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" For a recap of the previous three installments, read our primer on &amp;quot;The Rebuilding&amp;quot; Governor Pataki, the Father of the Freedom Tower, is running late \u2014 twenty minutes, plus or minus five long years \u2014 not that it matters any on this fine December morning. A lanky, whey-faced, round-shouldered man with all the charisma of a poached egg, he&amp;#039;s still head honcho of New York State for two more weeks, and this is a special day: George Pataki&amp;#039;s last giddyap at ground zero. So what the hey \u2014 they&amp;#039;ll wait. They \u2014 the work crews, machines, and media \u2014 are, yes, waiting. Rock anchors, 165 of them, have been set \u2014 long, tensioned three-inch-diameter steel rods lanced and grouted eighty feet deep into 120-ton bedrock \u2014 and twelve hundred cubic yards and more of concrete have been poured over curving rebar cages, forming a part of the four-foot-thick shear walls that&amp;#039;ll define the Freedom Tower&amp;#039;s perimeter and help bear the load as the structure itself climbs, column by column, 1,776 feet into the blue. The climb starts here, in a sixteen-acre pit seventy feet below street level, in the northwest quadrant of the Manhattan plain where, once, the World Trade Center stood.  The climbing, in fact, starts this morning, when George Pataki arrives, at last, after five years and three months of empty promises and endless posturing, of milking mass murder for the sake of politics, of multibillion-dollar real estate hardball, engineering savvy, and knuckle-busting work \u2014 and, above all, after five years and three months of stunning stupidity.  It was never going to be a quick and easy job. Even before Pataki picked a rebuilding plan drawn up by an architect who&amp;#039;d never built a building taller than four stories, a plan that placed the tallest building on the site at its toughest spot to build on and put it so close to an eight-lane highway that the NYPD insisted that it be moved and redesigned for safety&amp;#039;s sake, wasting another year; even before Pataki, wanting a legacy, named it Freedom Tower \u2014 the NYPD just loved that \u2014 and before deciding that it, not a memorial, would be the first thing built at ground zero, and before vowing that it would be topped off by September 11, 2006. Even before all that, it was going to be a slog. Because that&amp;#039;s how a superskyscraper gets designed, engineered, and built under the best circumstances: slowly, precisely, one step at a time. And that&amp;#039;s why today truly is so special: Today, they&amp;#039;re planting Freedom Tower steel.  Ground zero has seen few special days since 9/11, and those few have been mainly sad. The yearly anniversaries, when the roll of the dead is read aloud and bells toll to mark the minutes when the jets struck the Twin Towers \u2014 and again to mark their separate falls to earth \u2014 are heartbreaking. But days like this \u2014 when the politicians and cameras return to the empty pit for yet another hollow milestone, and the governor gives the same stale speech, and the memory of 9/11 and the inch by inch and day by day of rebuilding are buried ever deeper beneath a sour crust of cynical, jingo-fueled, pandering dung \u2014 days like today tend to be worse, the crib-smothering of hope.  Not today. The wind is whipping, but old Sol has cleared the Woolworth Building and the chilly air is bright. A brigade of brown-hatted ironworkers is waiting, which says something&amp;#039;s going up. And, best of all, the soaring four-hundred-ton crane is on the Freedom Tower job, and as Bobby the Teamster says, &amp;quot;Till the crane&amp;#039;s on the job, it&amp;#039;s not a job.&amp;quot; At ground zero, it&amp;#039;s a job just getting the crane to the job. Access to the pit is a sloping 460-foot bridge; the crane&amp;#039;s forty-two-ton car body alone, without its mammoth treads and its stacks of solid steel counterweights, exceeds the bridge&amp;#039;s weight limit. It took a dozen flatbeds \u2014 one at a time \u2014 to truck the crane into the pit, five of them just to carry sections of the soaring red boom.  But today the crane \u2014 like everything else down here: the concrete, crews, and cameras, the governor himself \u2014 is a bit player. Three plated steel columns, painted white, at rest on planking, massive, hulking, sitting side by side \u2014 they&amp;#039;re the stars. Two of them are covered with signatures; the third, with an American-flag decal atop the words FREEDOM TOWER \u2014 all in huge block capitals running down its length \u2014 is waiting for its close-up with the guv.  Brian Lyons has waited a long time for these columns to arrive. A construction superintendent for the tower&amp;#039;s general contractor, Lyons came down to ground zero on 9/11 to look for his brother Michael, a firefighter working out of the Bronx. He found all that remained of his brother&amp;#039;s company \u2014 their tools \u2014 on Saint Patrick&amp;#039;s Day 2002. He has worked here ever since. A blue-eyed, flint-faced, no-bull guy, pushing fifty, with three daughters and two young nieces without a daddy. &amp;quot;When these beams arrived,&amp;quot; Lyons says, &amp;quot;it got to me. It took me like half a day, and then I started to fuckin&amp;#039; break down \u2014 &amp;#039;cuz I was here when we took that last beam out, and now I&amp;#039;m here for this, the first beam goin&amp;#039; up \u2014 one step closer to gettin&amp;#039; to the top. The world&amp;#039;s watchin&amp;#039; this job, especially when this beam goes up. When steel starts growin&amp;#039; outta the ground, it&amp;#039;s nice.