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From After: How America Confronted The September 12 Era

Thursday, February 7, 2002

Hollie Bart had clearly gotten the insurance company's attention. Today, which was the twenty-fifth anniversary of Sal opening Continental Shoe Repair, she got a fax offering $5,685 for his business interruption claim covering the four weeks his store had been closed. (The number was arrived at by calculating his average weekly revenue -- about $2,000 -- and then deducting the costs he did not incur, such as for materials, because he did no business during that time.) Bart replied that she'd take it, but not as a complete settlement; she still wanted more for the period when Sal had been opened but the area around him had been so blocked off to vehicular and pedestrian traffic that it was almost as if he were closed.

Larry Silverstein told the author that he expected his trial against the insurers to start in September, that the jury would give him his win by October, and that by the following spring of 2003 the appeals would be over and he'd have his check for $7 billion.

By now David Childs, Silverstein's architect at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, had completed the elaborate design and mock-up of a new World Trade Center complex that Silverstein had asked him to start on the day after the attacks. It included a glorious new transit hub, with what Childs called his "great train room" at the base, surrounded by four office towers of varying sizes. The tallest had a protective sheaf of glass around it that rose above the office building itself (which stopped at about sixty-five floors) to the exact height of the original towers. In the middle of the four buildings was a grass plaza area of about ten acres that would serve as a memorial. Childs had also meant for the glass sheaf as another kind of memorial; it seemed to rise and fade up into the heavens. Or as Childs explained it to Silverstein, it was "a marker in the sky of the memorial down below." In all, it was an ambitious plan, likely to be far more pleasing to architecture critics than anything they might have expected from Larry Silverstein.

But Childs had a trick that made it even better. Two of the four towers could simply be picked up and removed, leaving 60 percent of the old Ground Zero space open.

Silverstein loved the way Childs could yank the two buildings up off the mock-up and produce something that turned a crowded circle of office buildings into an open, beautiful setting for two beautiful towers, a grand transit station, and acres of serene, open space for a memorial and even a museum or some other cultural amenity. For now, however, they had to show the Port Authority the design with the four towers, which provided the same amount of office space that the old Trade Center had had. Taking away two of the towers left about 60 percent of the original office space, which is about what Silverstein expected to negotiate. But because of that contract with the Port Authority that required him to rebuild it all, and them to let him rebuild it all, the crowded design would serve as their prop for a multibillion-dollar game of chicken. They had to wait for the Port Authority to blink first before Silverstein could lift those two towers and reveal Childs's real design.

Copyright © 2003 by Steven Brill