John Whitehead steps into the reception area of the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. on the 20th floor of 1 Liberty Plaza and shakes hands with a visitor. His hair is white, his manner courteous.

"I want to show you something," he says.

He leads the way down a corridor into a large room. A few lamps are lit, but the room relies on the afternoon light seeping from the large picture window cut into the west wall. Nobody is there except a young guard. Whitehead gestures at the artifacts of the New York calamity: Mass cards, photographs, scrawled messages, ID cards, flowers fresh and flowers dried, a thick guest book full of comments.

"This is the room for the families," he says quietly. "Early on, there was a viewing platform down near ground level, but that's gone now. So we have this. For any family members who want to come and see the site where their loved ones died. And maybe pray or meditate."

Whitehead, corporation chairman, goes to the window, and below us is the place where the World Trade Center once stood. At this stage, it's a monument to the work of those extraordinary men and women who cleared away more than a million tons of steel and rubble in eight astonishing months. The chaos of twisted steel, crushed concrete, exploded glass, mashed furniture are all gone now. The site is almost neat.

"They've done a great job," he says of the 3,000 workers who cleared away the site to allow others to start the job of making something new on the 16 ruined acres. "Now we have to do ours."

He points out the line of the subway tunnel, cutting at an angle across the site from Greenwich St., its intact concrete roof making it look like a ramp. On the far side, the mouth of a second tunnel is open, and hardhats move in and out. From this height, tunnel and workers seem part of a scale model.

"That's the tunnel for the PATH train," Whitehead says, and describes the loop it must make for the trains to arrive and depart again to New Jersey. All this will be part of the first stage of rebuilding: creating a transportation hub. "We have to do that right or nothing else will work."

From this height, there is no visible sign of the so-called footprints - the exact places where each of the twin towers stood and where so many humans died. All is a gray plain. To preserve the footprints, someone will have to rebuild them.

'Not a job for yes men'

Down the hall from the family room, Whitehead's office is simple and modest: a desk, a chair, a table. There is none of the preposterous grandeur usually associated with the word "chairman." The simplicity is characteristic of the man (say people who know him), but it also reflects his determination to create a team that is not based on a conventional sense of hierarchies.

"The ideas have to come freely," he says. "This is not a job for yes men."

Whitehead certainly was not looking for a job when Gov. Pataki called him a few weeks after Sept. 11. This was on a Wednesday afternoon, and as Whitehead remembers it, the first word from Pataki was, "congratulations."

"I said, 'Thank you, Governor, but what for?' Because I didn't know anything obvious that I should be congratulated for."

Pataki said: "You've just been selected to be chairman of the Lower Manhattan Development Corp."

"Oh, Governor," Whitehead said. "You don't know. In a couple of months I'll be 80 years old, and I read in the paper that you described this as a 10-year project. Are you really going to want me down there in a wheelchair and pointing my cane at some building?" Then he added, "I'm very complimented, of course, that you selected me."

Pataki said, "Oh, I'm not the only person who selected you. Everybody I called for suggestions, they said, 'Get John Whitehead.'"

The governor listed the reasons why he must take the job.

"But, Governor, I'm too old."

"Being old is good, John," Pataki said. "People will think you don't have any long-term agenda."

Whitehead laughs, remembering the conversation. He told Pataki he would think it over and asked how much time he'd have to make a decision. "Today is Wednesday," Pataki said, "and I'm announcing the appointment on Friday."

'This is my city'

When he hung up, the phone calls started coming in, from people Whitehead respected, all urging him to take the job. He was torn. "I was going to get some time to read a few books that I never had time for. I was going to relax a bit and spend time with my children and grandchildren." Whitehead has nine children and 14 grandchildren. "But I couldn't say no. This is my city."

He called Pataki and accepted, and on Friday he was at a press conference attended by the outgoing Rudy Giuliani and the incoming Michael Bloomberg and a slew of press. "And I realized that we had no office and no staff, and most important, no money. It was just a business startup all over again."

Today, Whitehead has office space, a staff of 33 and a budget. After the first tentative plans for the site were unveiled in July, the reaction was overwhelmingly negative. Now the process has slowed while the corporation tries to settle on the basic components of the project: memorial, office space, housing. This almost certainly will mean expanding the vision of the future beyond the 16 acres. At the moment, even the transportation hub remains tentative, as some victims' families insist that nothing can be built on the footprints.

But Whitehead is a patient man. And a man with a sense of proportion: When he was young, after all, and serving in the Navy, he landed at Normandy. He thinks problems can be resolved by intelligence and basic decency. And he recognizes that what New York finally does with its ruins will shape the future. The result must make the city more human.

"I think the next time we come out with something," he says, glancing out his window in the direction of those ruins, "we have to have some beauty."