Hope for Healed Urban Fabric Dashed by Security Concerns at Former Trade Center Site

"With the blank slate offered by a catastrophic attack, planners, soon joined by the mayor himself, saw a chance to re-establish a great crossroads in the middle of ground zero: Fulton and Greenwich Streets, tying the second World Trade Center into the city — north, south, east and west," writes David W. Dunlap. "Now, however, they see that vision slipping away, as security concerns trump urban planning."

"The Police Department has proposed encircling the site with a fortified palisade of guard booths, vehicle barricades and sidewalk barriers," he explains. 

“The argument that these measures will disconnect the site from the rest of Lower Manhattan ignores the fact that people largely experience the city on foot and on bikes,” said Richard C. Daddario, the deputy police commissioner for counterterrorism, in defending the plan. “The measure of connectiveness should not be the volume of vehicle traffic passing through the site.”