In some of the drawings, immense buildings writhe and twist high above the New York skyline. They are made of distended steel or shaped like immense sheared cables. Some appear driven by apocalyptic forces, dark visions from comic books or "The X-Files." One plan, called A Building Full of Holes, comes from the Acconci Studios, and imagines "a building preshot, preblown-out, pre-exploded."

The drawings — along with scale models, videos, computer-driven images — are part of the ongoing process of deciding what to do with the 16 acres gouged out of lower Manhattan on Sept 11. They're on display at the Max Protetch Gallery at 511 W.22nd St., and the response has been extraordinary. On Saturday, the crowds of visiting New Yorkers resembled the 6 train at 8a.m.

"Man, look at this one," a young man in a tan J.Crew sweater said to a female friend. He squatted to read the caption. His friend stared at the design, by Jonathan Foster. It was one of the proposals that seemed intended to be built, rather than presented as a statement. Among other smart ideas, it showed how to integrate 500,000 square feet of residential housing with commercial real estate and 1.3million square feet of retail space, along with flowing water, much greensward and a 4-acre memorial. "This guy really thought about it..."

Some of the visitors to the Protetch gallery were students, architects, designers; most appeared to be ordinary New Yorkers. All gazed at the drawings with a fierce, possessive intensity, trying to imagine them filling space in the real world of their city. The Protetch show itself was supported by Architectural Record and Architecture magazine, without any involvement of government agencies.

The government should be cheering.

There are notions here that are startling: the "secular cathedral" of Paolo Solieri, unfortunately shaped like a gigantic nuclear reactor; a skyline-dwarfing complex by Morris Adjimi, the walls of which are made of American flags. Some shapes are Gehry-esque contortions, undulating and Baroque, buildings as sculpture, on a scale that would destroy the skyline.

Some are probably undo-able: the marvelous World Bridge by Eytan Kaufman that would allow pedestrians to walk from lower Manhattan to New Jersey while providing 6million square feet of office space. It would evoke, on a gigantic scale, the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, a bridge for people and merchants, not cars.

Every design includes a memorial to the dead. Some exclude all commercial development.

Joseph Giovanni and Rodrigo Monsalve suggest using the "footprints" of the twin towers as pools, with the names of the dead inscribed in glass, and clear water spilling forever over the names. Another design suggests the creation of 1 World Plaza, with two pools in a circular lawn, 600 feet in diameter, with 8 million to 10million feet of office space around the edges of the plaza. The design by SITE wants to open those local streets that were erased when the World Trade Center was built and give them life on a humane scale.

The idea most mentioned by many New Yorkers — the "Twin Towers of Light" (conceived by John Bennett and Gustavo Bonevardi of PROUN Space Studio) — has an elegant simplicity. But at the moment, the designers and architects are far ahead of the men and women who will actually decide what will go on those 16 acres. The workers on the WTC site have done an amazing job of clearing most of the debris. They accomplished in four months what some had predicted would take a year. Now — soon, this month — their example must be followed by the government planners.

Transportation Priority

They must begin with transportation. The rebuilding of the Cortlandt St. station and the PATH terminal are crucial and obvious. But they should be only parts of a downtown subterranean transportation hub that must be on the scale of Grand Central and Penn Station.

Even before Sept. 11, many Wall Street firms were moving to midtown. The reason was simple: A lot of their people lived in Westchester or other suburbs, and didn't want to move from commuter train to subway for the trip downtown.
Somehow, Amtrak and the bus lines (through express lanes on the highways) must be connected to downtown. In addition, there should be a Plan B to extend a subway spur to Governors Island, where even more office and residential space could be developed.

But once the transportation plan is set, the rebuilding should begin. There must, of course, be public hearings on all of this. But they don't have to be the usual exercise in New York wretchedness. Start them next Monday, under the aegis of John Whitehead's Lower Manhattan Development Corp.

They could use the Javits Center or Chelsea Piers (or both) for the hearings. Limit the hearings to one month. Let all who want to talk about downtown redevelopment step to the microphone and have their say: for no more than five minutes (this is New York and we're in a hurry).

This cast would include ordinary citizens, manual laborers, cab drivers, students and grandfathers, along with the crackpots, professional kvetchers, gadflies and doomsayers. The good ideas would be duly noted, and passed on for serious consideration. Even those who appear for purposes of therapy would be heard, consoled, and thanked. These hearings could be held 24 hours a day, seven days a week. But at the end of one month, that would be it.

At the same time, those in charge of redevelopment must forge their own alliance, ceding personal or parochial power to create true power. At the moment, there are too many overlapping entities, from Whitehead's group to the Port Authority. Someone must (alas) be Robert Moses. Someone must become New York's Baron Haussman, the arrogant fellow who designed modern Paris.

For me, the most powerful figure in this process must be the elected mayor of New York, Mike Bloomberg.

All should have their say, but he must have the final say. The excellent Amanda Burden, chairwoman of the city's Planning Commission, must speak with authority given to her by Bloomberg. Committees on transportation, financing and the environment must be set up — and given hard deadlines. Then the work must begin.

This is an urgent project. We don't know whether additional terrorist attacks will hit New York or other American cities and drain resources and attention. We don't know if the full $20billion promised by President Bush will actually arrive in New York. The men at the site have done most of their work. The dreamers whose work appears at the Protetch gallery have made some of their dreams visible. Now it's time to get it on.