Ground Zero at 25

I just looked down at my phone: I’m writing these words at 8:03 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time on the morning of Sept. 11, 2026. In 43 minutes we will have reached the 25th anniversary of the moment when a hijacked American Airlines Boeing 767 struck the north tower of Minoru Yamasaki’s World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan, to be followed at 9:03 by a second airliner, a hijacked United Airlines 767, aimed at the south tower. The south tower burned for 56 minutes before collapsing at 9:59. The north tower came down 29 minutes later, one hour and 42 minutes after impact.

The attacks, in all, killed 2,753 people in New York that day, including the passengers, crew, and terrorists on the two jets; more than 2,200 people working inside, visiting, or walking into or near the buildings; and 343 firefighters, 37 Port Authority police officers, and 23 members of the NYPD. More than 9,000 people, according to recent figures, have died from illnesses connected to their work clearing the site in the weeks and months following the attacks; this includes more than 600 firefighters.

On Wednesday night at the Great Hall at Cooper Union, two miles north of the World Trade Center, Punch List in collaboration with our friends at n+1 and New York Review of Architecture brought together a collection of artists, scholars, critics, and architects, as well as 350 or so New Yorkers, to talk about the 9/11 attacks and, to a far greater extent, the deeply fraught effort to rebuild, which initially followed, and soon diverted in key ways from, a master plan by Daniel Libeskind and his firm.

That effort is ongoing: the final office tower to fill the 16-acre site, which is controlled not by the city of New York but by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which is to say not in City Hall but in Albany and (to a far lesser degree) Trenton, is a planned 2 World Trade Center tower, a 55-story office building, designed by Foster + Partners, that broke ground in July. With a planned completion date of 2031, it follows three other towers at the site, by SOM, Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, and Maki and Associates (plus another almost shockingly good SOM tower, given the constraints its architects faced, just outside the 16-acre zone, 7 World Trade); a memorial by Michael Arad and Peter Walker and Partners (dedicated 2011) and adjacent museum by Snøhetta and Davis Brody Bond (2014); a major transit hub and underground shopping mall, known as the Oculus, by Santiago Calatrava (2016); and a self-consciously Bunshaftian performing arts center, the Perelman, designed by Joshua Ramus and REX (2023). Calatrava also designed a Greek Orthodox church in white marble, St. Nicholas National Shrine, which opened in 2022 on the southern edge of the site.

We were especially interested to hear from our speakers what they think the site means now (which is to say to what extent it has been reintegrated into the fabric of Lower Manhattan or stands aloof as, primarily, a strange mixture of burial ground and tourist site) and what it might mean to future generations of New Yorkers. After all, a significant number of attendees on Wednesday night—including several Cooper Union students and my older daughter, Willa, who started a new job in New York City earlier the same day—were born after the 2001 attacks.

In my comments to open the program, I noted one curious historical fact: on the evening of Sept. 10, 2001, New York Times architecture critic Herbert Muschamp, then among the most powerful critics at the paper, a writer given free rein by his editors to soliloquize on, say, his quest to find just the right pair of leather pants, met for dinner in Manhattan with Frank Gehry and the fashion designer Issey Miyake. The L.A. architect had just finished a Tribeca flagship for Miyake, on Hudson Street. It closed in December, with the fashion house moving into new digs by SO-IL on Madison Avenue.

The rebuilding saga became Muschamp’s personal and professional undoing. As Gehry later put it, “I think 9/11 shook him to the rafters. He wouldn’t come out of his apartment for days.” Muschamp stepped down from his Times post in 2004 and died in 2007.

“It remains an open question,” I said on Wednesday, “whether a Times critic with a firmer grasp of the subjects central to the rebuilding effort—not just architecture but real-estate development, urban design, civic memory, and not least bare-knuckled municipal politics—might have used the paper’s bully pulpit to turn that effort in a more enlightened direction. What is certain is that Muschamp, with his consistent, terribly narrow focus on a small coterie of global-trotting architectural superstars, met his Waterloo at Ground Zero. His failures prompted an overdue reckoning in the world of architecture criticism that over time turned it, hearteningly, away from an emphasis on form-making and personality and toward what Joan Ockman would later, efficiently, call ‘architecture’s consequences in the world.’ In a certain way, the rise of publications like New York Review of Architecture and Punch List, which try to cover architecture as an art form and a discipline, yes, with its own protocols, but also as entangled in and often complicit with regimes of capital, labor, and power, is the culmination of a shift that began with Muschamp’s very public struggle to cover the biggest story of his or any American architecture critic’s career.”

Some highlights from the program that followed:

Justin Beal, author of Sandfuture, an experimental 2021 memoir about 9/11, Hurricane Sandy, and Lower Manhattan that doubles as a biography of Yamasaki and the Twin Towers themselves, read briefly from the book: “At night, alone in the plaza, you could lean your body against the chamfered corners of the aluminum facade, roll your head back and look straight up the side of the building. It was like lying on your back in the middle of an aluminum road. It was vast and, in that vastness, more closely resembled a naturally occurring phenomenon than something man-made. And there were two of them. You could stand in the space between them, where the air vibrated with silent energy, and imagine you were standing between the tines of a tuning fork.”

