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"   Joe Woolhead The site of the new World Trade Center.  CLICK HERE FOR THE LAY OF THE LAND &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt;  Originally published in the October 2010 issue. I&amp;#039;ll tell you this about New York City during the summer of the Ground Zero mosque here in year nine of our nation&amp;#039;s engagement in the holy war triggered by Osama bin Laden and now affixed to Orwellian permanence: It&amp;#039;s hot \u2014 ungodly hot \u2014 the woolen air a haze clinging to every pore. This morning brought a downpour not long after dawn that felt less like relief than ten minutes slumped against the wall of a shvitz getting pissed on by goats. Not that I&amp;#039;d know.  &amp;quot;You don&amp;#039;t mind the air conditioner, do ya?&amp;quot; Lenny laughs, planting himself behind the wheel of the truck. He&amp;#039;s hauling concrete from Brooklyn to the World Trade Center work site in downtown Manhattan. &amp;quot;This is ten yards on board,&amp;quot; Lenny says. &amp;quot;This is a twelve-yard truck with normal concrete \u2014 a sidewalk mix, whatever. This is twelve thousand PSI, much heavier a mix, much looser. That&amp;#039;s why we only carry ten yards.&amp;quot; The worlds within the worlds within the world of concrete? Forget about it. I can tell you that a yard of concrete is twenty-seven cubic feet \u2014 the volume of concrete sufficient to fill a cube measuring three feet by three feet; that after thousands of years \u2014 the Egyptians used concrete to build the pyramids \u2014 it still takes a mix of water, sand, stone, and cement to make up a batch of concrete; that adding substances \u2014 a whole range of chemicals and industrial by-products \u2014 to the mix changes the properties of the concrete to fit the job it needs to do; that while fire and the wheel get the glory, civilization uses more concrete than any other man-made substance. I can tell you that much of the concrete poured at the World Trade Center is the heaviest, strongest concrete ever poured anywhere. And I can tell you that Lenny has under ninety minutes from the time his truck is filled to deliver his ten yards to the site. Actually, Lenny&amp;#039;s the guy who can tell you all that, not me. But Lenny grew up in Brooklyn, a neighborhood called East New York, and lives in Staten Island now, and his accent is thick. In fact, everything about Lenny is thick, including his passenger this morning, me. Between us and the concrete, this truck&amp;#039;s going eighty thousand pounds, give or take. Except that the truck&amp;#039;s not going anywhere. We&amp;#039;re stuck in the two-mile long Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, the world&amp;#039;s longest underwater traffic tunnel, and by stuck I mean stopped cold in the morning rush hour. The only thing moving is the drum of concrete spinning slow behind us, keeping its load loose. &amp;quot;Backed up in the tunnel?&amp;quot; Lenny says after five standstill minutes. &amp;quot;Have some Ex-Lax.&amp;quot;  Sour dills do it for me. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s like Groucho Marx said \u2014 a clown&amp;#039;s like an aspirin but twice as fast. That&amp;#039;s how you feel sometimes when you go up to the Trade Center. You know what happened there, but you kid around and the humor helps you out.&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s a six-mile circuit from where the trucks load, hard by the Gowanus Canal, to the work site. They start loading a little after 6:00 A.M. and hit the truck route ten minutes or so apart. There&amp;#039;s a 260-yard pour at Tower 4 \u2014 we&amp;#039;re in the middle of that now \u2014 and a smaller pour at the memorial in the early afternoon. Other concrete companies are pouring Tower 1 and the new train station. &amp;quot;Not for nothing,&amp;quot; Lenny says, &amp;quot;but they used to have booths here \u2014 the cops used to stay inside the booths. No longer. Today you got modern technology. That&amp;#039;s it&amp;quot; \u2014 one thick finger jabbing high on the windshield \u2014 &amp;quot;right there in the ceiling. Cameras everywhere. Everywhere you go.&amp;quot; We all right timewise? &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;ll be okay on the time. The job is close enough where even if you lose a half hour you&amp;#039;re still in good shape. Unless you&amp;#039;re really warming up.