THE FOUNDATION
SEPTEMBER 2005
On a warm, wet cotton ball of a June morning, Marc Becker is walking ground zero. Beckerâs forty-seven, with twenty-six years spent working construction, thick-chested and slope-shouldered, wearing jeans, an untucked short-sleeved denim work shirt, and a royal-blue hard hat. A red-bordered security ID hangs from a cord around his neck.
Heâs seventy feet below street level, on the floor of the sixteen-acre pit, an off-kilter quadrangle dug forty years ago to hold the World Trade Center.
Four years after 9/11, ground zero is a landscape of damp dirt, rock, concrete, and steel. It is hallowed groundâsoaked, like every other square inch of the planet, in blood and sacrificeâbut it is not an empty hole, not by a long shot. A 460-foot construction ramp slopes down into ground zero from Liberty Street, the pitâs southern border, passing over a covered train track that snakes through the site. Every few minutes, another commuter train from New Jersey curves into the rebuilt station that sits below Church Street, along the pitâs eastern edge. Across from the station, at the pitâs western boundary, two trailers sit shadowed by a massive, pockmarked, four-decades-old concrete wall reaching all the way up from the floor of the pit to a construction roadway that runs parallel to the six broad lanes of West Street.
âWhat youâre standing on,â Becker says, âwas the basement of the whole complex for the towersâthe original B6 level, as is. Thatâs why this is like holy ground to peopleâthey were still pullinâ stuff out, if you know what I mean. Spring of â02, they were still finding parts down here. Remains.â
Itâs easy to feel overwhelmed by this patch of earth. The last resting place of nearly three thousand murder victimsâyou feel every moment that itâs a privilege to be here, and you worry that itâs a sacrilege, tooâitâs also a spot where steel will rise once more to the sky, and folks will come not only to mourn but also to work.
âWeâre ready to build,â Becker says. âWeâre ready to go. I donât get involved in politics. All I can tell ya is weâre ready to build. Iâve been here since 9/11; itâs very personal to me. I saw all the horrors. I mean, the horrors. I saw what the poor souls looked like after they jumped outta the buildings. Whatever got pulled outta the debris, I saw it. Itâs personal. Itâs personal. I donât forget it.â
Superintendent at One World Trade Center Marc Becker (right) in a discussion with superintendent Joe Capone (left) and engineer Brian Troast (center) in the foundation of the World Trade Center site. August 2006.
Becker builds buildings. Thatâs not only what he does; thatâs also who he is. And in New York City, 9/11 was personal beyond the butchery: The hole in the skyline where the Twin Towers rose is a hole in this cityâs heart. Here, they build âem high. Knock down the Twins, they go higher.
âThis is slab on grade,â Becker says, talking about the scuffed stubble of old concrete and rebar set into the deep bedrock, Manhattan schist, to anchor the Twins. âWe hit rock from eighteen inches to two feet down. With the new towerâgoing by the original designâthe new slab on grade was gonna be two feet below. Youâre right on top of the rock then. Weâd take all this out and lower itâbring in heavy machines with hammers on âem to start breakinâ the rock.â
The original design. Beckerâs referring to the 1,776-foot-tall building to be called the Freedom Tower, and the original design for it was trashed in May, a month ago. This is a bad thing for Beckerâfor a lot of folksâafter nine months spent working down here, getting ready to build again.
Back on July 4, 2004, they sank the cornerstone into the ground. The imam and the reverend said prayers. The governor spoke of rebirth, resolve, and sacred duty. Photos were taken. Then everyone took off.
After the holiday, Becker and the crews went right back to work.
Now he points toward Vesey Street, along the north end of the pit, where the jagged concrete slabs and steel support beams of the original parking garageâthe B4 level, a floor above the train tracksâhave been left jutting horizontally from the concrete wall in a rough zigzag trussed with steel, new and old.
âThe slabs were very weak from all the damage. You see the beams that go back to the slurry wall, these cross braces? We had to put all that in. Once that was in, we were able to demo these slabs. They were so weak that you just couldnât chop âem downâthey would collapse on you. There was a whole sequence of how to remove the slabs over that B4 slab and the trainsâover an active, running train. It went without a hitch.â
This slurry wall, the three-foot-thick, eleven-acre rectangle of scarred concrete within the pit, was built in 1967 to seal the Trade Centerâs foundation against seepage from the nearby Hudson River, whose eastern shoreline used to slice right down this site. The bathtub, the workers called it, and still do. It was held in place by more than a thousand steel-cable tiebacks fed through six-inch holes drilled through the walls, then grouted and jack-yanked at a forty-five-degree angle deep into the bedrock until the seven basement and subbasement levels of the World Trade Center were erected. The buildings themselves, once raised, held the bathtub in place.
After the WTC buildings were destroyedânot only the Twins but four other office buildings and a hotelâand the 1.5 million tons of wreckage was removed, these exposed bathtub walls were what remained. Pocked by its myriad round, rusted iron snouts that had sealed the now-corroded anchoring-cable holes, the slurry wall was in dire need of shoring up.
Becker and the men he works with had to pin back the wall with fresh tiebacks where they could. But here, along Vesey, where the train exits the pit, where the walls were badly hurt, and where the original design placed the north side of the Freedom Tower, they braced the slabs to keep the slurry wall from collapse until they got to work building the new tower.
