(The following article by David W. Dunlap was posted on the New York Times website on September 7.)
NEW YORK — On a cloudlessly blue Tuesday morning in September, the rhetorical foundations were laid for the first permanent public building at the World Trade Center site: a $2.21 billion PATH terminal and transportation hub with birdlike wings above ground and a spider’s web of passageways below that will help link the riverfront to the financial district.
Actual construction on the terminal, designed by Santiago Calatrava, is to begin on Monday, after the fourth anniversary of the terror attack is observed. Yesterday’s ceremony – set among the trade center’s rugged foundation walls – drew the mayor, two governors, three executives of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and four United States senators. It opened an annual season of official commemoration and mourning – one that occurs this year under the shadow of far more widespread devastation 1,100 miles away.
Trying to link these events, the speakers expressed hope that the rebuilding of Lower Manhattan in the face of what seemed like insurmountable odds might offer solace to the people of the Gulf Coast.
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York described conversations with evacuees in Houston on Monday. “I was able to say to those devastated, sad and angry people: ‘We will be with you. New York and America will stand with you.’ And I knew I would be here this morning, so my words were not just hollow words of reassurance but based on the reality of what we are doing today.”
What they were doing was not a groundbreaking, said Norman Y. Mineta, the secretary of transportation.
“The truth is, this hallowed ground has already been broken, viciously and cruelly,” he said. “And so today, instead of a groundbreaking, we begin the process of filling the gaping wound left by the horrific terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.”
Mr. Calatrava introduced his design in 2004 by sketching a child releasing a bird into the air, then superimposing the bird on the terminal hall. But the transportation hub is much more than that. It will create a network of underground connections to other buildings on the trade center site, to nearby subway stations and, under West Street-Route 9A, to the World Financial Center.
“We see us as not making icons but being of help to others,” Mr. Calatrava said. He is working on the trade center project with the firms STV and DMJM Harris.
The first step will be to protect the sheared-off column remnants from the twin towers with a pool-type liner and 12 inches of fill. Then a retaining wall will be built along the route of a temporary track leading to the station. Excavation will begin for the fourth PATH train platform. A trade center truck ramp that made use of an old tunnel built by the Hudson & Manhattan Railroad, predecessor to PATH, will be demolished.
The new terminal and transportation hub is expected to open in 2009.
Bringing the circle to a close yesterday, Mr. Calatrava and his 10-year-old daughter, Sofia (excused from part of her first day of school at the Lycée Français of New York), released two birds into the air.
Officially described as doves, they were in fact white homing pigeons based in Nassau County, furnished by an employee of Falcon Environmental Services, which runs a program for the Port Authority that uses hawks and falcons to keep the runways at Kennedy Airport clear of other birds.
Asked about the pigeons’ prospects after release, Stuart Rossell, who manages the program, said: “It should be excellent. They’ve always gone home before.”