&amp;quot; Whatever the weather, concrete produces its own heat as the water and the cement bond; on a morning like this, each batch mixed in the central drum that fills the trucks includes enough ice \u2014 shredded and blown into the mix from three-hundred-pound blocks kept frozen in a trailer nearby \u2014 to get it down to 65 degrees or so when it&amp;#039;s loaded.  &amp;quot;Without the ice,&amp;quot; Lenny says, &amp;quot;it&amp;#039;d be in the low 80s. The customer wants it to be 75 degrees. No problem.&amp;quot; Fifteen, twenty minutes, the tunnel loosens up, and we bounce into lower Manhattan. The spotter at the gate at the northwest corner of Ground Zero sees Lenny a block and a half away, sitting above a long row of cars at a red light. &amp;quot;See to the left? He&amp;#039;s washin&amp;#039; truck 84 \u2014 78 should be at the pump now. The guy out in the street there&amp;quot; \u2014 that&amp;#039;d be the spotter \u2014 &amp;quot;he saw this truck. He just told him I&amp;#039;m here. He&amp;#039;s dumpin&amp;#039; him out. He&amp;#039;s gonna empty out that truck so they&amp;#039;re gonna be ready when I get in there. It&amp;#039;s like a drive-through here. Watch this.&amp;quot; Sure enough. By the time we reach the site, 84 is on its way back to the tunnel, 78 is getting cleaned up, and Lenny has 103 backed up under one of the Tower 4 pumps ready to take his load up to the crew pouring another floor. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s Tony Junior,&amp;quot; Lenny says. &amp;quot;He&amp;#039;s in charge. That&amp;#039;s Good-Lookin&amp;#039; Pete right there. Guy to the left, his name is Larry \u2014 he&amp;#039;s the Teamster steward on the job.&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s a tight-knit bunch, although \u2014 for the record \u2014 Pete isn&amp;#039;t really looking all that good this morning. A lot of these guys go back together before 9/11 \u2014 in New York City, the construction business is a very small world \u2014 but the shared experience of that cataclysmic day and its aftermath cured and hardened their bond into something like concrete. &amp;quot;I realized the other day \u2014 I was talking to one of the contractors who was there, too, all that time \u2014 I said, &amp;#039;You know, we&amp;#039;ve been here almost ten years now.&amp;#039;&amp;quot; Lenny shakes his head, remembering.  &amp;quot;Thousands of people \u2014 I remember we had to shore up Church Street. The fire underground \u2014 they had steel plates across Church and Liberty \u2014 it was all torn up. Sitting in the trucks, waiting to go into the site, the heat underground, it actually melted the tires off the steel \u2014 three, four months after. I&amp;#039;ll never, ever, ever forget that smell. Never. I&amp;#039;ll never forget how it smelled.&amp;quot;  Joe Woolhead With two towers going up \u2014 1 World Trade and 4 World Trade \u2014 and two more on the way, the pirouette of concrete trucks at Ground Zero is a precision operation. The World Trade Center concrete is the strongest, heaviest concrete ever poured, and you&amp;#039;ve got less than two hours from the time it&amp;#039;s mixed until it needs to be poured, or it starts to set. I got here five years ago, in the spring of 2005, long after the smell was gone. (Click here to read &amp;quot;The Rebuilding&amp;quot; in its entirety.) I&amp;#039;ll never forget how it looked: barren, battered, bereft, a broken place sitting seventy feet below street level, with one long ramp running down into it. Three empty construction trailers, a couple of old beams waiting to be trucked up the ramp, and two large squares outlined by orange construction cones marking the footprints of the fallen Twin Towers. A cornerstone \u2014 boxed in wood, sitting in a pool of rainwater, nothing but a politician&amp;#039;s prop \u2014 for a building that would never be built. By then \u2014 nearly four years after 9/11 \u2014 it had become clear that no one was in charge at Ground Zero. You had a landlord \u2014 the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns these sixteen acres and built the World Trade Center \u2014 and a tenant fighting for control of the property; you had dueling architects; you had a state agency created by Rudy Giuliani before he left the mayor&amp;#039;s office designed specifically to keep a fellow Republican, Governor George E. Pataki, in charge of the funding and planning of rebuilding; you had community boards and groups of folks who&amp;#039;d lost loved ones on 9/11 and local and national politicians and the Port Authority and the tenant and editorial writers and architects all locked in endless tugs-of-war over what should be built, when and by whom, and who was to blame for the resulting impasse.  