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" This is the fifth in Scott Raab&amp;#039;s series of stories about the rebuilding at ground zero. To read the previous four installments, please visit our recap page. ***** On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was bickering with the wife over an article in the &amp;quot;Health&amp;quot; section of The New York Times about babies choking on food, going back and forth about grapes. Judah, our son, was two years old.  My position was, as always, utterly clear: no whole grapes. Ever. Lisa&amp;#039;s was murky: As the grape-cutter, she cut if she felt like it. I found this intolerable. She found my rigidity and catastrophism oppressive, regardless of the Times&amp;#039;s wisdom and advice: Cut the grapes in half. It wasn&amp;#039;t about grapes, of course. It never is. It was about power at the sub-grassroots -- about who calls the shots. All politics is local. Domestic, even. Petty as hell, both ways. It gets loud. It gets ugly. Even over grapes. When the phone rang, it was Mrs. Field, who lived in the big house diagonally behind ours. She and Mr. Field -- Isabel and Hank, Brooklyn natives who&amp;#039;d immigrated the twenty miles to Glen Ridge, New Jersey, sixty years before to raise their family -- were more than neighbors and friends: They were our boy&amp;#039;s babysitters and his surrogate grandparents. Nice, nice folks, smart and sharp and funny the way people around New York City are. You can say that&amp;#039;s parochial or clich\u00E9d or phony -- I don&amp;#039;t give a damn, because it&amp;#039;s true. The slow and lame and halt don&amp;#039;t come or stay here, not often or for long. Anyway, Isabel told us to turn on the TV: The World Trade Center towers were on fire. By then, both planes had hit. In a few minutes, we saw Tower Two fall. Then Tower One. All gone. Fucking gone. Just like that. We took Judah and drove to West Orange, to Eagle Rock, where we could see the skyline of Manhattan spread out, and we watched the twin pillars of smoke fill the sky, not twenty miles east of where we stood.  I don&amp;#039;t recall how long we stayed, don&amp;#039;t recall a word we said, if one or both of us wept, or if we even spoke at all -- no memory of that. We just stood watching, scared unto numb, as the horizon turned to soot and vapor. Otherwise, an empty, silent sky.  When we got home, I tried to call my friends in the city. I couldn&amp;#039;t get through. But even as a catastrophist -- raised in Cleveland by Jewish immigrants filled with fears -- I knew that most of my pals worked in midtown, and I knew no one who lived near or worked at the World Trade Center. I didn&amp;#039;t know yet what the Colls, who lived next to the Fields and had two little kids, had lost. Robert Coll, the dad, worked at Euro Brokers, up on the eighty-fourth floor of Tower Two -- the South Tower -- and died that day. He died because he stopped on his way down -- down the one stairway that led to safety -- because a fat lady who was huffing and puffing her way up warned that that stairway was impassable.  She was dead wrong, but how could Bobby Coll know that? So he helped her struggle up the stairs, and forever left his two-year-old daughter and ten-month-old son and his young wife. He was thirty-five years old. In a few months, the Colls were gone, their house sold. Robert Coll is one of seven names engraved on a stone in a small square of green near the stairs that go down to the New York City -- bound track at the Glen Ridge train station. Hank Field died a few years ago, so Isabel moved to South Jersey to be close to one of her kids. Our son -- God bless him -- just turned nine. Which means Lisa and I don&amp;#039;t bicker about grapes these days; we bicker about which pizza joint can deliver the pie in time for Judah to eat before his game. We&amp;#039;ll be dead someday -- I was already forty-seven years old when I became a father, and I&amp;#039;m a catastrophist, so this truth is never far from my consciousness -- somebody else will live where we now live, and our names will be engraved elsewhere. Meanwhile, little by little and day by day -- with all due respect to the inevitability of doom -- we build the best life we can and mainly trust the future to itself.  And meanwhile, at ground zero, where the towers fell and nearly three thousand people died, it&amp;#039;s the same story: They bicker and build, and build and bicker, and bluster and blame and battle -- mainly over who&amp;#039;s calling the shots -- men with various degrees of vision, integrity, and heft, carrying on not like men inscribing history upon Earth&amp;#039;s face -- little by little, day by day -- but like baggy-pants clowns.  Someday they, too, will all be dead and, by and large, forgotten, which may help to explain why they&amp;#039;re so busy squirting seltzer on one another: It helps &amp;#039;em pass the time of day in death&amp;#039;s bright waiting room; it makes them feel alive. Power and money don&amp;#039;t negate life&amp;#039;s cheap slapstick -- they only add richness and depth. Hell, history is comedy -- in all places, at all times -- strutting, preening humankind, heading toward oblivion. You want tragedy and catharsis? Read Aristotle. You want truth? Stare naked in the mirror at the brute who dreams up gods and bickers over grapes, driven to create and to destroy as he is created and destroyed -- pitilessly -- who ponders the big bang and laughs when someone else slips and falls down.  