But What A Train Station!

On the eve of the anniversary of Sept. 11, a distressed Nicolai Ouroussoff writes in the Times that the only exciting thing planned at Ground Zero is a train station:

There has been no healing, really. Four years have passed since the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, and the road to recovery at ground zero looks bleaker than ever. A rebuilding effort that was originally cast as a symbolic rising from the ashes has long since turned into a hallucinogenic nightmare: a roller coaster ride of grief, naïveté, recriminations, political jockeying and paranoia.

The Freedom Tower, promoted as an image of the city’s resurrection, has been transformed into a stern fortress — a symbol of a city still in the grip of fear. The World Trade Center memorial has been enveloped by a clutter of memorabilia.

. . .

On this anniversary weekend, it may be time to face up to what few have wanted to acknowledge: that nothing of value can be built at ground zero while the anguish and anxiety remain so fresh – nor while political and economic forces are eager to exploit those emotions.

I was once unwilling to recognize this. Three years ago, when the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation was opening its competition for the design of a master plan for ground zero, I paid a call on an older architect who had spent a lifetime navigating the byzantine planning politics of American cities. At the time, New York was full of anxious hope. A public outcry over the dull uniformity of the original renderings by the architecture firm Beyer Blinder Belle had sent the development corporation back to the drawing boards, and there was a sense that something bold and important might happen.

The architect, unimpressed, said flatly that the only ground zero project that was not doomed to failure was the transportation hub. Since it was devoid of symbolic importance, he explained, it would not become a political time bomb. The rest? Forget it.

I refused to believe him.

Obviously, his view was prophetic. The only promising design so far is the soaring glass hall of Santiago Calatrava’s train station, which may end up as one of the most glorious public spaces to rise in New York since the construction of Grand Central Terminal. By contrast, the rest of Daniel Libeskind’s master plan looks eerily like those original Beyer Blinder Belle proposals – though with more elaborate packaging – a somber memorial to the dead, neatly parceled off from a sea of corporate towers that could be anywhere.