He concluded by questioning the conventional wisdom of what the towers represented: “With twenty-five years of distance from 9/11, I hope we might all be able to see these buildings, which have become such an unfortunate icon of American unilateralism and xenophobia, instead as the product of the imagination of a man who had to overcome extraordinary obstacles to design them and believed, however quixotically, in their potential to be symbols of something quite the opposite of what they have come to represent.”

The artist Rose Salane showed photographs by her friend and collaborator Deborah Rodi of Windows on the World, the restaurant that, on its opening in 1976, filled the vacant top two floors of the North Tower. Rodi was reservations manager there from 1981 to 1993.

Salane related some of Rodi’s memories of working in that space 107 floors above the sidewalk: “‘Can I have a window table?’ people would ask. We assured customers that there’s a view from every table….On some days people would be so disappointed that there was no view of the city available, but maybe they didn’t realize we were so high up that we were in a cloud.”

The artist and writer Audrey Wollen, in a presentation several attendees told me was their favorite, gave a short history of the annual, ephemeral, high-wattage Tribute in Light memorial—and the way it warps patterns of bird migration up and down the Eastern seaboard.

NYRA editor Samuel Medina bravely waded through the scores of rebuilding proposals, including many of the purely speculative variety, that flooded newspapers, magazines, and art spaces in the months after the attacks. The prompts came from sources as diverse as the Lower Manhattan Development Authority, which (sort of) ran the rebuilding process for the Port Authority; the gallerist Max Protetch; and special issues of New York magazine and the New York Times Magazine overseen, respectively, by Joseph Giovannini and Muschamp.

“The result,” Medina told us, “was a reduplication of big names and proto-glitchy aesthetic agendas, such that Peter Eisenman and Zaha Hadid could peddle two or more ‘visions’ for the same site.”

Krotov led a street-level tour of the World Trade Center as it exists today and what he called its “slow-simmering discombobulation, the sense that one can never really orient oneself or even know where to go.” Marked by “seams, gaps, misalignments, imperfections, stains, patches, and unevennesses,” the World Trade Center, he said, is today “an underwhelming landscape overwhelmed by contradiction, unable to support the insupportable multiplicity of uses demanded of it and unsatisfying in prosaic, rather than grandiose, ways.”

In a panel discussion moderated by the writer and Pennsylvania state senator Nikil Saval, a former editor of n+1, I joined Sharon Zukin, professor emerita of sociology and earth and environmental sciences at the City University of New York, who with Michael Sorkin edited a 2002 book of essays on the rebuilding process, “After the World Trade Center”; Lynne Sagalyn, professor emerita at Columbia Business School, whose 2016 book “Power at Ground Zero” remains the chronicle of record of these events; and Carla Swickerath, a partner at Studio Libeskind who helped lead the firm’s work at the site.

In what for me was one of the evening’s more moving moments, in response to a question from Saval about what aspects of the rebuilt site surprise us, or have evolved differently than we might have expected, Zukin had the following to say:

“What’s amazing to me is the veneer of normalcy that has overlaid the redevelopment of that part of Lower Manhattan. If you go around to Chambers Street, you see the public school children and the kids playing in Washington Market Park. You see the college kids going to BMCC and the high school kids at Stuyvesant. Then you walk over to Broadway, and walk down to the Wall Street area, and of course you pass the denizens of Trinity Churchyard, who have been laid there since the Revolutionary period, and you see the residential conversion of office buildings that are no longer, and you see the restaurants, and you see people hanging out in bars, and you think of the lofts and apartments of Tribeca, just a few blocks to the north, and the new apartments that are rather expensive that are being built in what’s called FiDi by younger people. Fidi! This is all the neighborhood of the World Trade Center site. What is most surprising to me could be called resilience, could be called survival, or could be called the regime of money that has suffused redevelopment.”

To close the program, Medina and Krotov read a selection of audience comments, texted in response to our intentionally simple and broad question, “What does the site need?”

Some of the answers:

“A compost garden.”

“One thousand seven hundred and seventy six free and public toilets.”

“Just some houses.”

“Playgrounds for children.”

“The original towers built again exactly to their original dimensions.”

“Turn the relatively useless reintroduced streets, Greenwich and Fulton, into treeways, à la Stefano Mancuso’s Phytopolis.”

“Residents. Buskers. Safe space for public speech. Pushcart-level and storefront-level commerce. Sports fields. Dogs. Maintenance workers, respected and paid well enough to live nearby, regularly and with dignity picking up after the kids and dogs. Humility. Memory. Urbanity.”

News & Notes

More on 9/11 and Ground Zero:

The Architect’s Newspaper, a publication that launched in the fall of 2003, just as debates over rebuilding at Ground Zero were reaching a fever pitch, revisits its own diverse coverage of this mammoth story.

Paul Goldberger (whom we’d have loved to include Wednesday night, but who was otherwise committed) for the opinion pages of the New York Times: “We have learned a lot about building cities since the World Trade Center went up, and we did not put nearly enough of that knowledge to use. Most important, we failed to recognize how much of urban life comes from people living and not just working in neighborhoods, and we did not provide for that.”

Also in the Times, a lovely piece by John Leland, with even lovelier visuals by Juan Arredondo, on Jim Maroon, one of the men who clean the reflecting pools at the 9/11 Memorial.

From 2011, Ruth Reichl, in New York magazine, on Windows on the World: “It’s been said we’ve romanticized the place after the horror of what happened there. I’d say we romanticized it all along.”

See you next week!

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