Meanwhile, chances are that what gets built because of or despite the Ground Zero Clown Troupe -- venal or grand, timeless or transitory, ugly or beautiful; likely, always, all of the above -- will stand at least a little longer here than any of us.   Among my favorite ground-zero keepsakes -- Esquire has covered the World Trade Center rebuilding since 2005, and I have gathered much flotsam -- is an architect&amp;#039;s dream book prepared for a design meeting in September of &amp;#039;05.  Titled &amp;quot;World Trade Center/Tower One/Base Of Building/Texture Concepts,&amp;quot; it&amp;#039;s five 11-by-17-inch spiral-bound pages long and nearly devoid of text. It contains a total of fifteen uncaptioned photos of various surfaces, meant to offer the building&amp;#039;s developer a visual sense of materials and patterns and historical references that might be evoked by the vast concrete cube that will form the base of Tower One -- the &amp;quot;Freedom Tower,&amp;quot; as New York&amp;#039;s former governor George Pataki named it.  One of the crew of architects handed the book to Larry Silverstein, the tower&amp;#039;s developer, at the meeting&amp;#039;s start; when it ended, two-plus hours later, the book still sat on the table, unopened. So I asked to borrow it, and nobody has asked for it back. And as the tower has begun -- slowly, slowly, slowly rising from a pit seventy feet below street level -- to take shape before my eyes, I go back to the book, to the last picture in it, a section of the Wailing Wall, the two-thousand-year-old ruin of one temple that was built upon the ruins of a three-thousand-year-old temple, right in the heart of Jerusalem&amp;#039;s heart -- and right here, in a brief book of ground zero spitball visions, sits the holy Wailing Wall, where people still come every day to pray and weep and pound their chests in timeless grief. I mention this because many of the people who know that I&amp;#039;ve been writing for years now about the rebuilding of the World Trade Center ask the same questions, including this: Why not just make the whole place into a memorial, where folks can pray and pay tribute and honor to those who died there?  This, in fact, was what America&amp;#039;s mayor, Rudy Giuliani, suggested as he was leaving office. Ironically, it was Rudy who also had urged a quick rebuild; who tried to trump term limits by playing the 9/11 card in an effort to stay in office; and who, thwarted in that effort and expecting his mayoral successor to be a Democrat, conspired with Pataki, a fellow Republican, to control ground zero as a political symbol and to control the billions of dollars that would pour into it.  It&amp;#039;s no stretch, looking back, to say that 9/11 was the best day of Giuliani&amp;#039;s political career, but it didn&amp;#039;t wash him clean -- indeed, it eventually helped bare his armpit ethics -- and it wasn&amp;#039;t footing firm enough to support the presidential bid of a bastard with little to offer beyond his foul temper and two clenched fists. As for Pataki, who, like Rudy, hoped to stand sufficiently tall on ground zero to reach the White House, his five years at the helm of the rebuilding left few marks on the earth there, and none in the public mind.  Which is to say that bucking the forces of history and spirit embedded at ground zero -- as puissant as those embodied by the Western Wall of King Solomon&amp;#039;s Temple -- is no mere walk in a memorial park.  So though you need not be a half-wit or a hayseed to pine for a big park, you must at least embrace, or be embraced by, a lambkin&amp;#039;s naivete about capitalism in general and New York City real estate in particular. The Trade Center -- ten million square feet of fully packed office space -- collapsed upon sixteen acres of the most precious land at the core of the most economically vital city on the planet as the direct result of an act of jihad intended to slaughter thousands of innocent people and cripple our nation -- and you want they should turn the whole shebang into a bleeding greensward? To honor whom, exactly -- Osama? Blow me. But I digress. Enough to note that of the many tidal pulls ebbing and flowing through ground zero, the most powerful of all is cash. Americans may be every bit as God-fearing as pollsters say -- and as the ancient Israelis, when not making golden calves or changing shekels at the shul -- yet as much as even a New Yorker likes green space, we worship where it counts: with our works, and at the altars of green money.  