&amp;quot;  Steel springing from the earth itself is not a far-fetched trope. Steel starts as iron ore, rock-plentiful, easy to refine, and thus the most essential element in the evolution of Homo sapiens as a tool-using, city-building, sky-climbing bunch of baboons. Iron ore + fire = life as most of us live it, which is why the universal measure of a civilized people emerging across eons is an Iron Age \u2014 and both why and how ground zero will rise again. Acts of building \u2014 putting fire to iron ore \u2014 are as much a part of our human nature as growing grain. Putting fire to iron is what we do. And it sure as hell is loud. Where the Freedom Tower beams were cast and rolled, at the Arcelor mill in Luxembourg, in the town of Differdange, they&amp;#039;ve turned iron to steel for more than a hundred years, and the choir of demonic noise \u2014 even with earplugs \u2014 and the dust and heat and smoke make it feel like a thousand. It is a roaring aural undulation, a slow oceanic swelling so vast and relentless that chords seem to form and vanish like ghosts. All of which is music to the ears of Lambert Schmit. Schmit&amp;#039;s fifty-three years old and has worked at Arcelor for half his life, as did his father and grandfather. He managed the Differdange mill for seven years; now, he says, he is a communications officer. At six four, he has the long stride and narrow squint of a cowpoke.  &amp;quot;My grandfozzer was smaller,&amp;quot; Schmit says, &amp;quot;but my fozzer was very tall. Zere are many big people around &amp;#039;ere.&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s a landscape fit for giants. In the prep yard, the overhead crane operator, peering straight down like a bombardier, dips his mammoth claw into mountains of metal, sorted by grade \u2014 pig iron, automotive scrap, shredded sheet steel: &amp;quot;Very full for ze moment,&amp;quot; Schmit shouts. &amp;quot;Zere must be fifty thousand tons&amp;quot; \u2014 then loads a bucket, set on tracks, with a hundred tons. The full bucket groans into the mill, where it&amp;#039;s capped by lowering what is essentially its roof \u2014 the whole becoming a vast electric arc furnace.   &amp;quot;You have no pacemaker or zing like zat?&amp;quot; Schmit asks. No idle question: The direct-current electrodes inside the furnace pack the wallop of a lightning strike \u2014 thirty-five million watts. The accompanying scream \u2014 of steel being melted to magma at 1600 degrees \u2014 has a certain terror to it, a quality of noise beyond all noise. Flames billow, flinging sparks in long trails, and the heat radiates even to the flight of stairs up to the door of a command post where the furnace operator sits in an air-conditioned, pale-tiled room, surrounded on three sides by computers, his fitted earplugs dangling from a lanyard, listening to Eric Clapton on the radio.  &amp;quot;We just have a short look outside,&amp;quot; says Schmit, smiling, stepping to a side door opening on the volcano, &amp;quot;to give you some impression. It will be quite hot.&amp;quot; Yo. Quite. Fucking. Hot. Nowhere else does anyone roll the 730-pound-per-foot wide-flanged H beams \u2014 &amp;quot;jumbos,&amp;quot; Arcelor calls them \u2014 that form the heart of the Freedom Tower columns. The liquefied scrap, analyzed and then refined in a second furnace, where alloys are added to bring it to the proper grade, is next poured and cast in a continuous molten stream, molded, water-cooled, and cut by oxygen torches into rough and glowing segments called &amp;quot;beam blanks&amp;quot; \u2014 embryonic beams \u2014 still throbbing at the core with heat. The rolling process shapes the cooling mass of steel to the customer&amp;#039;s order. The blanks are squeezed \u2014 back and forth, over and over \u2014 thundering through sets of automatic rollers, incrementally thinning and lengthening the beam, deforming and recrystallizing the steel&amp;#039;s molecular grain as the flanges, web, and chamber are shaved, pass by narrowing pass, slowly into being, giving the finished H beam its enormous tensile strength.  It is this rolling process and the H beams it produces that enable the erection of superstructures like the Freedom Tower. Once upon a time, they rolled them in the United States, at Bethlehem Steel and U. S. Steel. The titanic columns of the Twin Towers themselves were pieced out to smaller steelmakers across the U. S. A. when the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey \u2014 ground zero&amp;#039;s owner, then and now \u2014 suspected that U. S. and Bethlehem had rigged their bids back in the sixties. But American Big Steel is smaller now \u2014 hell, they&amp;#039;re building a casino where the furnaces at Bethlehem once roared \u2014 and its profits come from minimills, not beasts like Differdange. So it&amp;#039;s hard not to feel a pang looking at the &amp;quot;Arcelor Loves New York&amp;quot; poster in the office display case at the mill, with a photo of the Manhattan skyline marked by thirty thin lines leading from tall night-lit towers to the Arcelor logo. &amp;quot;In New York,&amp;quot; says Lambert Schmit, &amp;quot;there are a great number of buildings that have at least some of our product inside.&amp;quot; Schmit visited the city once, in the spring of 2001. &amp;quot;My girlfriend told me, &amp;#039;Let&amp;#039;s go to the tower restaurant&amp;#039; &amp;quot; \u2014 Windows on the World, on the 107th floor of the north twin, where, in 1989, Brian Lyons popped the question to his wife. &amp;quot;We went up,&amp;quot; Schmit says now, &amp;quot;but we did not have dinner zere.&amp;quot; Across the driveway from the mill entrance, there is a memorial, a bas-relief in bronze embedded in a mortared wall of stone: a muscular young steelworker, naked to the waist, his fists clenched at his sides, his visage baleful. A row of names is carved into the stone on either side of him \u2014 thirty-three in all \u2014 conscripts, Schmit explains, seized by the Nazis during their occupation of Luxembourg and sent from their mill jobs to the Eastern front to fight and die.  