You had, in short, a pit, variously described as a hole in the ground and in the city&amp;#039;s heart, a national disgrace, an insult to the 9/11 dead, and proof that the terrorists had won.  You had promises that weren&amp;#039;t kept, deadlines that weren&amp;#039;t met, villains on all sides. What you never had at Ground Zero was the one and only thing that was ever going to make a difference \u2014 the thing that you have there now: effective leadership of an actual construction project.  A living layer cake of building \u2014 four superskyscrapers, a memorial plaza atop a museum, a transit hub, a subway line, each at a different stage, all separate yet inseparable.  It is, in toto, vast. The size and noise of it hit you in the face as soon as you&amp;#039;re within the gates. You need earplugs, water to cut the dust in your mouth and throat. It&amp;#039;s too big to see when it&amp;#039;s all in front of you. You need a guide. But Lenny can take you only so far. Where Lenny&amp;#039;s truck has dumped its concrete is at the southeast corner of the site, where Tower 4 is beginning to rise above the stump of its base. Crews are beginning foundation work for Towers 2 and 3; both sit due north of 4, in a row that descends from the crew pouring concrete for the twentieth floor of T4 down to the excavators sitting seventy feet below street level at what will become the base of Tower 2. That&amp;#039;s only one slice. The subway line, the transit hub \u2014 the train station known hereabouts simply as the Calatrava \u2014 and a portion of the street-level plaza form another slice, just west of the row of towers.  The other slice \u2014 roughly half of the site \u2014 consists of the memorial and Tower 1. At street level, the memorial will be a pair of fountains \u2014 each a waterfall of thirty feet \u2014 within the footprints of the Twin Towers, lined by parapets etched with the names of the victims of 9/11 and set off within the site by a maze of trees and walks. This is all happening right now, in real time, and it&amp;#039;s enough to make a patriot&amp;#039;s heart thump. On a good day at Ground Zero \u2014 and they&amp;#039;ve all been good days for some time now \u2014 it&amp;#039;s a hoe-ram symphony, a crane ballet, a three-dimensional tribute to patience, pure grit, and engineering genius. So tell me: How come all these asshats are still calling it just a hole in the ground?  &amp;quot;This is the one that pissed me off,&amp;quot; says Chris Ward, executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, owner of these sixteen acres. &amp;quot;Newt Gingrich, on the front page of The New York Times, is quoted on the mosque issue: &amp;#039;We&amp;#039;re gonna allow the Muslims to build it within two blocks of Ground Zero, where we haven&amp;#039;t built anything.&amp;#039;&amp;quot; Ward&amp;#039;s our guide today, and the dress shirt under his screaming-green safety vest makes him no less a Ground Zero warrior-hero. The Port&amp;#039;s purview includes all the major bridges, tunnels, and airports connecting New York City to the world; Ward&amp;#039;s in charge of six thousand employees and a multibillion-dollar annual budget, and he answers to the New York and New Jersey politicians who traditionally have used the PA as a cash cow, patronage pit, and whipping boy.  Ward&amp;#039;s immediate predecessors were hacks \u2014 Pataki&amp;#039;s puppet was a guy from upstate New York who once ran his family&amp;#039;s car wash and bowling alley \u2014 who mainly hid from public view while the boss overpromised and underdelivered. Ward, a barrel-chested egghead whose r\u00E9sum\u00E9 includes a master&amp;#039;s in theology from Harvard&amp;#039;s divinity school, is a straight-shooting leader. Within weeks of his appointment as the Port Authority&amp;#039;s executive director in May 2008, Chris Ward did something no less heroic for being necessary: He called bullshit on the whole damned thing. At the behest of New York governor David Paterson \u2014 who hired Ward after inheriting the governorship from the crusading whoremonger Eliot Spitzer \u2014 he delivered a thirty-four-page report that boiled down to this: Ground Zero&amp;#039;s budget and deadlines were so at odds with reality that it would take three months more just to figure out a realistic schedule to finish the rebuilding.  &amp;quot;Myopic monumentalism wrecked this project,&amp;quot; Ward says. &amp;quot;You can&amp;#039;t have a monument in a day. You don&amp;#039;t define the project by that at the beginning. You have to build it \u2014 and that requires patience. It requires hard work, and it requires deadlines. &amp;quot;We know every single day how much steel has to be placed, and how much concrete has to be poured, and we are driving every contractor for that level of completion. It is getting done.  &amp;quot;And let&amp;#039;s just step back here. We&amp;#039;ve done a lot \u2014 we&amp;#039;ve built 700,000 square feet below grade, we&amp;#039;re building an air-conditioning system for 1.8 million square feet of public space. It&amp;#039;s a kids&amp;#039; game of pickup sticks \u2014 they&amp;#039;re tied together. You can&amp;#039;t touch one without touching everything else. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;ll go down in the PATH station so you can see the open-heart surgery that&amp;#039;s going on to keep the PATH trains running while we&amp;#039;re tearing down the platforms.&amp;quot; Through an unmarked door inside the temporary PATH station \u2014 the railroad loops through the site, toting tens of thousands of commuters around the clock and seven days a week from New Jersey \u2014 and down, with Ward in the lead, into another world framed in steel and concrete, lit by bulbs hung from metal poles, mapped by countless plywood pathways laid by countless work crews as, day by day, they build a new World Trade Center from the ground up. &amp;quot;Look at that,&amp;quot; Ward says as a PATH train shrieks past. &amp;quot;That train curves and you&amp;#039;re about six inches from the new shear wall that we&amp;#039;re literally now pouring.&amp;quot; Once the train passes, we walk toward the center of the site, through a maze of utility work \u2014 in addition to public space, the rebuilt Trade Center will host ten million square feet of office space \u2014 and pump rooms. &amp;quot;That gray steel over there is the floor of the foundation,&amp;quot; says Ward. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;re gonna bring it all the way over to the top here. So while there&amp;#039;s still work being done down here, the PATH station ceiling will be there \u2014 more importantly, the floor of the memorial&amp;#039;ll be there, so we can plant the trees and finish the fountains. We&amp;#039;re building from the top down.&amp;quot; This is a point of great pride with Ward and the Port Authority engineers: In order to get the memorial ready for the tenth anniversary of 9/11, they redesigned the job and turned it upside down, so the memorial pavilion \u2014 the plaza that itself forms part of the PATH station&amp;#039;s ceiling \u2014 can be built first.   Joe Woolhead In the footprints of the original Twin Towers will be the memorial to those who died on September 11, 2001 \u2014 clad in black granite, etched with the names of the dead, with a reflecting pool where the core of the buildings once stood. The memorial will be completed by the tenth anniversary. &amp;quot;You can&amp;#039;t say the memorial&amp;#039;s the most important thing, so put your shovel down and let&amp;#039;s wait on the transit hub. The mechanical systems that drive the memorial fountains, the air-conditioning, and the lighting for the memorial are in the basement of the hub. So I had a difficult conversation with Santiago. He&amp;#039;s not used to difficult conversations \u2014 it was hard to get a word in edgewise \u2014 but we made it clear that he is building to an owner, not to himself.&amp;quot; Here Ward grins. Santiago Calatrava is an international superstar, a consummate artist, an engineer as well as an architect, and he had designed \u2014 to universal acclaim \u2014 a stunning hall entirely free of columns, all space and light, clasped by ribs of curving white concrete. It was an engineering marvel and, at the original budget of $2 billion, the most expensive train station ever built.  