New World Trade Center still a dream

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(China Daily)
Updated: 2009-09-11 08:06

NEW YORK: The five skyscrapers were all supposed to rise by early next decade to replace the ravaged World Trade Center, with the city's tallest towers set in a spiral evoking the Statue of Liberty's torch.

They would frame a massive memorial in a tree-filled park, plus a theater and a transportation hub with uplifted wings - one of the symbols intended to defy the terrorists who destroyed the 16-acre (6.5-hectare) site in under two hours.

New World Trade Center still a dream

People run from the collapse of the second World Trade Center Tower on Sept. 11, 2001, after both were struck by hijacked airliners. This year will mark the eighth anniversary of the attacks. [AP]

Standing on the site now - a multi-level labyrinth of concrete and steel, from the entrance resembling the rooftops of an underground city - the sweeping design unveiled six years ago still hasn't materialized.

And while the most symbolic pieces of the puzzle at ground zero are taking shape, it's become increasingly clear that the grand scheme will take decades to be fully completed, if it ever is at all.

New World Trade Center still a dream

Vickie Cooper had mixed feelings as she peered through a fence at the site's stark northeast corner, a spot reserved for a skyscraper now mired in arbitration over its financing.

Its history is "too sad to even really think about progress," said the 48-year-old Texas insurance worker. But "I am a little surprised - I thought there'd be something built there."

Some questions and answers about the 16-acre (6.5-hectare) property in lower Manhattan:

What are they trying to build?

On the site where the Twin Towers and other World Trade Center buildings stood, plans call for four skyscrapers including One World Trade Center, formerly called the Freedom Tower, which will be the size of one of the former Twin Towers but with a much taller antenna.

There will also be a memorial and museum with reflecting pools built on the footprints of the Twin Towers and waterfalls cascading into a subterranean visitor space.

When will it all be built?

The landowning agency, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, says One World Trade Center, the memorial and the museum will be finished in 2013. A mass transit hub, whose elaborate design by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava has been repeatedly simplified, should be done by 2014.

Less certain is the future of the three other skyscrapers being built by Larry Silverstein, the developer who signed a 99-year lease on the World Trade Center complex two months before it was destroyed. Silverstein and the Port Authority are waiting for arbitrators to settle their latest clash over financing and delays.

AP-Reuters