A separate plaque fixed to the base of the wall contains six names. A La Memoire Des Heros De La Greve, it reads, above 2 Septembre 1942. &amp;quot;You see,&amp;quot; Schmit says, &amp;quot;on September the second, zere was an uprising. Ze Germans, zey wanted to exploit the works, and ze workers laid down. Zey stopped working. Zey tried to organize a work stop. Ze leaders&amp;quot; \u2014 the men named on the plaque \u2014 &amp;quot;zey were taken away and shot. Every year zey make a commemoration of this happening. It&amp;#039;s still not forgotten.&amp;quot; After the first batch of Freedom Tower jumbos has been cast and rolled and cooled, Lambert Schmit and five younger Arcelor steelworkers in orange jumpsuits and white hard hats gather on the beams for a group photo. They&amp;#039;re smiling, talking softly, looking shy and more than just a little proud.  Differdange to the port of Antwerp is 130 miles or so, an hour-and-twenty-minute drive for a crazed Portuguese cabbie. The Freedom Tower steel \u2014 forty-eight beams in all, from thirty to fifty-six feet in length, weighing a total of eight hundred tons \u2014 takes the train. And though steel is king at Differdange, once at the port \u2014 fourth largest in the world, handling sixteen thousand ships a year \u2014 it&amp;#039;s just another load on vessels hauling fifty-two thousand tons of shipping containers and break-bulk cargo. Pieced into four lots for the North Atlantic crossing, the beams await their passage to Virginia, where they&amp;#039;ll be fabricated as columns \u2014 welded and plated, drilled and milled \u2014 before being trucked to ground zero.  Twelve jumbos, chained atop three wheeled trailers, are shipping on the Swedish-flagged Atlantic Cartier, a ship three football fields long, whose silver-bearded, pink-cheeked king is Captain Jonas Rahmberg, a burly, smiling son of G\u02C6teborg, sixty-two years old, wearing dark dress pants and four gold bars on the navy-blue epaulets of his pressed short-sleeved white shirt. &amp;quot;No, no,&amp;quot; Captain Jonas insists. &amp;quot;Twenty, thirty, forty years ago, I must agree, the captain was the king. He was, really. It&amp;#039;s yoost an ordinary yob now, more or less. I&amp;#039;m the boss, but I&amp;#039;m not God.&amp;quot; Ah, but do you have a cook on board? &amp;quot;Yah. One chief cook and one second cook.&amp;quot; And if you feel like an omelette or a ham-and-cheese at 3 A.M., you can simply call the cook? &amp;quot;I can do it. But I don&amp;#039;t do it. They start six o&amp;#039;clock, so I can wait. Then I got my egg and bacon.&amp;quot; The captain&amp;#039;s quarters are way up on the tenth deck, with plenty of wood and windows, a model of his ship under glass atop a low bookcase, a Jack Daniel&amp;#039;s desk organizer \u2014 much of his yob is paperwork \u2014 and a regal view north along the River Scheldt, which links the Port of Antwerp to the North Sea.  Cap has been at sea for forty-two years now, twenty as commanding officer, the past fifteen at the helm of the Cartier. &amp;quot;I have a crew of twenty-five. We are four Swedish and twenty-one Filipinos, the junior officers and crew, very nice guys. It&amp;#039;s always the same boat and the same route \u2014 from here to Liverpool, then Halifax, then down to New York, Baltimore, and Portsmouth, Virginia. One trip is five weeks, and we have twelve to thirteen ports in that time, so we have one port every day and then six days crossing each way. I work five weeks and then I&amp;#039;m home five weeks. That means, if you turn it around, I&amp;#039;m away half the year from home. So you need to have a good wife.&amp;quot;  The Atlantic Cartier has plied the open sea since 1985 \u2014 an &amp;quot;old lady,&amp;quot; Rahmberg calls her \u2014 and she&amp;#039;s relatively slow. &amp;quot;Seventeen, eighteen knots. The new Maersk lines, probably they making twenty-five knots. But we have 30,000 horsepower. They have 130,000, plus they burn much more oil, too. It&amp;#039;s a good ship. Some ships are shaking like hell, but this one is good.&amp;quot;  One seven-hour shift in port, time enough for the straddle carriers and gantry cranes to load two thousand containers on board and for the crew of mighty stevedores to lash down the three enclosed below-decks full of mixed roll-on-roll-off cargo \u2014 including a helicopter, two forty-eight-foot yachts, a gleaming phalanx of Volvo SUVs, a vintage Caprice Classic sporting New Jersey plates, and three trailers of Freedom Tower steel swallowed up like plankton \u2014 and Cappy and the Cartier are set to sail to Liverpool. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s not like you go to work eight o&amp;#039;clock in the morning and home five o&amp;#039;clock again,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;re not locked in one place. It&amp;#039;s a free life. It&amp;#039;s never the same. After forty years, you don&amp;#039;t know anything. The best thing is to be at sea.&amp;quot; Four days after the Cartier left Antwerp, New York City marked the fifth anniversary of 9/11. The New York Times devoted an entire section to nineteen thousand words of heavy breathing called &amp;quot;The Hole in the City&amp;#039;s Heart.&amp;quot; Irish tenor Ronan Tynan, whose endless version of &amp;quot;God Bless America&amp;quot; has turned the seventh-inning stretch at Yankee Stadium into a shrill and absurd travesty, serenaded Laura and George W. Bush with &amp;quot;Be Still My Soul&amp;quot; at St. Paul&amp;#039;s Chapel; across the street from ground zero, the 240-year-old stone church somehow was spared when the towers collapsed, and it has done duty as a 9/11 shrine ever since. Then our president paid the mandatory &amp;quot;surprise&amp;quot; call on a firehouse nearby, where he vowed, in case any of us doubted it, never to &amp;quot;forget the lessons of that day.