But once it became clear that both the cost and the complexity of building it were going to bust the budget and the rebuilding timetable, Ward had no choice but to ask for a sit-down with Calatrava. He could not have felt comfortable as a nickel-nursing, git-er-done politburo hack putting the squeeze on Santiago. But that&amp;#039;s precisely what Ward did, and he looks back at that fondly as one of the rebuilding&amp;#039;s turning points. &amp;quot;Literally, right here, is where all of these backspans and trusses are gonna be, and the way he designed them, you literally had to bring them in and drop them, and the steel would bend to a point and form where it was supposed to be. But that could&amp;#039;ve been incredibly costly and risky if you had to keep placing it. This huge truss that goes down the middle of the Calatrava hub \u2014 the thing is like welding forty plates together because it holds up the whole ceiling. &amp;quot;He came to the table with some very, very creative ways of solving a lot of the construction complexity. So we&amp;#039;ve done four columns. You can&amp;#039;t even really tell they&amp;#039;re there.&amp;quot; Crossing the site toward Tower 1 in the far northwest corner, we climb a few wood stairs until we reach a level even with the memorial footprints. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s the lower void of the South Tower. Look at these pumps. Sixty thousand gallons a minute for the memorial. The pavilion is almost overhead \u2014 instead of building from the bottom up, we flipped the memorial staging structure so the memorial will be done by the ten-year anniversary.  &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;ll have the fountains working, the names on the parapets of those who were lost, and 80 percent of the trees fully planted.  &amp;quot;We made a commitment to the mayor, we made a commitment to the two governors \u2014 that memorial will be done on the ten-year anniversary. That&amp;#039;s the only thing that matters.&amp;quot;  From Ward&amp;#039;s lips to God&amp;#039;s ears: If the Port Authority can&amp;#039;t get that much finished by 9/11/11, it may be his last day on the job. And he knows it. The voids where the Twin Towers stood have long been Ground Zero&amp;#039;s spiritual center. When the site was cleared of debris, they immediately were declared off-limits to vehicles and equipment, and they have retained a certain solemnity throughout the rebuilding. The crews lining their floors and walls with black granite wear black hard hats, which seem to be impossible to obtain for the not-so-few collectors among the rebuilding throng.  It is artisanal work, befitting its character and purpose. Nobody will forget that this patch of land \u2014 as wrenched by dispute as any in the world \u2014 also is, literally, a mass grave. For that very reason, many voices \u2014 among them, in his mayoral farewell address, Rudy Giuliani&amp;#039;s \u2014 argued that the entire site should become a vast memorial. That this idea failed to gain any real traction says at least as much about New York City&amp;#039;s \u2014 and America&amp;#039;s \u2014 fighting spirit, resilience, and self-security as it says about the worth of real estate in Manhattan.  But the memorial is no less vital for that, and it is \u2014 even now, in its infancy \u2014 breathtaking. &amp;quot;Come on,&amp;quot; Ward says. &amp;quot;Let&amp;#039;s go over to 1 World.&amp;quot; That&amp;#039;s what the Port Authority has renamed the Freedom Tower. So far, no good: Everyone else still calls it the Freedom Tower. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;re just about to hit the standard floor, which means every floor plate is like the one on top of it, so the guys can get some momentum going and start punching &amp;#039;em out. By this year&amp;#039;s anniversary, we should be around fifty or fifty-five, and then by the ten-year anniversary, we should be topped out at ninety.&amp;quot;  On my first trip to the pit, in &amp;#039;05, I met Marc Becker.  &amp;quot;I know it&amp;#039;s gonna happen,&amp;quot; Becker told me then, speaking of the tower finally rising. &amp;quot;I just don&amp;#039;t know when.