Maybe 2021 Is A More Realistic Date

The fact that the order of victims’ names on the Sept. 11 memorial is a contentious issue shows just how contentious everything about the World Trade Center site is:

One of the most potentially divisive issues at ground zero — how victims’ names are arranged on the memorial walls — was settled two years ago, when the governor and mayor said they would be listed in random order, with insignias of service next to the names of uniformed emergency workers. Period.

But nothing about the World Trade Center site ever seems completely settled.

Firefighters and police officers never liked the random concept, union officials said, believing that their mission of running into the buildings while others fled entitled them to special recognition. A group of victims’ relatives proposed that names be listed by association (employees of Cantor Fitzgerald or Aon, for example) in the space corresponding to the tower where they died. The architect who won the design competition, Michael Arad, originally spoke of creating “meaningful adjacencies” that would, for instance, permit siblings to be listed side by side.

The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation long maintained that this discussion was over. Yesterday, however, Stefan Pryor, the corporation president, and Thomas H. Rogér, a board member of the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation, told a City Council committee that renewed discussions about the arrangement of names were in fact still going on.

“L.M.D.C.’s ears remain open,” Mr. Pryor said. “We are always open to further solutions, suggestions. And we’ve had meetings on this topic quite recently.”

He said that random arrangement remained the plan and said that any alternative would have to conform to the overall memorial design.

Pressed by Councilman Alan J. Gerson of Lower Manhattan to articulate the corporation’s position on the names, Mr. Pryor said, “The current position of the L.M.D.C. is to support Michael Arad’s position.” Mr. Arad, who did not testify yesterday, said in 2004, “The haphazard brutality of the attacks is reflected in the arrangement of names and no attempt is made to impose order upon this suffering.”

At yesterday’s hearing, Mr. Rogér, whose 24-year-old daughter, Jean, was a flight attendant aboard the American Airlines jetliner that crashed into the north tower, said, “The random suggestion contained within the current design may have some artistic elegance about it, but it certainly is flawed in many respects.”