&amp;quot;  Bush spoke in front of a bronze bas-relief mural much larger than the one in Differdange \u2014 fifty-six feet long, covering the outer west wall of the firehouse, showing forty-six firefighters responding to the burning towers. Below are listed all 343 FDNY active-duty members who died on 9/11. DEDICATED TO THOSE WHO FELL AND THOSE WHO CARRY ON, it reads, in large block letters on either side of the blazing twins. MAY WE NEVER FORGET. And the front page of the Daily News contained a single word: REMEMBER. It&amp;#039;s puzzling, as if one lesson of 9/11 might be that it is necessary, five years later, to be reminded to remember 9/11. As if five years were enough just to list all the lessons of that day, much less absorb their fury, grief, and wisdom. As if those lessons were revealed already, done with their unfolding. As if ground zero, the sixteen-acre maw just across Liberty Street, had swallowed itself up, along with the politicians and journalists whose business it has become to hammer home the lessons of 9/11, over and over and over, and to tell us how our hearts still hurt. As if we had forgotten, as if the horror and pain of 9/11 required refreshment, not long after the fifth anniversary, crews excavating street-level manholes along the west side of ground zero began finding human remains \u2014 arm, rib, and leg bones among them \u2014 that had been missed in, or buried by, the original seven-month recovery effort.  The elemental lesson of this news \u2014 that each inch of our planet is, has been, and always will be an abattoir, with or without a bas-relief memorial \u2014 went unnoted in the ensuing uproar, which centered mainly on which callous, heartless son of a bitch or incompetent, unfeeling government agency was to blame for not having sifted more thoroughly through every scoop of soil at and around ground zero. Old outrages \u2014 claims that Mayor Giuliani had wrested control of the cleanup away from the fire department and turned it into a scoop-and-dump job, knowing that such haste risked mutilating undiscovered FDNY corpses \u2014 merged with new charges that hundreds of thousands of tons of Trade Center debris carted from ground zero to Fresh Kills, an unfortunately named Staten Island landfill, where it was supposed to be combed for remains, had not been properly searched, and thus DNA evidence that might have helped ID the Trade Center dead wound up being used by the city to fill potholes and pave roads.  Several of the dozens of survivors&amp;#039; groups that formed in the wake of 9/11 demanded a halt to all ground zero work so that the site could be searched again \u2014 this time by the military&amp;#039;s Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command. No and no, said New York City. The city would search again, using city resources, and construction at ground zero would proceed.  Considering that the remains of 40 percent of 9/11&amp;#039;s 2,749 victims have never been identified; that seven hundred plus human fragments have turned up atop a forty-story tower across the street from ground zero, along with more than five hundred, so far, from the city&amp;#039;s ongoing second search, and that not one of any of these has yet led to a new DNA match; that the very process of rebuilding unearthed the hidden bones; that if Rudy Giuliani hadn&amp;#039;t taken command of the recovery, firefighters would likely still be poking through the original debris pile for unvaporized shreds of their fallen brethren; that rebuilding the World Trade Center site is better for the city than leaving it a pit \u2014 considering all these things, and considering that remembrance of that day and of its dead does not require endless tantrum and vilification, on balance, the city&amp;#039;s position seemed quite sane.  Of course, considering that this is New York City, where foaming outrage is mother&amp;#039;s milk and people have argued for years already over how the names of the 9/11 victims should be listed at a ground-zero memorial that doesn&amp;#039;t exist, nobody was surprised when the city&amp;#039;s decision to keep building was greeted with protest rallies and the traditional filing of lawsuits.  Brian Lyons, a sane man who knows as well as anyone that ground zero is forever both a burial ground and a workplace, doesn&amp;#039;t mince words. &amp;quot;The stuff at the dump \u2014 that&amp;#039;s not a good thing. They could dig that dirt up, go to a nice farm, bury it all, put headstones up or somethin&amp;#039;, a little memorial. Say, &amp;#039;These are the remains that were gone through, removed from Fresh Kills, and now they sit on a beautiful apple farm in fuckin&amp;#039; upstate New York.&amp;#039; I dunno. I think that&amp;#039;d help. It&amp;#039;s in a garbage dump in Staten Island. There&amp;#039;s a lotta people upset about that. Y&amp;#039;know, Vito fuckin&amp;#039; Bazzagaloot, he might be there somewhere \u2014 you know what I&amp;#039;m sayin&amp;#039;? Those are the guys that belong over there.&amp;quot; A little memorial \u2014 that would be nice. Hell, any memorial would be nice. We don&amp;#039;t build memorials because we&amp;#039;ll forget; we build them because we can&amp;#039;t forget, because we need some place outside ourselves to put the hurt. As for the pit, the power of the human need to fetishize the dead may be one of 9/11&amp;#039;s subtler ongoing lessons, but it&amp;#039;s not going to trump the need to rebuild \u2014 not on sixteen acres of the most precious real estate on earth, and surely not with billions of bucks to be spent and made.  