&amp;quot; I could almost hear his teeth grinding as he said it. His blue Tishman hard hat \u2014 Tishman construction helped put up the old Twin Towers, and it&amp;#039;s running the Tower 1 job for the Port Authority now \u2014 was covered with stickers, his 9/11 battle ribbons, marking him as a veteran of the rescue and recovery efforts. He was patient with my questions, all nuts-and-bolts stuff about pumping water out of the pit and figuring out how to build a skyscraper&amp;#039;s foundation around a working railroad track, but I could see him getting flushed as I kept trying to make sense of construction basics that were second nature to him. &amp;quot;All I can tell ya is we&amp;#039;re ready to build,&amp;quot; he said finally. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;re ready to go. It&amp;#039;s very personal to me. It&amp;#039;s not just a job.&amp;quot; Back then, nearly a year after Pataki had dedicated a cornerstone, crews were still waiting for the Port Authority, the architects, and the NYPD to figure out how to secure 1 World Trade&amp;#039;s base. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s personal. It&amp;#039;s personal. I saw all the horrors. I mean horrors. From day one.&amp;quot; And then he choked up and couldn&amp;#039;t talk anymore.  Now we&amp;#039;re sitting in a small construction trailer fifty yards from Tower 1, at street level. Through the small rectangular window, the titanic seventy-foot trusses rise at its base, painted with a dull red epoxy, awaiting fireproofing.  Above \u2014 day by day, a floor a week \u2014 750 men are busy raising Tower 1. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;re goin&amp;#039; vertical,&amp;quot; Becker says. &amp;quot;Pretty soon you&amp;#039;ll be able to start to see it in the skyline. We&amp;#039;re actually getting ready to start erecting thirty-three and thirty-four. We just finished thirty-one and thirty-two.&amp;quot; He&amp;#039;s a strapping Brooklyn cowboy with a wrangler&amp;#039;s mustache. He fills a construction trailer all by himself. It isn&amp;#039;t his size. He&amp;#039;s still that intense. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m attached to the building. When I hear some of the negativity, I take it personal. But people don&amp;#039;t understand. Oh, yeah, I explain it. Absolutely. I tell them they don&amp;#039;t know what the hell they&amp;#039;re talkin&amp;#039; about. People don&amp;#039;t understand the magnitude of the below-grade structure \u2014 almost fifty thousand cubic yards of concrete. That&amp;#039;s almost equivalent to a thirty-story building. We were building footings around an active railroad track. When people walk below grade \u2014 I&amp;#039;m in awe myself when I walk around. The magnitude of the concrete \u2014 it&amp;#039;s massive. Massive. People don&amp;#039;t understand.&amp;quot;  The lack of understanding is compounded to this day by pundits fond of pointing out that the Empire State Building took just over a year to build, as if the two projects were in any way comparable. Never mind that the Empire State site had not been attacked, that its predecessor was not destroyed, that its designers had no need to harden their building against an ongoing jihad. The Empire State&amp;#039;s builders also didn&amp;#039;t have to dig down seventy feet to hit bedrock strong enough to support their skyscraper, and then build its foundation atop a commuter railroad.  In fact \u2014 as opposed to ignorant punditry \u2014 the World Trade Center is a mere few hundred feet east of the Hudson River \u2014 in July, crews working on the foundation of the vehicle-screening center unearthed a ship&amp;#039;s prow dating to the late eighteenth century \u2014 and the old Twin Towers towered over Hudson River landfill, which is why the Port was forced to dig so far for bedrock, and why it also had to first build a concrete &amp;quot;bathtub&amp;quot; around the towers&amp;#039; site to keep out the river and to hold fast against its push. The bathtub&amp;#039;s walls had to be repaired after 9/11; even as the site was being cleared of millions of tons of debris, workers rushed to shore them up to prevent a potentially catastrophic flood.  Then there was the matter of rebuilding the PATH lines. The tracks, equipment, and utility lines were destroyed on 9/11, and the Ground Zero &amp;quot;Master Plan&amp;quot; that so dazzled Pataki with glorious symbolism and monumental soar \u2014 concocted by an architect who&amp;#039;d never had a building built that stood taller than four floors \u2014 blithely sited Tower 1 on the worst possible spot on the entire sixteen acres, which is why Becker&amp;#039;s crews had to weave column footings around a working commuter railroad.  