But take heart, Percy: Eight acres of ground zero -- fully half the place -- will be a memorial, complete with a park, plus its own Wailing Wall, a section of one of the old slurry walls built to shore up the substructure of the original WTC against the nearby Hudson River. There you may daven and weep and mourn to your soul&amp;#039;s content -- or just grab a bite to eat. And all around you, rising to heaven, tens of thousands of people will pay their tribute by coming to work each day, in four office towers the size of the Empire State Building, here in the heart of the heart of this most American of places.  Which brings us to the second question everybody asks: Would anyone dare to work at ground zero? There&amp;#039;s a simple answer -- not everyone in the United States is a wussy -- and a complicated answer, but it&amp;#039;s worth pausing to reflect on the obverse version of this question, posed endlessly in the echo chamber of the mass media: Since we won World War II in four years -- and built the Empire State Building in only thirteen months, and the Hoover Dam in five years, and Oprah in, give or take, nine months -- isn&amp;#039;t our failure to finish the World Trade Center rebuild by now irrefutable evidence of the collapse of can-do America? Both questions are stupid, but the first one -- however silly -- is at least honest. The second ignores history for the sake of phony analogy -- all of these things are not merely unalike; they&amp;#039;re obviously and fundamentally different -- but they both presume the same falsehood: The U. S. of A. is a cooked goose. Done. Over. Just a nation full of can&amp;#039;t-do clowns and craven braggarts led for the last eight years by a big-hat, no-cattle blowhard.  But New Yorkers long ago settled both questions. Since 9/11, thousands have moved into Lower Manhattan, with their partners, kids, and pets, not as an act of defiance or courage, but because, native or immigrant, the New Yorker sizes up risk and benefit with the same confidence -- not to mention a cold eye on the bottom line -- that built the town and the nation in the first place. While old Wall Street office buildings two blocks from ground zero are being converted to condos and apartments, Goldman Sachs has now topped off a $2 billion tower, its new headquarters, a few hundred yards across West Street from the WTC site. And although there are plenty of words for folks who bet against Goldman Sachs, winner isn&amp;#039;t one of &amp;#039;em.  The towers at ground zero will rise and fill; millions of visitors will come each year to visit the memorial; shops, hotels, and restaurants will thrive; and the American empire, having survived -- knock wood -- two four-year terms spent staggering toward fiscal and literal Armageddon, will survive awhile longer.  The more relevant question trembling behind these two others isn&amp;#039;t pretty, but it&amp;#039;s clear as ice: Will ground zero be attacked again? The answer is just as plain: Bet on it. Peter Bergen, who has studied and written about bin Laden and Al Qaeda for many years -- a fellow at NYU&amp;#039;s Center on Law and Security and a lecturer at Harvard&amp;#039;s Kennedy School of Government (and a CNN national-security analyst; Bergen looks marvelous in a kaffiyeh and flak jacket) -- told me, &amp;quot;If you talk about a 2050 timeline, clearly this is going to be -- if not the number-one target -- in the top five. They&amp;#039;ve attacked it twice -- and it seems a target in perpetuity. Somebody will try something, even if it&amp;#039;s some halfhearted attempt by somebody merely inspired by Al Qaeda. I wouldn&amp;#039;t work there at all. But that&amp;#039;s just my personal feeling.&amp;quot; Or, as Daniel Benjamin -- coauthor of The Age of Sacred Terror and a National Security Council member during Bill Clinton&amp;#039;s administration -- wrote in a 2004 New York Times op-ed, fetchingly headlined &amp;quot;The 1,776-Foot-Tall Target,&amp;quot; to build the Freedom Tower at all &amp;quot;ignores the difference between heroic resolve and foolishness. Dangling an iconic and indefensible target in front of terrorists is inconsistent with a strategy of reducing our vulnerabilities wherever possible . . . [careful] calculations -- not reflexive bravado -- ought to govern planning for ground zero.&amp;quot; Nobody in his right mind could argue with the gist of the Bergen-Benjamin message: Everything built at ground zero will be a trophy kill, and there will be no lack of hunters and no way to guarantee its safety.  And yes, some folks will refuse to work there, and some will feel forced to by circumstance, and some may even say goodbye each day as they head to their offices and wonder if today&amp;#039;s the day.  And yet the truth is that vast numbers of New Yorkers -- including those who lived through 9/11 -- will say, So what? Mr. Bergen, Mr. Benjamin, may I introduce Charlie Maikish? Mr. Maikish, a quiet man, a civil engineer who helped build the Twin Towers when he was just out of college; and then years later served as director of the World Trade Center for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the bistate agency that built the WTC and is -- slowly, slowly, slowly -- rebuilding it; and who helped fix the damage after the car-bomb attack in 1993; and who most recently served for two and a half years as head of the command center overseeing the rebuild: Mr. Maikish, sirs, gets it. He saw Ramzi Yousef, the architect of the &amp;#039;93 bombing, in the courtroom, and he knew the war had just begun. &amp;quot;I was in the courtroom when he was sentenced,&amp;quot; Maikish says. &amp;quot;And he said, &amp;#039;We will succeed. The towers will come down.