That&amp;#039;s 9/11 lesson number one: Every living civilization plants its feet on someone else&amp;#039;s bones, remembered or forgotten. Also, lesson 1-A: Money talks.  When the Atlantic Cartier  reaches Portsmouth, an FBI detail and a National Geographic TV crew are waiting, here to film a segment about port security. &amp;quot;All kinds of visitors today, Cap,&amp;quot; the container-line operations manager says, up in the captain&amp;#039;s quarters. &amp;quot;They&amp;#039;re looking around,&amp;quot; Cap says. &amp;quot;They do their yob.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Leaving this afternoon for New York City?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Yah. Two o&amp;#039;clock. Then we leave for Halifax and home again.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;You play any golf?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Yah, but not so much as I want.&amp;quot; Just then, the lead FBI agent \u2014 with his shaved head and full mustache, he could be Gordon Liddy&amp;#039;s son \u2014 pops in. &amp;quot;Thank you for having us aboard, sir,&amp;quot; he says firmly and soberly. &amp;quot;You and your crew are our eyes and ears, and we rely on what you tell us, and if you&amp;#039;d be so kind as to have an ear to the wall, so to speak \u2014 a vigilant eye and a vigilant ear \u2014 we&amp;#039;d greatly appreciate it. And I can&amp;#039;t say that enough or mean that enough.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s okay for me, too,&amp;quot; says Cap. &amp;quot;I think all seamen around the world can help you a lot. We&amp;#039;re willing to help. That&amp;#039;s for sure.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;We appreciate it, Captain,&amp;quot; says young Liddy. The film crew is nowhere to be seen, but another visitor \u2014 some putz with a digital camera \u2014 takes a picture of the agent with Cap. Liddy&amp;#039;s dark eyes narrow. &amp;quot;I ask one thing, sir,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t have a problem with you snapping my photo. Just make sure it does not hit any print media in any way, shape, or form. For personal use, I have no problem with it.&amp;quot; The putz apologizes. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s okay,&amp;quot; says Liddy, who suddenly seems to have acquired a New Jersey accent. &amp;quot;Believe me, if I thought you were a threat, we&amp;#039;d have a different conversation in a different building.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s another world now, that&amp;#039;s for sure,&amp;quot; Cappy says after Agent Liddy leaves. &amp;quot;If it&amp;#039;s bad or good, I don&amp;#039;t know. All the safety \u2014 it can be too much sometimes with paperwork. You don&amp;#039;t need to love it, but you have to live with it. So what? That&amp;#039;s life.&amp;quot; On the day Captain Jonas and the Atlantic Cartier docked at Portsmouth, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey officially declared the end of its five-year, scorched-earth war against Larry Silverstein, the real estate developer who leased the World Trade Center from the PA seven weeks before 9/11 and who had battled the Port and Pataki ever since to rebuild ground zero.  It was never a fair fight. On one side, you had a three-term governor tag-teaming with a quasi-governmental monolith \u2014 the PA owns and profits from every major bridge, tunnel, and airport in the New York City metro area, issues its own bonds, and skulks behind a wall of Stalinist bureaucracy \u2014 massed to obliterate a Brooklyn-born septuagenarian who had made his bones and his first fortune by buying, burnishing, and flipping distressed office buildings.  For five years, Silverstein paid the Port Authority $10 million monthly rent on the pit, fought the insurance companies on his own dime, and battled Pataki over his harebrained rebuilding scheme. The Port and state wouldn&amp;#039;t buy out his ninety-nine-year, $3.2 billion lease and couldn&amp;#039;t legally force him out, so the PA, hoping he&amp;#039;d go bust, bled him while Pataki blamed him publicly for the rebuilding delay. And when none of that worked, the governor resorted to the blood libel \u2014 Larry was betraying the memory of the 9/11 dead \u2014 and in so doing, helped affirm 9/11&amp;#039;s most costly lesson: From the Hudson to the Tigris \u2014 whatever treasure, truth, and blood it costs \u2014 wielding national tragedy as a blunt political weapon is hunky-dory. It was ugly stuff, but it made plain that the war to rebuild ground zero wasn&amp;#039;t, and never had been, about honoring the memory of 9/11 or recapturing the skyline or standing up to terrorism \u2014 all of the bullshit spouted so relentlessly that it finally became impossible for many New Yorkers to feel any sense of connection to rebuilding ground zero. It was about money and power. And power and money. Not to mention money and power.  In the end, there was no contest: Larry Silverstein kicked Pataki&amp;#039;s ass and the Port Authority&amp;#039;s. When the dust cleared, Larry retained the rights to rebuild three office towers on the choicest spots at ground zero, while the PA wound up holding the bag that held the lame-duck governor&amp;#039;s Freedom Tower \u2014 now scheduled for topping off in 2011 \u2014 a 2.6-million-square-foot cipher that Pataki&amp;#039;s sure successor, Eliot Spitzer, was referring to as a white elephant during his campaign. For the PA, that was actually good news. The bad news was that they hadn&amp;#039;t built a skyscraper in almost forty years \u2014 not since the Twin Towers. The dog had caught the car. Now it just had to figure out what the hell to do with it. The first step was a marketing masterstroke: The Port Authority chairman announced that under no circumstances would the PA ask its own employees to work in the Freedom Tower. The second step was restoring public confidence, which was quickly accomplished when the PA told Pataki that unless the governor started finding Freedom Tower tenants himself, the Port likely could not afford to finish building his 1,776-foot crown jewel. For the Silverstein Properties executives who had worked for three years on the tower, the handoff was not without trauma. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s like seeing your beautiful young daughter turned out as a coke whore,&amp;quot; said one. For the Freedom Tower architects, who had created a design for the tallest and most symbolic building in America and who now were suddenly partners with a club-footed government agency specializing in bridges and tunnels, it was a marriage forged in hellfire. Four days after the PA took full command of the Freedom Tower, an official white Dodge Caravan with yellow lights on top and a load of Port brass inside rode to Kearny, New Jersey, where a two-story mock-up of the tower stood, built so that the architects could see how various glass samples reflected light. The team of architects had been chauffeured from the city in a fleet of Lincoln Town Cars, a half dozen of which were parked on the gravel, waiting for the return trip, when the PA pulled up in its minivan. &amp;quot;I think,&amp;quot; said one of the architects, &amp;quot;this is the sign of things to come.&amp;quot;  It&amp;#039;s slow, turning beams into plated columns. You have to cold-saw the steel to length and bevel the edges of the beam, then weld six-inch-thick steel plates \u2014 twice. First you tack-weld them, to hold the plates on the beam until you can reheat the beam to 300 degrees with a gas blowtorch called a rosebud, and then you use submerged arc welding to bond the plates to the beam for good and, God willing, ever. Then you mill both column ends to flush planes of such gleaming beauty and polished perfection that you could, without the slightest stretch, call the finished column art. Were you actually to call it that, though, the Port Authority&amp;#039;s inspector here at Banker Steel in Lynchburg, Virginia, would set you ramrod straight. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s not done for aesthetics,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s done for engineering purposes. They mill the end so they are as close to absolutely flat and straight and flush as a human can make &amp;#039;em. These people are doing very precise work on a large, huge component. You don&amp;#039;t just guess at it. They have drawings. They&amp;#039;re not winging this thing at all.&amp;quot;  There&amp;#039;s more to it, of course \u2014 always \u2014 attaching lifting tabs for the crane and long studs that help anchor the column in the concrete footing and hole-drilling for the splice plates that will let the ground-zero crews attach more columns as the Freedom Tower below-grade foundation rises to street level. And one more thing: &amp;quot;Some of these will get a coat of special paint. Normally they wouldn&amp;#039;t, but there&amp;#039;s supposed to be some sort of ceremony up in New York.&amp;quot; Yes, indeedy. And Banker Steel is under peculiar pressure, particularly Don Banker, who owns the joint. Part of it is the calendar: Pataki has an &amp;#039;08 presidential pipe dream, and his entire legacy and platform is an unbuilt building \u2014 so he&amp;#039;s downright desperate for a last photo op with at least one upright piece of Freedom Tower steel. As of today, Banker has less than three weeks to deliver, and the tower&amp;#039;s general contractor is busting Don&amp;#039;s chops daily. Which fazes Don Banker not at all. &amp;quot;They&amp;#039;re all just as nervous as they could be,&amp;quot; Don says, grinning. &amp;quot;We even got an e-mail last night: One of the guys was lookin&amp;#039; for some minute-by-minute step of exactly where we are.&amp;quot; Banker has been in the business for most of his life, and like steel men from Luxembourg to Lynchburg and from Bethlehem to Bremen, he doesn&amp;#039;t faze easy. He&amp;#039;s a trim, tie-knotted fifty, and with his drawl, his Boy Scout smile, and his square forehead, he could pass for a televangelist, but he&amp;#039;s no hickish na\u00D4f. His shop is doing the steel for the new Goldman Sachs tower, one block west of ground zero, alongside the Freedom Tower job, and he pilots his own jet to Teterboro Airport in north Jersey when he needs to look after Banker Steel&amp;#039;s interests in the big city.  Don&amp;#039;s problem isn&amp;#039;t dealing with the general contractor or getting his columns to the pit on time; his problem is that he has a strong sense of history. And of patriotism. And of what a powerful thing a piece of steel can be, literally and spiritually. Banker Steel is fabricating the Freedom Tower columns in the same shop that Montague-Betts Steel once operated, and back in the day, M-B provided twenty-five thousand tons of the steel used for the old Twin Towers. Lynchburg&amp;#039;s still proud of that \u2014 and proud to be a part of the Freedom Tower. &amp;quot;This is soul,&amp;quot; Don says, his voice rising. &amp;quot;This is so important to our country. It&amp;#039;s not just about New York City.&amp;quot; He&amp;#039;s right, of course, but Don has also made the mistake \u2014 unlike Pataki and his Port Authority surrogates \u2014 of acting like words mean something. He wants to let the citizens of Lynchburg sign one of the Freedom Tower columns before it leaves Lynchburg to head north to the pit. In ink.  