THE unveiling of six rough design proposals for the World Trade Center site is an exciting milestone. For all their obvious – and predictable – shortcomings, they are a stirring first glimpse of downtown’s future.
What a thrill, after months of anguish and mourning, to imagine the leveled 16 acres surging again with life and commerce!
The put-upon planners at Beyer Blinder Belle deserve our thanks. Working under an impossible time limit, pressured from all sides, they came up with plausible and provocative schemes for what should not again be called Ground Zero.
Count on them to be thrashed in every corner. The buildings will be called too big or too small, the memorial spaces extravagant or inadequate.
But, as Mayor Bloomberg said, they are a “start,” and a start is an inspiring thing. Great novels grow out of cluttered first drafts. The wonderful AOL Time Warner Center rising at Columbus Circle learned from awful earlier designs.
The six proposals for downtown are not awful. They betray the constraints under which they were brought forth.
Each takes four pages to explain in the brochure put out by the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. and the Port Authority. They are hard to follow, even with a flurry of schematics, models and maps.
That is because the incompatible demands from various corners required BBB to throw in the kitchen sink.
Because the sink won’t fit in 16 acres – much less one with a seven-acre pair of “sacred footprints” – most of the schemes won’t even fit into the actual WTC site, and need to expand to the west or south.
Each design includes 11 million square feet of offices, a sprawling memorial park, the restoration of long-closed streets, a giant shopping mall, enhanced transit connections, public amenities and at least one 1,500 foot-tall “skyline element.”
The plans are as similar as they are different – like the tracks on a CD played in a different order each time. The sequence changes, and so does the effect, to an extent. But the songs, and the notes, are the same.
On paper, none of the visions looks fabulous. But neither would Rockefeller Center, reduced to a massing-and-siting schematic and stripped of architectural detail.
The BBB designers did a swell job squeezing the sink into a cubbyhole. What must come next is to decide priorities.
Every first draft needs an editor. That would be Gov. Pataki, who should pay attention to the ideas Mayor Bloomberg promises to come up with.
The governor must bring focus to the kitchen sink. He must say: We need more of one thing, less of another, and maybe none at all of something else.
It will not be easy. But it was not easy to get from Sept. 11 to where we are now – with a disaster site cleared long before it seemed possible, and a half-dozen worthy proposals for its future in hand.
Go to it, Gov – and don’t wait until after the election.