They did it \u2014 all of it \u2014 day by day, piece by painstaking piece, while the politicians and pundits prattled on. Same way they&amp;#039;re doing it today.  A mosque at Ground Zero? That&amp;#039;s news.  Tower 1 finally going up? Not only isn&amp;#039;t that news, it&amp;#039;s complicated.  In truth, it&amp;#039;s not so much complicated as it is freaking amazing. Two huge tower cranes operating between 1 World Trade&amp;#039;s central core and its perimeter are doing the heavy lifting. Each one is equipped with a hydraulic-jack system that enables the crane to raise itself as the building goes up. You with me? The cranes jump themselves as the building goes up.  The building goes up in a continuous cycle. The ironworkers are on the top deck, erecting steel \u2014 first in the core, then the perimeter columns, then all the beams. When the steel&amp;#039;s done, they deck the floor. Then the concrete is poured. It&amp;#039;s a two-week cycle: By the time a floor is far enough along to be poured, the ironworkers should be beginning to erect the core and perimeter steel six floors up. &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;re doing two floors every two weeks,&amp;quot; Becker says. &amp;quot;As you go up the building, the other trades follow \u2014 the spray fireproofing, the curtain wall, the mechanicals.&amp;quot; Becker looks out the little window, over to the tower. &amp;quot;I think it&amp;#039;s one year ago next week that we set our first tower column,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;The job right now is running six days a week. There&amp;#039;s two shifts for the concrete guys, and sometimes it goes to seven. We need to be topped out with steel at the end of 0-11.&amp;quot; The thought alone makes Becker almost smile. &amp;quot;This is once in a lifetime,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s goin&amp;#039; up.&amp;quot;  To me, the voice of Ground Zero belongs to Brian Lyons. Another Tishman guy, Lyons was my first interview down here. He came down to Ground Zero on 9/11 to look for his brother Michael, a firefighter, and searched until he found all that remained of his brother&amp;#039;s company \u2014 in the ruins where the old South Tower collapsed \u2014 and just kept on working at the site on whatever needed doing.  Lyons is cut from the same cloth as Gary Cooper \u2014 all strength, no swagger \u2014 and looks like Dennis Hopper on the best day of Hopper&amp;#039;s life. He was supering at Tower 4 most of the summer; now he&amp;#039;s running the transit-hub job next to it, across the site from where we&amp;#039;re sitting in Becker&amp;#039;s little trailer. &amp;quot;Workin&amp;#039; hard, man. I&amp;#039;m beadin&amp;#039; sweat all day.&amp;quot; This Ward guy made a big difference down here. &amp;quot;I know Chris. Very nice guy. He helped navigate a lotta this stuff and get this thing goin&amp;#039;. And everybody&amp;#039;s workin&amp;#039; hard to try to make that happen for him. Now it&amp;#039;s a construction site. All the things in the past are past \u2014 we&amp;#039;re ready to go, and there&amp;#039;s a lotta work. We&amp;#039;re here to build now.&amp;quot; It took a while, I say. Lyons shrugs. &amp;quot;Every job has all that BS. You build your own house, there&amp;#039;s always some mysteries going on. There&amp;#039;s always that kind of stuff. It&amp;#039;s construction. It&amp;#039;s taken a long time. It&amp;#039;s turned the corner. Now you&amp;#039;re seein&amp;#039; the fruit of that tree comin&amp;#039; up outta the ground, which is beautiful. Every inch of the site is bein&amp;#039; worked on. We got our head above the street. Now we&amp;#039;re towering towards the sky, and that&amp;#039;s what this is all about. &amp;quot;Nine years have gone by in the blink of an eye for me. I&amp;#039;ve been gettin&amp;#039; off that train and comin&amp;#039; in that gate for nine years, man. Every day \u2014 six, seven days a week. I go home exhausted every day. The kids are growin&amp;#039; up. And another anniversary&amp;#039;s comin&amp;#039; up here soon. The delis, the pizzerias \u2014 they all have business now. When we were gettin&amp;#039; started, they were suffering. Now they&amp;#039;re busy, they&amp;#039;re feedin&amp;#039; their families, the stores are full, tourists are coming. There&amp;#039;s a whole different buzz downtown.