&amp;#039; I felt chills go through me when he said it, because I knew that they were zealots and would stop at nothing to see that happen.&amp;quot; When the towers fell, Maikish was at a meeting in midtown; he didn&amp;#039;t get to ground zero until later that day.  &amp;quot;There were eighty-odd Port Authority people that died, forty-five that I knew personally -- and tenants and other people at the Trade Center, close to a hundred people I knew that never made it out that day.&amp;quot; Sitting at his desk, his tie knotted tight and his white shirt crisp, with five decades of hard hats lined up neatly on top of his bookcase, Maikish pauses to lick his lips and swallow back the tears. &amp;quot;There was a real mourning for the loss of a physical place, too,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;I said to myself, This is crazy -- why are you so upset, so devastated by the loss of the buildings? But for a lot of us, it was a very special place. We built it. We lived it. It was a very special place, and it still is. It really is. It has this psychic energy around it. You can&amp;#039;t animate or give a soul to a physical structure, but believe me -- you can.&amp;quot; And then Maikish earnestly trots out the most tired 9/11 trope of all, the one about the terrorists winning. &amp;quot;Would I put my own children in the Freedom Tower? Yes. And I&amp;#039;ll tell you why -- the terrorists win if they get us to so materially change the way we function that we&amp;#039;re no longer a free and open society. They win. &amp;quot;Americans are going to avoid their symbols because they might be targets? That&amp;#039;s doing exactly what the terrorists want. No. Personally? I&amp;#039;d move into the Freedom Tower in a minute.&amp;quot; I&amp;#039;m no neutral party here; I&amp;#039;m going with Charlie Maikish. I&amp;#039;ve talked to a lot of folks working on the rebuild -- some wearing suits, some in safety vests -- who see themselves as soldiers in whatever neo-Orwellian phrase you&amp;#039;d use to mark this precise point in the human animal&amp;#039;s endless cycle of slaughter and suffering. I don&amp;#039;t know their politics, and I don&amp;#039;t want to know. I don&amp;#039;t know how to define and gauge the purity of someone else&amp;#039;s patriotism. The merry jingoes at Fox News have that beat covered anyway, and debased it to a cretin&amp;#039;s code.  What I know is this: It takes a ration of fundamental heart, of bravery -- among other things -- to make a country like America and a city like New York. To come here from some other place and make this place your home. To believe that you can build a better life, however you define that, in New York City. To do it -- or to fail, or to lose it and to soldier on -- that takes stones. And I know this: Bravado is the opposite of bravery, the pretense of courage where there is only fear and ignorance. Bravado sometimes says things like &amp;quot;Bring it on!&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Mission Accomplished!&amp;quot; -- and it sublets Geraldo Rivera&amp;#039;s apartment when he&amp;#039;s off on assignment -- but it never, ever faces fear or gets a damned thing done. Guys like Maikish do. Or don&amp;#039;t. But they don&amp;#039;t pretend, and they&amp;#039;ll die trying. They are grown men. They grasp -- since they know that they&amp;#039;re fated to die -- that facing fear with faith instead of running or hiding from danger doesn&amp;#039;t make them dumb beasts; it makes them men. And it makes them Americans. And it makes them New Yorkers. As for that awful &amp;quot;If ______, then the terrorists win,&amp;quot; it was drowned in sewage so long ago that everyone to Ayn Coulter&amp;#039;s left gags anytime it&amp;#039;s used. But what the hell -- like greeting cards and Tuesdays with Morrie, it does mean something, and not just that you&amp;#039;re gagging because you&amp;#039;re far too smart and learned to fall back on dire clich\u00E9. What it means in part, especially to New Yorkers -- even those who didn&amp;#039;t help raise the World Trade Center -- is that not filling up the two holes torn in the grandest skyline in the world -- the man-made horizon that both symbolizes and defines New York City -- because you&amp;#039;re scared of the bad guys coming back is not wisdom, caution, or careful calculation: It&amp;#039;s cowardice.  I&amp;#039;m also with Maikish on the soul of ground zero, because I&amp;#039;ve spent enough hours on the ground there to have felt it. It isn&amp;#039;t Little Bighorn, and it isn&amp;#039;t Auschwitz, and the truth is that there is no piece of soil anywhere man has lived that isn&amp;#039;t soaked in blood shed cheap, and for the ugliest of reasons. But ground zero has a soul just as sure as you and I do, and just as sacrosanct.  