Next Steps, Hard Choices: A Proposal for Lower Manhattan

Craig Whitaker Architects
Craig Whitaker
Oscar Del Rio
Jane McCarthy
Jack Zuccon

New York University
Urban Planning Program
Marc Abelson
Alissa Black
Meryl Block
Nicholas Johnson
Jacqueline Kersh
Mario Kilifarski
Gail Pickett
Jaime Sharrock
Annika Smith
Christina Smith
Thomas Sze Leong Yu

The City Club of New York

Robert Silman Associates, PC
Robert Silman

Swidler Berlin Sherff Friedman, LLP
Norman Marcus

Transportation Consultant
Joseph M. Leiper

Imbilano & Quigley Landscape Architects
John Imbiano

Sturges Graphic Design
Abigail Sturges
Sarah Bryant
Lindsay Farrell

A new plan for the World Trade Center site should aspire to restore some or all of the former street system, to create mixed-use development, to bury the West Side Highway, to establish a memorial to honor those who died on September 11th, to rebuild an improved PATH sation, and to strengthen mass transit in the area. These are all laudable goals, but just wishing for them won't make them happen. The very complexity of the planning problems, the difficulty structural and design issues, and the overlapping and sometimes competing institutional jurisdictions, make it difficult to achieve many of these objectives.

Funds for rebuilding will come from various public and private sources, each with its own timetable and organizational imperatives. All these funds are needed, yet a rebuilding effort, in which various monies are interwoven, is especially complex. Therefore, this study explains how the various components of the development puzzle affect each other.

There are many "stakeholders" in the future of the site. Most are now well known; they include relatives of the victims, civic groups, and a wide range of city and state agencies. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the World Trade Center site, has over time also entered into long-term agreements with a host of different leaseholders. The leaseholders, and Port Authority bondholders, also have an important stake in the site's future. Resolution of the competing demands between new streets, a memorial and public open space and the income-generating uses needed to support them will be another test of a successful plan. This study analyzes some of these hard choices.

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