&amp;quot; A small park sits right across the street from Ground Zero, across the front door of New York&amp;#039;s least-sung skyscraper, 7 World Trade. Seven, the last tower to fall on 9/11, was quickly rebuilt by Larry Silverstein, who signed a lease on the World Trade Center six weeks before 9/11 and has been wed unhappily to the Port Authority ever since. The details of their union would fill a book nobody would wish to read; suffice it to say that Silverstein is a warrior-hero, too, a real estate developer whose Ground Zero legacy, however history judges it, has this going for it: You can grab lunch at any of several dozen nearby places, find a seat in the sun in front of 7, and watch Tower 1 going up and up. There are more places down here to eat than ever. More folks looking for a spot. Like Lyons says. More noise, more ancient wineheads panhandling, more hawkers of 9/11 kitsch, more residents walking their dogs, more taxis \u2014 a whole lot more New York City. You can see it, hear it, and feel it. And that really is the headline at Ground Zero: The terrorists lost. Not that it was ever truly in doubt, but it&amp;#039;s so plain now, so in your face when you stroll around the immediate vicinity \u2014 including the dead-air block around the corner that has now become a metaphorical battleground of its own because of the &amp;quot;Ground Zero mosque.&amp;quot; The terrorists lost. New York City won.  Not just because the pit is full. Not just because Tower 1 is climbing. Not just because anyone says so. Nobody needs to say a goddamn thing. The evidence is everywhere down here and it speaks for itself: They can&amp;#039;t win. They&amp;#039;ll keep trying, and it won&amp;#039;t matter. The spirit that built this place \u2014 New York City and the United States of America \u2014 the spirit that is rebuilding the World Trade Center now, can never be crushed by terror, whatever its creed. We fucked up once. That&amp;#039;s all.  All due respect, and not for nothing, but we fucked up. We didn&amp;#039;t know \u2014 partly because we didn&amp;#039;t want to know \u2014 we were at war. Al Qaeda let us know. They felled the towers, scarred the Pentagon, slew three thousand innocents, inflicted terror upon the people of a nation shielded for generations from war&amp;#039;s hell by luck, geography, and a fearsome arsenal, all that, but it dishonors neither the dead nor America to speak the truth. It was a classic sucker punch, and it hurt plenty, but it was not a crippling blow. Not even close. America&amp;#039;s unfolding political and military response is a subject for historians to parse, although I myself wish the use of the word homeland had been strangled in the crib, and that Osama bin Laden had found fewer willing partners in jihad among our own ideologues and media mullahs. What makes an issue of something like the Ground Zero mosque is the same strain of nativist hatred that holds weaker nations together, that trusts fear more than freedom. We&amp;#039;re either better and stronger than that or no better or stronger than our sworn enemies. New York City&amp;#039;s response to 9/11 is simpler to measure \u2014 mainly because the city was Ground Zero and hence forced to respond \u2014 and yet crucial to our vision of ourselves as a nation. And not simply because New York City is the best of America, but because \u2014 Red State/Blue State be damned \u2014 it is America. One of every fifteen Americans lives here, in the metropolitan region; for much of the rest of the world, New York City is the face, the living definition of who we are as a nation. And rightly so.  Besides, what New York City did in the wake of 9/11 is no different in essence from what other war-torn places have done under circumstances far more dire and with far fewer resources.  We cried. Prayed. Mourned our dead. We went back to work. Building. Rebuilding. We said everything that had to be said, without words. This time, we&amp;#039;re going higher.  Click Here to Read More of Scott Raab&amp;#039;s Series, &amp;quot;The Rebuilding&amp;quot; &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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