When I first came down here and stood in a pit that was little but slab on grade, it felt like a cathedral at the bottom of a vast and empty well, a place where all the push and pull and pulse of living life had died. A battlefield, and worse -- a busy field of human, workday dreams turned all at once into a silent slaughterhouse. Squares of traffic cones marked the outlines of the fallen towers, and battered plywood painted blue covered a Freedom Tower cornerstone that had been rushed to the site so that George Pataki could make a show of being in charge, but construction had been paralyzed -- and would be so for months, because nobody was in charge -- and the commuter train that snakes through ground zero squealing and shrieking past every few minutes served only to make the naked earth seem more barren, more like the soul of a small child orphaned. Now? The future of ground zero is its present, days and nights and land filling with work and money again, its soul no longer small and sad and stagnant. It&amp;#039;s big and hairy -- it smells like sweat and bangs like steel pounding on rock until rock breaks. It hurls curses at the fucking crane operator as he takes his goddamn time on break finishing the Post sports page. It has a thrumming pulse. It feels just like . . . New York.  The toughest of all ground zero questions is: What&amp;#039;s taking so long? The reason it&amp;#039;s so tough to answer isn&amp;#039;t because there are no answers; it&amp;#039;s tough because none of the dozens of answers is a sound bite, and trying to parse them is like uncrumpling a train wreck.  Those sixteen acres are owned by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, a quasi-governmental monolith that owns and operates all the major bridges, tunnels, and airports -- plus the infamous and eponymous bus terminal -- that connect New York City to the rest of the world. It was the PA, born in 1921, that begat the World Trade Center -- thanks to its endless flow of cash from its bridges, tunnels, and airports, its ability to issue bonds, and the vision of one Austin Tobin, an autocratic former PA director who built the Twin Towers and promptly died. Under Tobin, who ran the show for thirty years with an iron fist -- and with no fear of any elected official -- the Port was a powerhouse, savvy enough to steamroll any obstacle and confident and competent enough to put up what used to be the two tallest buildings in the world at once.  Those days are long gone -- and so are the PA&amp;#039;s political independence, competence, and confidence. What&amp;#039;s left is an agency full of frightened bureaucrats run by hacks handpicked by the governors of two states whose fierce rivalry -- rooted in greed and lust for money and power -- was the problem the PA was created to solve in the first place.  Nothing happens at ground zero without the Port&amp;#039;s say-so. And nothing happens at the PA unless the New Jersey boys get to wet their beaks, which means that nothing gets built at ground zero without the guarantee of a new multibillion-dollar tunnel from Lower Manhattan to New Jersey, a joyous prospect for any real estate developer in certain precincts of New Jersey.  But that&amp;#039;s only one aspect of ground zero&amp;#039;s paralysis. There&amp;#039;s also the private real estate developer who inked a $3.2 billion, ninety-nine-year lease on the World Trade Center seven weeks before 9/11, Larry Silverstein, the seventy-seven-year-old whiz kid from Brooklyn who gets trashed for all that goes wrong with the rebuilding -- and who couldn&amp;#039;t care less about that. All Larry cares about is getting the thing rebuilt before his time, or his lease, runs out. But despite his determination and experience -- and this guy has spent fifty years cutting deals and greasing wheels in New York City -- and a phalanx of lawyers, Silverstein and the PA keep lurching in lockstep from stalemate to stalemate. The politicians involved have been horrible. From Pataki&amp;#039;s empty promises to Eliot Spitzer&amp;#039;s venereal arrogance and Mayor Mike Bloomberg&amp;#039;s calculated detachment, no officeholder has cared enough to do ground zero a damn bit of good.  Then there&amp;#039;s the not-so-little matter of the Master Plan, chosen by Pataki, to rebuild the site. Five office towers in all, and a brand-new train station, a memorial and museum, a performing-arts center, plus a half-million square feet of retail shopping -- all packed into a parcel of sixteen urban acres, with a commuter train and two subway lines running through it -- conceived in such a way that no part of it can literally be separated from the rest. Under the very best of circumstances, it would take years of planning and building to get it done. And then there are the victims&amp;#039; families whose sons and daughters and husbands and wives were murdered in cold blood on those sixteen acres -- hundreds of whom have no remains to bury, and view the site itself as sacred ground. Pieces of the lost are still turning up, and different groups are still spatting about the &amp;quot;right&amp;quot; way to list the names of the dead on a memorial that won&amp;#039;t be done by 9/11/11.  