When the revised master plan for the rebuilding of the World Trade Center is released this month, it will include scores of changes to architect Daniel Libeskind's design, both major alterations and minor refinements, many of them never before seen in public.
The plan will retain its signature elements -- the recessed memorial area, the 541m spire that will be taller than the original towers, and a grand new transportation terminal. But other features will come into sharper focus, like a giant waterfall that has so far attracted scant attention and shrinking "urban parks" that in reality are little more than streets with flower beds.
The secretive evolution of the plan contrasts sharply with the continuing portrayal of the rebuilding process as one of the most open and inclusive civic building projects in memory. Government officials, architects, civic groups and developers still speak in awestruck tones about the town hall meeting in the summer of 2002, when more than 4,000 New Yorkers spent hours discussing, of all things, urban planning.
Ever since, the officials overseeing the rebuilding effort have congratulated themselves for their courage to go back to the drawing board after the public rejected the original six designs for the site. And they have cited that process for their defense of the Libeskind plan from mutations that would rob it of its singularity.
"It was the aggressive outreach to a broader public that resulted in the consensus behind this plan," Governor George E. Pataki said in an interview last month.
As much as the Libeskind plan evolved by the will of the public, however, it also turned on the political needs of Pataki, who was running for re-election last fall. The governor's decrees, like his early declaration under pressure from victims' families that the footprints of the towers be preserved as a memorial, sometimes created public opinion as much as reflected it.
Libeskind's plan, for all its ingenious originality, was just as prized for its flexibility. There also were financial considerations: The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the owner of the trade center, wanted to guarantee its revenues from the site, and its leaseholder, the developer Larry A. Silverstein, stood alone in his ability to pay for the rebuilding, thanks to his control of the twin towers' insurance money.
Though the new master plan could be further revised in the environmental impact review, by most accounts it will be superior to that of the World Trade Center design of the 1970s. It will reconnect neighborhoods that were split apart by the original project and provide a somber memorial to the victims of the 9-11 attack.
In the minds of some officials, though, it also seems reminiscent of a design rejected by the thousands of citizen planners who packed that July 2002 town hall meeting in the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center.
Months before that huge meeting, rebuilding officials knew that almost all the decisions about the site would be driven by the memorial to the victims of the Sept. 11 attack, leaving few options for its basic design.
In early 2002, Louis R. Tomson, the president of the Lower Manhattan Development Corp, and others advised Pataki that the most sensible plan was to re-establish Fulton and Greenwich Streets through the site. That would carve the property into quadrants, saving the largest section -- the southwest corner, where the towers had stood for some 30 years -- for a memorial.
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