The Port Authority and the governor&amp;#039;s people are having none of any such nonsense, and they told Don so during a conference call a few days ago. He tried explaining about the letters the elementary school kids sent him when they read in the paper about the new beams, and he tried to tell them about the old Montague-Betts welder who belongs to Don&amp;#039;s church. &amp;quot;Jack Moreland,&amp;quot; Don says now. &amp;quot;Just a scrawny little four-foot-tall guy. He said, &amp;#039;Don, I welded on those first ones. I got to sign that beam. You&amp;#039;ve got to let me get in there to sign that thing.&amp;#039; &amp;quot; No dice.  &amp;quot;They pretty much stopped my conversation. They said, &amp;#039;You need to clear everything through us.&amp;#039; And they haven&amp;#039;t paid us a dime. Our September invoice has not been paid yet, and it&amp;#039;s gonna be December Friday. They owe us considerably \u2014 well, the September invoice was a million bucks, and they owe us a lot more since then.&amp;quot; But Don Banker&amp;#039;s not the sort of guy who&amp;#039;d miss a delivery date at ground zero. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;ll be there when we&amp;#039;re needed,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;Trust me. We&amp;#039;ll be there.&amp;quot; He smiles his Boy Scout smile. &amp;quot;And our beams will have signatures all over them.&amp;quot; Sure enough: When those first three white-coated Freedom Tower columns head north to New York City, one of them \u2014 the one Don trucked over to Lynchburg&amp;#039;s minor league ballpark on a bright December Saturday for the public to write their words of love, hope, and 9/11 remembrance \u2014 has ol&amp;#039; Jack Moreland&amp;#039;s signature scrawled on it. Along with thirteen thousand or so other folks&amp;#039;.  The columns got to New York City in plenty of time, and the Port Authority held a little Sunday-morning signing of its own, two days before the ceremony in the pit. They laid out a column on a flag-draped pine platform jury-rigged on a patch of gravel not far from ground zero, and they announced that for the first three hours, only family members of the 9/11 victims could sign it. This had nothing to do with crowd control, much less the privacy and dignity of personal grief \u2014 after five fruitless years, your average New Yorker wasn&amp;#039;t going to storm downtown to sign a piece of steel \u2014 and everything to do with 9/11&amp;#039;s unhappiest lesson: Grief has no end. No &amp;quot;meaning.&amp;quot; No &amp;quot;lessons.&amp;quot; It is always personal, even in a human slaughterhouse and crucible like ground zero.  Death lives in all of us \u2014 in life&amp;#039;s very heart, and in our own \u2014 inseparable from everything and everyone we love. And death, unforgettable, turns love to grief as surely as fire burns iron to steel.  And so they came downtown \u2014 the press, Pataki, and a few hundred mourners \u2014 and signed the second Freedom Tower column. &amp;quot;God bless America,&amp;quot; wrote Pataki. &amp;quot;We will never forget.&amp;quot; The family members had much more to say, of course, and many pasted photos of their loved ones on the painted steel. &amp;quot;Amazing in life,&amp;quot; one young widow wrote next to a picture of her husband. &amp;quot;More powerful in death. I thank you for having been a part of your life and I thank God for our children.... The beams have become a way of life for me.... It is all about structure and support. I have all of that thanks to you....&amp;quot; The governor hits the floor of the pit in full &amp;quot;God bless you&amp;quot; mode, shaking hands with every construction worker he can get his hands on while the crane operator sits in his cab, still reading this morning&amp;#039;s Post. It&amp;#039;s not his party, it&amp;#039;s his workday, and he&amp;#039;s not lifting a legacy or a metaphor; he&amp;#039;s lifting steel. Dozens of Port Authority personnel clump and mingle, shaking hands and grinning like chimps while the erection super \u2014 he brought the columns into the pit \u2014 shakes his head. &amp;quot;Oh, they&amp;#039;re a pain in the ass,&amp;quot; he fumes. &amp;quot;Yesterday we had a little problem here \u2014 I&amp;#039;m talkin&amp;#039; &amp;#039;bout a problem so small \u2014 and twenty-five of &amp;#039;em were standin&amp;#039; here. I said, &amp;#039;Please, guys \u2014 go away. Please. You go away and the problem will go away.&amp;#039; &amp;quot;Myself and another guy, we were the ones that were the first crane that got here after 9/11. When they told me my company got the job, they said, &amp;#039;You&amp;#039;re gonna get the first crane here.&amp;#039; I took the first piece of steel off this site, and now here I am \u2014 I got the first piece of steel comin&amp;#039; in.&amp;quot; The television camera crews are perched on an old existing slab from the original World Trade Center, four vestigial stories up, but it looks like every man jack down here brought a camera of his own for the raising of the column. They part like the Red Sea for the parade of suits just behind the governor heading for the ceremonial column \u2014 the mayor, the PA chairman, a couple of architects, Larry Silverstein, and, in a thick pack, a bunch of union officials in shiny orange hard hats, looking like Sopranos extras.  Carmine Castellano, the ground-zero super for the general contractor, doesn&amp;#039;t have his camera. He&amp;#039;s busy running the whole show down here, like always, but he&amp;#039;s making his own speech to no one in particular. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m pretty excited about today. Today&amp;#039;s a big day in the history of America. All the unions, the guys have a lotta pride in what they&amp;#039;re doin&amp;#039; today, and my thing is, we&amp;#039;re not buildin&amp;#039; a buildin&amp;#039;, we&amp;#039;re buildin&amp;#039; the buildin&amp;#039;. It stands for America. It&amp;#039;s a long time comin&amp;#039;. And I&amp;#039;ve been here from the inception, and I&amp;#039;m pretty excited.