Power at Ground Zero

The destruction of the World Trade Center complex on 9/11 set in motion a chain of events that fundamentally transformed both the United States and the wider world. War has raged in the Middle East for a decade and a half, and Americans have become accustomed to surveillance, enhanced security, and periodic terrorist attacks. But the symbolic locus of the post-9/11 world has always been "Ground Zero"—the sixteen acres in Manhattan's financial district where the twintowers collapsed. While idealism dominated in the initial rebuilding phase, interest-group trench warfare soon ensued. Myriad battles involving all of the interests with a stake in that space-real estate interests, victims' families, politicians, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, thefederal government, community groups, architectural firms, and a panoply of ambitious entrepreneurs grasping for pieces of the pie-raged for over a decade, and nearly fifteen years later there are still loose ends that need resolution. In Power at Ground Zero, Lynne Sagalyn offers the definitive account of one of the greatest reconstruction projects in modern world history. Sagalyn is America's most eminent scholar of major urban reconstruction projects, and this is the culmination of over a decade of research. Both epic in scope and granular in detail, this is at base a classic New York story. Sagalyn has an extraordinary command over all of the actors and moving parts involved in the drama: the long parade of NewYork and New Jersey governors involved in the project, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, various Port Authority leaders, the ubiquitous real estate magnate Larry Silverstein, and architectural superstars like Santiago Calatrava and Daniel Libeskind. As she shows, political competition at the local, state, regional, andfederal level along with vast sums of money drove every aspect of the planning process. But the reconstruction project was always about more than complex real estate deals and jockeying among local politicians. The symbolism of the reconstruction extended far beyond New York and was freighted with the twin tasks of symbolizing American resilience and projecting American power. As a result, every aspect was contested. As Sagalyn points out, while modern city building is often dismissed ascold-hearted and detached from meaning, the opposite was true at Ground Zero. Virtually every action was infused with symbolic significance and needed to be debated. The emotional dimension of 9/11 made this large-scale rebuilding effort unique; it supercharged the complexity of the rebuilding process withboth sanctity and a truly unique politics. Covering all of this and more, Power at Ground Zero is sure to stand as the most important book ever written on the aftermath of arguably the most significant isolated event in the post-Cold War era.

Now, more than a decade after the initial flurry of books, we have what is likely to remain the definitive account of this tortuous and unedifying saga, Lynne B. Sagalyn's Power at Ground Zero: Politics, Money, and the Remaking of Lower Manhattan. Her meticulous and exceptionally clear exposition of the essential facts provides more than enough evidence for readers to come to their own, and often damning, conclusions., A superbly qualified scholar thoroughly deconstructs the tortured story behind the rebuilding of the World Trade Center complex...Sagalyn keeps the many strands of this story expertly in hand...Sagalyn has produced a definitive history and an urban studies classic." - Kirkus Reviews, Riveting...exhaustive...Ms. Sagalyn's book is likely to stand as the primary reference on Ground Zero., Authoritative...Sagalyn has a keen sense of both politics and urbanism. Extraordinary and insightful. Sagalyn has written a great epic of political wrangling and real estate.

Lynne Sagalyn is a Professor of Real Estate at Columbia University Business School and is also the author of Times Square Roulette (MIT Press).