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		A Vision for Downtown by Pete Hamill, New York Daily News 03-10-2002 "Don't mourn. Organize" — Joe Hill All the tears have not yet been shed and we are still bringing out our dead. But in the name of those men and women who were killed on Sept. 11, New York must move more quickly, and with commanding force, to begin the rebuilding. This is a matter of urgency and honor. Six months after the city's greatest disaster, we still don't know what will be done with the 16 ruined acres of the World Trade Center. Artists, architects and other citizens have offered many visions — often ingenious — for what should be created at the site. But all those visions are wafting through the New York air, like birds riding the shifting breeze. We have seen nothing concrete about what is coming to downtown, no official plan, no listing of specific intentions. Nobody seems to be in charge. There is no Robert Moses. There is no Baron Haussmann. John Whitehead, the chairman of the Lower Manhattan Redevelopment Corp., seems to be rooming with Dick Cheney. He is a vague, ghostly presence who avoids interviews and shows no face to the public on television. He is said to be a modest man. But this is New York, and his mission is crucial. We have no time for modesty now. Two of Whitehead's meetings were closed to the press and public, as if he were Cheney dealing with his buddies in the oil and gas industry. If Whitehead has a firm plan, he won't tell anyone what it is. Mayor Bloomberg has been too modest, too. Part of the reason surely must be his wariness of the conflicting egos of the professional politicians. He doesn't want to push so hard that he infuriates Gov. Pataki, or the Bush administration. He knows that New York will need much money from the state and the feds. On Thursday, President Bush, to his credit, announced that New York will get even more than he had promised last fall: $21.3 billion. With such funds now guaranteed, it's time to create a plan for action. The downtown site must have certain essential components, all of which are complicated, all of which will cost billions, but none of which are impossible. They just have to be integrated into a master plan: A transportation hub on the scale of Grand Central and Penn Station. If downtown is to live as a vital, essential part of New York, there must be an underground terminal that can accommodate trains from the Long Island Railroad, delivering commuters from Nassau and Suffolk counties, Metro-North (carrying people from Westchester), the PATH trains from New Jersey, and the existing New York subway systems. There are many technical problems to be solved, starting with track widths, and the costs would be very high. But there is an opportunity now to create a transportation center that could endure for a century. An underground commercial mall. This would replace much of what was destroyed on Sept. 11, from Sam Goody and Borders bookstore, to the shoe stores and the food parlors and bakeries. Century 21 has already added great vitality to downtown, defined here as everything below Canal St., by reopening its store across the street from the site. All potential tenants in the mall could begin now to explain to planners what they will need to make their space absolutely functional. A mixed-use plan for office and residential buildings. Originally, I was one of those who believed that the entire site should be a memorial. I've been persuaded that I was wrong. We shouldn't turn that site into a necropolis. The area must create as many jobs as possible, and so we need those 35-story office buildings. They should be designed to fit into the existing architecture, something the World Trade Center did not do. They should have access through basements to the transportation hub and the underground mall. The rents should be reasonable. But the site must be used 24 hours a day, and not shut down when the sun fades into New Jersey. Children must live there, and laugh there, and weep there, and go to school there, and with any luck, grow old there. That means adding residential buildings, meshing living space with all those rehabbed office buildings on the east side of Broadway, while better integrating Battery Park City with downtown itself. The West Side Drive should be buried from Chambers St. to the Battery, its roof covered with greensward and a modern version of the old Washington Market. A playground is mandatory, but in the name of continuity, there could be a stickball court, too, with instructors from the ranks of the aged, and a space where young men could master the ancient New York game of boccie. This is where New York began, almost 400 years ago. If it fades into a somber monument to sudden death, abandoned at sundown, an immense part of New York will be added to the casualties. A memorial. Obviously, this is crucial. The city should never forget what happened on that Tuesday morning in September. My own vision is that it should be as stark and simple as Maya Lin's Vietnam memorial in Washington. The names of the dead should be on it: those who died while rescuing others as well as those who were victims of the lunacy. And then a tree from each country — almost 80 of them — whose citizens died when those airplanes came roaring out of the sky. No sculptured rhetoric. A sacred grove. Obviously, the master plan must be designed from the bottom up, with the transportation hub built first. Nothing else — including developer Larry Silverstein's 7 WTC — should be built until the planners make a decision about the hub. Once buildings are erected, there will be no way to go back again into the earth to build the station. The planners should show the public what they want to do, and estimate the costs of building the hub, and the long-term economic and social consequences of not building it. But those master planners must come forward soon — within weeks — and show New Yorkers what they have in mind. This is, after all, our city, not just theirs. Bloomberg now will have three members on the expanded (to 14 members) board of the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. They should be charged with galvanizing that body, even if Whitehead seems to have entered the Witness Protection Program. They should insist on setting deadlines for the master plan. They should set dates for swift public hearings that will debate the plan. Then they should set deadlines for the bids of architects and contractors to turn visions into reality. Above all, they should tell New Yorkers what the hell they are doing. Time to Honor Our Dead Six months have passed. The men and women working at the site have honored us with their labor, their intelligence, their willingness to live each day in the poisonous presence of death. In a very short time, they have done more hard work than anyone could have predicted, and they are still carrying out the remains of human beings. New York must honor them in return, by making certain that the gutted site will not fill with spring and summer rains, or melted snow in another winter, while men in offices ponder the future. It's time to stop talking about the downtown future, and start making it visible.