But the best possible answer to the question of what&amp;#039;s taking so long is another question: What&amp;#039;s the rush? I&amp;#039;m serious. Why the hurry? I mean, all due respect to Oklahoma City, but here you can&amp;#039;t just set some chairs on a lawn and call that a memorial. And not for nothing, but Pearl Harbor waited ten years just for a stinking plaque -- plus ten more for a memorial. Are we so devoid of historical memory -- and so frightened of the time passing -- that we can no longer recognize and live with reality? This is reality: Austin Tobin, too, had to make peace with New Jersey -- that&amp;#039;s how the PA wound up running its own railroad -- and with the Rockefellers to get the Twin Towers built. The PA condemned those sixteen acres -- seized them via eminent domain from folks who&amp;#039;d lived and owned shops there their whole lives. Power, profit, politics: All the forces that shaped the World Trade Center forty long years ago -- including the Hudson River, including the private real estate barons whose outrage at a publicly funded agency building office towers to compete with their own led to lawsuits and ugly  public-relations campaigns -- haven&amp;#039;t changed. Nothing has changed.  I&amp;#039;m not saying that&amp;#039;s a good thing. I&amp;#039;m just saying that in 2050 no one will care how long it took, how much it cost, or who blamed whom for what -- same as those who come to Rockefeller Center to work or gawk at the Christmas tree don&amp;#039;t care about John D. Rockefeller or the nine years required to finish its construction -- with one man of stupendous wealth in full command.  I&amp;#039;m saying that these forces are both inevitable and necessary, and that accidental, organic splendor blooms when the predations of capitalism, government, and art -- or at least, architecture -- are composted, day by day, by time and fate. This, too, does not change. So figure five more years to get it done -- and enough already with the kvetching. Or else the terrorists have won. Getting it done is one thing; doing it right, which takes more than mere money and time when it comes to putting up a superskyscraper on this patch of land, is another. Any emirate with a purseful of petrocash can sink a slab of steel tubing into sand, stand it upright, call it the Burj Dubai, and deflower eighteen virgins to mark the grand opening -- but, damn it to hell, we&amp;#039;re talking the Freedom Tower here.  (Yep, it&amp;#039;s a silly, stupid name -- why else would the hush-hush Port Authority quietly anoint it One World Trade Center many moons ago, while assiduously denying they&amp;#039;d renamed it? -- but what&amp;#039;s left of poor George Orwell&amp;#039;s skull has already exploded a million times, which isn&amp;#039;t to say that Orwell wouldn&amp;#039;t finally toss his pen and lunch, were he alive, and weep in fury, but what can you do? Freedom Tower it is -- and shall be for the foreseeable future.) At the Skidmore, Owings &amp;amp;amp; Merrill office on Wall Street, a two-minute walk from ground zero if the goddamn tourists would stop clogging the sidewalk, George Pataki&amp;#039;s Excellent Tower of Maximum Liberty has always been known as Tower One. SOM has been the premier corporate architecture firm in the world for decades -- the Burj is its baby; so was the Sears Tower -- a North Star of sanity in a starfucking galaxy of spinning prima donnas whose ridiculous self-regard oozes down from their thick-framed fashion eyewear all the way to their cowboy boots.  Here at SOM, the grown-ups wear dark suits and white shirts with calm ties, the youngsters dress for the jobs they want -- many are headed to hipper shops, in search of the daring and edgy -- and the most vital statements speak of profit and loss. And here at SOM, they&amp;#039;ve been walking the Tower One wheel for seven years, through three governors, two complete redesigns, and a relentless barrage of critical derision. None of which means anything to Carl Galioto, head of SOM&amp;#039;s tech group. Owlish, mild as milk, Carl&amp;#039;s the architect who works most closely with the engineers who have to find a way to build the building envisioned by the architects -- on time and under budget, if possible, sustainable and safe. Carl can rhapsodize, quietly, about many things -- from the three city-bus-sized natural-gas fuel cells that will supply up to one quarter of Tower One&amp;#039;s electricity to the sorry state of the New York Mets. But the most riveting area of Carl&amp;#039;s vast expertise is the one he can&amp;#039;t speak freely about, because of the bull&amp;#039;s-eye the Freedom Tower wears: Carl Galioto is in charge of the tower&amp;#039;s life-safety and security systems.  That&amp;#039;s why, not long ago, he found himself in the New Mexico desert, watching as technicians blast-tested a full-scale mock-up of several upper floors of Tower One, using a load of explosives so powerful that Carl saw it only through a periscope, from an earthen bunker a quarter mile away. &amp;quot;The typical weather-performance tests -- the airplane propeller, the wind and everything -- I&amp;#039;ve done that dozens of times. But watching a blast test was something I had never done. I&amp;#039;d seen a film of it -- we design federal office buildings -- but I had never personally witnessed one before. I wouldn&amp;#039;t miss that.