On Sept. 11, 2001, 16 acres in Lower Manhattan were turned into hallowed ground. How that area has been transformed since 9/11 has been a delicate balance of both looking back and looking forward.
Healing never happens as fast as the hurt. The smoldering bramble of concrete and steel at Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan took only minutes to amass, but it took years to decide just what to put in its place. Leave it empty, out of respect? Rebuild, as an act of defiance? “I think they should do something that kind of preserves the other towers, like, the memory of them,” one woman said. The stakes for stitching up Ground Zero’s gaping wound were monumental. “There’s been no project in our lifetimes that’s had the combination of an emotional component like Ground Zero, and the physical size of it,” said Paul Goldberger, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his architectural criticism in The New York Times.
