stakeholders, in urban design vernacular - are best equipped to manage its development and future. It is these stakeholders, according to PPS’s recent book How to Turn a Place Around, who "know from experience which areas are dangerous and why, which spaces are comfortable, where the traffic moves too fast, and where their children can safely walk or bike or play." And it is the hope of the project that their website can become a place where the public goes to articulate its expertise.

Public participation has been an avowed goal of the parties involved in the redevelopment of Lower Manhattan, but the public’s response has proven more passionate than anyone anticipated. When the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC), the state/city group chartered to coordinate the rebuilding, held the first of its public hearings on May 23, the crowd was hostile. "We don't feel the Lower East Side is represented in the process," said Margaret Hughes. "The LMDC talks about being open but so many decisions have already been made." And there were further complaints: Chinatown was being ignored; the issue of affordable housing hadn’t been adequately addressed; no one seemed interested in rebuilding the towers. "It's absolutely inconceivable to me," said Louis Epstein, "that they would rebuild without rebuilding the towers. It's like deserting your dead in the battlefield." *