&amp;quot; Carmine&amp;#039;s gotten so good at this speech \u2014 better by far than Pataki is at his \u2014 that he doesn&amp;#039;t drop a single F-bomb. And he is excited; you can hear it in his sawmill Jersey drone. Truth is, you&amp;#039;d have to be half-dead \u2014 or some kind of Islamofascist evildoer \u2014 not to feel at least a touch giddy and more than a little moved. Here is where the Twin Towers stood on 9/11, under the same indifferent sky, in a world that felt entirely different then. Here is where time stopped for all time \u2014 and where grieving began \u2014 for thousands of hearts. And here, if the posing and the signing ever stops, a piece of steel is going up. And up it goes, just like that, easy as pie. The big crane&amp;#039;s engine starts belching, and folks just... slowly... back... away, agape. Even the plainclothes security guys with the earpieces and the bulging double-breasted topcoats look up, frozen, openmouthed, as the big boom starts swinging and slowly drops the double-looped cable to where the crew of ironworkers can grab it and hook up the column.  Fifty thousand pounds of steel are suddenly chiffon, rising with no more effort than a Frenchman&amp;#039;s pinkie. Damned if the operator&amp;#039;s not styling, too: Once he has that column straight up and down, he pauses right there, hanging it for the cameras on their perch to get their glory shot of the whole thing floating in the sky, with FREEDOM TOWER running down the narrow column face, just below the Old Glory decal, which is vertical now that the steel is up, its stripes fluttering downward to the F. Slow and smooth, the column seems to glide over to where its footing waits, and the Local 40 brown hats, their guide ropes threaded through it, top and bottom, ease it gently down. Down past the sprouting rebar, down atop the metal base plate, down at the bottom of a pit that will never again be nothing but the bottom of a pit. &amp;quot;Don&amp;#039;t scratch the paint,&amp;quot; someone shouts as they wrench the lug bolts tight, and there&amp;#039;s a ripple of laughter, but when they finish bolting down the column, ground zero explodes with applause and whistling for a full half minute.  &amp;quot;Free-standin&amp;#039;,&amp;quot; Carmine bellows as the ironworkers unhook the cable and the boom lifts off. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s it, brother. Awright. It&amp;#039;s up.&amp;quot; Followed by more cheering. &amp;quot;Nobody push it, please,&amp;quot; Carmine says. &amp;quot;Nobody go push it.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I think it&amp;#039;s leanin&amp;#039; already,&amp;quot; someone shouts. &amp;quot;Another good job, Carmine.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s out an eighth of an inch,&amp;quot; Carmine says. &amp;quot;Who shot those bolts?&amp;quot; He&amp;#039;s kidding, thank goodness. What he doesn&amp;#039;t know is that the first order of business tomorrow morning will be scraping that flag decal off. According to the official United States Flag Code, the stars must be on the left, which they were when the crew put it on horizontally, but with the column standing up, the stars are on the right. Odds are, Carmine will fling a few F-bombs when he finds that out, and who can blame him for that? By the time the second column goes vertical a few minutes later, the dignitaries are already up by the TV cameras, their backs turned to ground zero, holding a press conference. It&amp;#039;s 11:54 A.M., almost time for the lunch truck to come trundling down the ramp.  Spring&amp;#039;s first robin came a few months later, with a hacking cough but still red of breast. By then, the first columns were topped with a second tier, and Governor Spitzer had proffered a faint blessing: &amp;quot;This should not be interpreted to mean... that this is how I would have desired it to be built,&amp;quot; he said and immediately raised the possibility that the Port could lease or sell the tower to a private developer. On the upside, he also promised he wouldn&amp;#039;t call a press conference &amp;quot;every time a brick is added to the foundation or a column goes up.&amp;quot; The Port Authority, meanwhile, granted Esquire an official interview for the first and only time in two years. &amp;quot;As I sit here today talking to you,&amp;quot; said the Port chairman, &amp;quot;it&amp;#039;s full steam ahead on the original plan. At the same time that we&amp;#039;re working feverishly and Carmine is in the pit laying steel columns, there&amp;#039;s a hundred other guys, who have names other than Carmine, who are basically trying to find a way to make the numbers work, so that financially, when Carmine gets to grade, we can just keep going and don&amp;#039;t have to stop.&amp;quot; In April, the city began to tear up West Street, the eight-lane highway just west of ground zero, searching for more remains of the godforsaken day the Twin Towers fell.  The Father of the Freedom Tower, George Pataki, simply fell off earth&amp;#039;s face. Before leaving office, he hired a former Bush and Cheney aide to raise money for his political action committee, the &amp;quot;21st-Century Freedom PAC,&amp;quot; and then he faded to gray, leaving behind not even a bas-relief. And the Port Authority \u2014 already a billion over budget on the tower and panting hard to find some private-sector partner with deep pockets and a masochistic bent \u2014 has quietly renamed the thing. Hello, One World Trade Center. Farewell, Freedom Tower. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a2972/thesteel0607/>