&amp;quot; For security reasons, Carl can&amp;#039;t discuss the blast load itself, although when I tell him I have heard that the new Goldman Sachs tower was engineered to withstand the detonation of a small nuclear bomb, he blinks and says, &amp;quot;I know what that building was designed to -- and I can assure you it was not a nuclear device.&amp;quot; And not even Carl is so circumspect that he can&amp;#039;t permit himself a small smile at the memory of New Mexico. Part of it is that the Tower One blast test confirmed the computer simulations and the engineering calculations. And part of it was just the thrill of a big-ass explosion. &amp;quot;The entire bunker shook,&amp;quot; Carl says. &amp;quot;It was just terrific.&amp;quot;  One door down sits David Childs, the Freedom Tower&amp;#039;s design daddy. In a working world wan with weltschmerz, where a critics&amp;#039; darling must fulfill some academic ideal of sculptural perfection and buildings serve as mere fodder for cultural analysis and triggers of emotion -- architecture has long attracted pompous political theorists whose self-regard is matched only by the contempt they drip on their peers -- Childs is every inch an old-school gentleman, brimming with boyish cheer even as he approaches age seventy, and even as his Freedom Tower -- a gently turned octagonal shaft that tapers to the exact height of the Twin Towers, topped by a 408-foot lighted spire -- has been derided as a monument to fear because of its 180-foot concrete cube of a base.  &amp;quot;This nonsense,&amp;quot; Childs fumes -- over the years I&amp;#039;ve seen him fume before, but he fumes like the Yalie he is -- with dignity and circumspection. He fumes about the Port Authority&amp;#039;s Calatrava-designed train station, budgeted at $2 billion but now slated to cost maybe twice as much: &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s no purpose to the building. It&amp;#039;s a receiving hall. You can&amp;#039;t get a ticket there, you can&amp;#039;t get a Coke there -- it&amp;#039;s a vestibule. And any possible way that you calculate it, it&amp;#039;s the most expensive building ever built by mankind. And it has no purpose.&amp;quot;  His angst is understandable. Childs inherited the Freedom Tower from another architect whose press clippings would stack up taller than anything he&amp;#039;s ever built, and the job of designing a 2.6-million-square-foot office tower to meet the same security requirements of a U. S. embassy on unfriendly soil -- while simultaneously creating a symbolic lighthouse in the sky -- would give Vishwakarma pause. The only building completed at the Trade Center site since 9/11 is 7 WTC -- a glowing trapezoidal office tower that is nearly filled with market-rate tenants. Childs designed it and Larry Silverstein built it -- with no help from the Port Authority or politicians, which is why the thing got done -- but Childs gets no credit; instead, he gets hammered about the Freedom Tower&amp;#039;s base.  &amp;quot;When somebody attaches a phrase to something and it sticks, like &amp;#039;the concrete bunker,&amp;#039; &amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;Well, we know what that looks like: It&amp;#039;s all concrete, with a little hole in it, and it looks terrible.  &amp;quot;In fact, this building&amp;#039;s base is smaller than the original design, and it&amp;#039;s much more porous. From the lobby level up, it&amp;#039;s all open. And behind, it&amp;#039;s got big trusses that you read through. You look through this fabric of the surface skin -- it&amp;#039;s open. And when the glass is on it&amp;quot; -- Childs&amp;#039;s design has the whole base wrapped in two-inch-thick prismatic glass -- &amp;quot;the faceted glass, it will cause prisms of light to break. I think it will be truly beautiful. All the light going through and bouncing back -- it&amp;#039;s really going to be quite amazing.&amp;quot; Maybe. Problem is, after Silverstein and the Port went to the mattresses, the Port wound up in charge of putting up the Freedom Tower, which is like asking Stevie Wonder for a lift to LaGuardia. In a Yugo. And Childs doesn&amp;#039;t just know that; he&amp;#039;s riding shotgun.  &amp;quot;If we get our glass,&amp;quot; he says. He&amp;#039;s not fuming; he&amp;#039;s pleading now. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;ve got to get the right glass. A simple building is not tolerant of cost cuts. It is dependent on the detailing, on the right materials. You can&amp;#039;t fool around with it.&amp;quot; He shakes his head in woe.  &amp;quot;And they&amp;#039;re going to screw it up badly. They&amp;#039;ve already changed the stainless steel to aluminum -- all the spandrels. We redesigned it so that the spandrels aren&amp;#039;t important, but we lost a piece of our very short vocabulary by having to do that. Now they want to change the glass.