Lower Manhattan has opportunity to reinvent itself

`Now is not the time to think status quo. Now is the time for those who shape the city's future ... to think with a little boldness and creativity, to see what may be, rather than what was.'

Sandy Weill, the chairman of Citigroup Inc, says New York should build a baseball stadium on the site of the World Trade Center.

This remarkable revelation surfaced in the New York Times, buried deep in an article about the need for the city to plan the future of lower Manhattan. There is not a lot of agreement right now on what is to take the place of the twin towers, who is to finance it, or even who is to supervise the whole thing.

Yet this much may be agreed upon. The tragedy of Sept. 11 gives New York City a singular opportunity in the way of city planning, an opportunity not to be squandered.

Now is not the time to think status quo. Now is the time for those who shape the city's future -- and we won't really know who these visionaries are until after the mayoral election next week -- to think with a little boldness and creativity, to see what may be, rather than what was.

And what may be is a city that is nicer, and friendlier and more attractive, to the people who live and work there. This would mark a real departure for New York, a city that has triumphed in spite of a gritty hostility to its own residents.

In other words, why not a ballpark? And while we're at it, it's high time for the city to build a couple of big marinas downtown, too, and a couple of streetcar lines.

The pledge to reconstruct the World Trade Center was made within days of the towers' unplanned demolition. Instead of two 110-story towers, though, the developer who leased the buildings from the Port Authority thought four 50-story towers might be just the thing. Other observers said that only rebuilding the towers bigger and better would do.

The question now is, why? Does this particular site in downtown Manhattan need to be devoted to what was there before -- over 2.5 million m2 of office space? The World Trade Center was originally envisioned by Austin Tobin, executive director of what was then known as the Port of New York Authority, as a latter-day version of the Tontine Coffee House, site of the New York Stock Exchange in the 1790s.

The coffee house was located at the corner of Wall and Water streets, and the World Trade Center very nearly was, too. Only the bi-state nature of the authority, whose board members are from New York and New Jersey, was responsible for the creation of the World Trade Center complex as we knew it. The Port Authority got to build its Trade Center in exchange for taking over the Hudson & Manhattan Railroad, the so-called tubes between New Jersey and Manhattan.

Who now needs a new World Trade Center? For much of its life, the Trade Center was a magnificent white elephant. Wall Street long ago moved to midtown, and many of the office towers along Wall and Broad streets are residential rather than commercial. The city's office vacancy rate stands at 8.4 percent and the stock of new office space grows almost daily.

Robert Yaro is executive director of the Regional Plan Association, and he says the group is taking a "broader look" at the site in terms of the economy and the region, not just now, but a decade from now, which is probably how long it will take before lower Manhattan returns to normal.

"Sandy Weill is a smart man, and we'll put the stadium on the list," said Yaro. He added that stadiums are "not tremendous wealth generators," as the Trade Center undoubtedly was. The key here is the use of the past tense.

Perhaps an even larger question to be answered by New Yorkers is whether the Port Authority will have a role in all this. Former executive director George J. Marlin thinks not. That's a column for another day.