Author Roberta Brandes Gratz argues that what’s needed is a reconstruction plan that inspires
Open Access Article Originally Published: January 10, 2006
Another anniversary of 9/11 has come and gone. Only this time it was nearly submerged in the wreckage of New Orleans. The overseers of a 300-year-old Southern city and the 16-acre Ground Zero site in Manhattan now share a common new purpose: Undertaking expensive, symbolic, and closely watched reconstructions that inspire America and respond to the challenges of this century in a new way.
Much of the responsibility for achieving these goals is falling to civic planners, a group of professionals suddenly thrust into the national spotlight. For better or worse it’s planners in New York, faced with reconstructing Ground Zero, who are taking the first crack at an incredibly important task.
If any city should know how to build to meet the needs of people, respond to an ever changing and complex economy, and inspire the world about what is possible, New York should. Every urban lesson about how to construct a durable, efficient, and functioning modern civilization is here, in plain view. The prescription for future development at Ground Zero should draw on the proven lessons of what has evolved over time in the lower Manhattan neighborhoods that border the site.
So what does that look like?
It’s The Street, Stupid
First, just as officials have planned, we ought to leave the sacred footprints of the Twin Towers as memorials honoring a horrific attack on a city and a nation that bent, but did not break. But equally appropriate is to rebuild the functional and economically productive street grid that once existed in lower Manhattan before it was wiped out in the 1960s to make way for the now-fallen towers.
Great streets evolve on interesting grids. Outside of the fenced in Ground Zero site, the rest of lower Manhattan still has narrow, winding streets alive with human activity. For Ground Zero to truly function as a place fit for all the human-scale activities of this century, it needs to reconnect to those lively streets. Ground Zero’s new streets need to be interesting enough to attract crowds, and they need to be safe and comforting too, with benches and intimate public spaces where people can mingle and meet.
Productive street life also makes all the other facets of urban design and construction flow. Ground Zero’s planners should see the need for a mixture of buildings of different heights, widths, and scale. No superblocks should emerge. Instead, different kinds of buildings need to be encouraged — tall and thin, short and fat, residential and commercial, institutional and educational, museums and theaters. They should be constructed on a timetable that is dictated by market demand, not a gargantuan plan. Too much built at one time without market demand acts as a giant sump, draining economic and social energy from elsewhere. That, too, occurred with the original World Trade Center.
Another idea that is crucial to Ground Zero’s ability to inspire and perform well is to include lots of new housing. Right now, residences are prohibited. This policy needs to be reversed. In fact there is more demand for housing at the Ground Zero site and in nearby neighborhoods than for office space. There is precedence for this idea. In neighboring landmark districts, Tribecca and SoHo, new modestly scaled contemporary buildings are being developed alongside historic buildings that bring a kind of urban coziness to both neighborhoods, among the trendiest and most desirable in New York.
No Mall! No Mall!
Moving on: The Ground Zero master plan calls for 1 million square feet of retail space in a giant mall that tries hard not to look like a mall. The developers are reported to be the same ones who put a mall in Time Warner’s new building uptown, named it the Shops at Columbus Circle, and insist it is not what it is: a mall. The same old national chains are there. The space is totally developer controlled. This is an important distinction. Most people don't understand that what makes a mall is that it is all owned, leased, and controlled by one owner. It’s not an authentic street that is truly public, has multiple property owners and individual tenants, whether those tenants are chains or locally-owned.
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