&amp;quot; Childs knows that this is how it goes with architects and their patrons, always. He speaks of Francesco Borromini in seventeenth-century Italy, and his Oratorio dei Filippini, the timeless product of a thirteen-year grudgefest with his client -- the cardinal of Rome.  &amp;quot;Ah, God, he couldn&amp;#039;t get his right stone, and it was all compromise -- it was all the same stuff we deal with every day. Nothing changes. That&amp;#039;s why you have to struggle and fight. Once you take this tower and you put it in its place -- you&amp;#039;ve got to do it right. It has this memory, this cerebral role to play. This is a good office building, and the structure works. But there&amp;#039;s another thing that this building aspires to -- that other, final, symbolic, proportionate, light-filled thing that inspires you. You&amp;#039;d better damn well do it right.&amp;quot; Nothing changes -- human nature least of all. The sacred and profane, the artistic and commercial, the genteel and brutal: These forces collide on ground zero just as they do in each of us -- if we&amp;#039;re lucky -- and shape us all, and all we do, to one universal, inevitable end. We live in space -- in a world we can touch and try to master -- but we&amp;#039;re here for just a while before we&amp;#039;re devoured by what we can&amp;#039;t touch or master: time. We change. We die. What we leave behind -- if we&amp;#039;re lucky -- is love. What Bobby Coll and Hank Field left behind wasn&amp;#039;t their love for family and friends; it was the love their family and friends had for them. Nothing built by human hands lasts forever; only love can redeem us to ourselves. These are the gifts we&amp;#039;re given: a little bit of time and the capacity for love, to make connections of such depth and passion that they somehow redeem our venal, clownish selves. Otherwise, parenting is just a biological imperative. Otherwise, a city is just an economic and demographic construct, and an office tower is just another beehive, and the blues and baseball and Hollywood -- and skyscrapers -- are just products of a barren culture that fooled itself into thinking it stood for something beyond the bottom line.  Could be. I&amp;#039;ve got a small, round stone from ground zero sitting right by my keyboard, holding down some notes -- one of countless perfectly spherical stones formed in what geotechnical scientists call a kettle hole; they found this one as they were digging for bedrock strong enough to support the footings for one of the towers.  A kettle hole is formed as a glacier melts -- as the water forms a whirlpool that slowly carves a hole in the bedrock, little by little and day by day. The hole is round and smooth as silk, rounded and smoothed by the pieces of rock cut out by the swirling water -- as those pieces of rock are rounded and smoothed, little by little and day by day, in the process. I&amp;#039;m not saying it&amp;#039;s a symbol or a metaphor. I&amp;#039;m saying it&amp;#039;s a rock -- and it took a lot longer to make than any building at ground zero, and it will last more or less forever, and it will still be nothing but a fucking rock, with all the capacity for love of a fucking rock. I&amp;#039;m saying that I decided when I started going down to ground zero that I wasn&amp;#039;t going to keep a cool intellectual or &amp;quot;professional&amp;quot; -- or political -- distance from my feelings about the place. All the awful stupidity in the wake of 9/11 -- the gutting of the Constitution, hundreds of thousands of people killed, the apparently endless fearmongering -- have zilch to do with the place itself or, in truth, with the actual events of that day.  What happened that day was plenty bad enough. But it&amp;#039;s nothing that this city hasn&amp;#039;t long since recovered from -- and I see that every time I go down there.  As for love, well, it&amp;#039;s not easy to write about, but like paintings of sad clowns and The Five People You Meet in Heaven, it must mean something. I love New York City, and ground zero, and -- God help me -- the Freedom Tower. Like David Childs, I know they&amp;#039;ll get it wrong, but I know it&amp;#039;ll turn out better than this fucking rock.  What will it mean a century from now? A soaring paean to the resilient soul of a nation -- or George W. Bush&amp;#039;s spike of idiopathic overreaction to Islamofascist terror? Misbegotten relic -- or slender, faceted, simple pointer beside a memorial to a dark day stitched forever into human history? Just one more anthill of faceless paper shufflers -- or a jaw-dropping ode to form and function?  The only right answer is: Yes. Of course. All of the above.  And when they finally get it done, it will inspire its own version of the reaction almost every other man-made New York City landmark has endured, including the Twin Towers -- and the Chrysler Building, and the Empire State Building, and Rockefeller Center: Everyone will piss on it with fervent scorn -- and then, sooner or later, it will belong.  It will be loved. ***** Want more information? Read a biography of the contributor behind this work. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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