To the world beyond the bathtub walls, ground zero is a hole, a mournful memory, a symbol. But to the men who build buildings, itâs the worst kind of jobâa job left undone. They put up the towers that stood right here, they climbed the pile of what was left, and they carted it all away. They rebuilt these train tunnels and tracks, raised this new stationâahead of schedule and under budgetâand got the Port Authority Trans-Hudson (PATH) line back in business. They braced these walls and they figured out how and where to plant the Freedom Towerâs column footingsâthe steel-and-concrete bases sunk into bedrock to anchor the rising steel, spread its weight, and keep it from sinkingâwithout tearing up the railroad tracks.
âWe had footings literally between the PATH tracks,â Becker says, and you can hear the pride and frustration in his voice. âWe were building the main tower columns in between those PATH tracks.â
The bathtub was clean. The cornerstone was laid. Almost four years after 9/11, ground zero was good to go.
And then, just as the first order for the Freedom Towerâs foundation steel was drawn up, it turned out that the New York Police Department had serious concerns about the buildingâs design. It was only twenty-five feet away from West Street. The base of the 1,776-foot tower was open, exposing the columns. The NYPD was worried about truck bombs, is what it boiled down to.
All the work stopped, and some very important people looked stupid. George Pataki, New Yorkâs governor. Larry Silverstein, the real estate developer who signed a lease on the World Trade Center six weeks before 9/11 and was ready to start rebuilding on September 12. And the folks over at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the brooding quasi-governmental behemoth that built the old WTC and still owns these sixteen acres. Awfully stupid.
On May 4, Governor Pataki issued a statement pledging âyet another magnificent design that will once again inspire the nation and serve as a fitting tribute to freedom.â
Then Pataki gave the architects and engineers a mere eight weeks to redesign the whole thing and move it farther from West Street. On this day, Patakiâs deadline is just three weeks away, and Marc Becker has no clue whatâs going to happen to all the work already done here.
But Becker is sure of one thing. âI know itâs gonna happen,â he says. âI just donât know when.â
He walks over to the cornerstone, twenty tons of Adirondack Mountain granite. Itâs covered by a tarp and hidden inside a blue plywood box in one corner of a column footing in the southeast corner of the imaginary parallelogram that was going to be the footprint of the Freedom Tower. The rest of the footingâeleven feet deepâis half-filled with pooled rainwater.
Will they have to move the stone?
âI donât know.â He shrugs. âI have no idea.â
Twenty yards south of the cornerstone, a two-hundred-foot square traces the footprint of the old north Twin, marked with orange-and-silver traffic cones spaced to cover the top of its sheared-off perimeter columns, still sunk into sixty-ton bedrock. Another square of cones marks the south Twin.
Two offset squares, one north, one south, two hundred feet per sideâthe length of a standard Manhattan street block. Here they stood, and here they slammed to earth.
Nothing will be rebuilt here. Even as the work crews prepped the site, Marc Becker kept the Twins clear.
âNo piece of equipment,â he says now, âno machinery, no storage in these footprintsâalways outside of it.â
Here the heart aches. It hurts here. To stand here knots your throat; it fills your eyes. Here there are no ghostsâeveryoneâs gone for goodâand this moment, like every moment, passes.
Even then, you dare not breach those lines. You rebuild, but you donât ever forget. Here they died. Here time stopped.
The best place to view ground zero from on high is atop the new fifty-two-story office tower at Seven World Trade Centerâon Vesey, just north of the pit. Once your knees quit buckling and the urge to hug the floor of the roof passes, you can stare past the southern tip of Manhattan from 741 feet. West is the Hudson River, flowing just beyond the pale green, skullcapped towers of the World Financial Center, built on landfill they gouged from the pit when the WTC was built, and on the other side of the Hudson, New Jersey.
To the east, on Church Street, the tour buses idle at the curb as the tourists, thousands each day, clog the broad sidewalk. They gape at the hole in the ground through the steel bars of the fence put up by the Port Authority; they snap photos of the old rugged cross of scorched steel formed by fate and two corroded beams of the old towers, exhumed and erected by the recovery workers as a gesture of pious defiance; they try to read the unreadable rank of black-and-white signs telling the tale of the WTC and 9/11, affixed to the fence by the PA, which was headquartered in Tower One and lost seventy-five of its own on 9/11.
The pit is below you, the cornerstone a blue fleck at your feet. Looming over Liberty Street is a forty-one-story tombstone, the former home of Deutsche Bank, empty since 9/11, draped in a shroud of black netting, ruined by the plummeting South Tower and snarled in insurance litigation ever since, still awaiting demolition.
7 WTC was the final ground zero building to fall on 9/11âat 5:20 p.m., after burning all dayâand now, the first to go back up. They broke ground in May 2002, and they topped the tower out in October 2004. They hung Old Glory on the last steel beam before lifting it to the sky. The governor and Larry Silverstein stood by, watching.
Mike Pinelli stood with them. Pinelliâs the Seven project super, meaning he runs the show, a gruff, goateed, fast-talking Jersey guyâpardon the redundanciesâand the son of a Port Authority cop. Pinelli left the New Jersey Institute of Technology in â85 with a degree in mechanical engineering and landed his very first job as an assistan...