Exclusive Lifestyle Report From New York: The World Trade Center rises again
Today in New York City, retired firefighter Lee Ielpi will finally be able to walk onto the long-forbidden site of Ground Zero and see his son Jonathan’s name etched in bronze among the 2,749 who died on 9/11.
Jonathan Ielpi, then aged 29, married with two little boys, was a firefighter with the New York City Fire Department just like his dad. Before leaving to rescue those trapped in the Twin Towers, he called Lee.
“I’m going to the World Trade Center, Dad,” he said.
“Buddy, be careful,” Lee replied.
And that was the last time father ever spoke to son.
“I spent nine months in recovery,” Ielpi says. “Ten years means nothing when it comes to losing a child.”
On this 10th anniversary of 9/11, Ielpi will stand beside one of two memorial pools — once the craters left behind by the fallen North and South Towers — to reflect near the place where his son’s body was found.
Ielpi is one of the characters you’ll meet in Rising: Rebuilding Ground Zero, a six-hour documentary series premiering on the Discovery Channel on Sept. 14.
The Philippine STAR was invited to interview Rising’s creator and executive producer, Danny Forster, and attend the series’ world premiere at the new World Trade Center.
An architect who hosts the Discovery show Build It Bigger, Forster toured us around 7 World Trade Center, a tower overlooking the Ground Zero construction site. The massive rebuilding project is about halfway done.
Tower One, formerly called Freedom Tower, is hitting 1,000 feet as you read this — its ultimate height of 1,776 feet will make it the tallest skyscraper in North America — but the WTC complex in its entirety will reach completion by 2014.
Though Forster had a video presentation about Rising, his best visual accompaniment, to which he often referred, was right outside the plate-glass windows of 7 WTC, where cranes, bulldozers, and builders were hard at work to meet the 9/11/11 deadline.
Forster is also in the end stages of his passion project. In the next 15 hours he’ll be finished editing the documentary that took him three years to make, a story he feels it’s important to tell because no one else was talking about it.
“Rising is not just the story of 9/11 but of 9/12, what happened afterwards,” he says. “When 9/11 happened, there was an immediate, intense amount of attention. That attention started to wane over the years when the design wasn’t quite clear, the path wasn’t figured out yet. This is one of the most complicated construction projects in the history of building, and it’s taken many, many years to get out from the ground.”
Why did it take so long? Forster explains that it was a matter of infrastructure. When the towers fell, underneath them were eight stories below bedrock, and 16 acres were pushed down 100 feet. “So you’re not just building a skyscraper, which is easy to build, but the infrastructure to support this place and the blocks around it, dealing with transportation, security, electricity.”
Since organizing all those urban complexities was taking so long, developers erected a 12-foot fence around the 16 acres. “People were longing to know what was going on in there, but the new skyline has only risen in the past year and a half,” Forster says. “Before that, people saw nothing.”
But as you’ll see in Rising, that’s not the reality at all. “This design represents America’s response to 9/11,” Forster says. “People have a nostalgia for the original World Trade Center, but in reality it didn’t function all that well. We have to re-imagine the kind of city we want for ourselves. Instead of a singular homogeneous financial building, we’ll have a series of buildings. Instead of a building that lops off streets, we’ll reintegrate and connect Ground Zero to Manhattan.”
Initially, Forster began by focusing on the builders themselves, all of whom had ties to the original World Trade Center, either through fathers who had built the towers, or by losing a loved one on 9/11.
That focus began skewing towards more personal stories when Steven Spielberg and Dreamworks SKG came onboard as executive producers.
“It’s really important to capture all the voices and experiences of the people that are putting us back on our feet, to look forward into the future while never losing sight of how we got here,” Spielberg said at the screening, via a televised address (he was in Greece with his family). “And that story is going to be told best by the survivors of 9/11: by the righteous rescuers who were just doing their jobs and saved so many people, the next of kin who lost their loved ones, the voice of the workers, architects and the people who had the vision for this area.”
Spielberg would watch episodes of Rising and e-mail directions to Forster, who was grateful for the instruction. “Steven brought an understanding of the humanity and personal stories of the people we met onsite,” Forster says. “We were focused on the construction but Steven’s an amazing storyteller who has an incredible eye for characters. We’d get notes from him about how to bring the humanity of the story out. It couldn’t just be about rebuilding buildings.”
Being the professor of architecture that he is, however, Forster couldn’t resist giving us a sneak peek at the wonders being built on Ground Zero, as well as a sneak preview of Rising, which will be presented in five parts.
TOWER ONE
The first two-hour episode will focus on the tallest building in North America and the safest skyscraper built in American history. “This is the first time that a building has been lifted up by 200 feet.” For protection, the base of Tower One is made of solid concrete. Wrapping the building are 70-foot-tall, three-foot-thick concrete blast walls. Since the lobby is so encased, architect David Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill came up with a podium solution to let light in, wrapping the concrete base in translucent glass that changes color with passing pedestrians.
Tower One’s base is the exact shape of the original towers, but the square has been rotated towards the top, creating an optical illusion. “If you look at the tower, its silhouette is identical to the exact height of the original plus a 400-foot spire,” notes Forster. “From a diagonal angle you see the Washington Monument, an iconic, powerful obelisk form. It’s a clear marker: This is where it happened. The challenge was to make it both safe and beautiful.”
For the architects it was important not to compromise the American values of openness, transparency and diversity. Thus, Childs used low-iron glass so it’s the most transparent tower ever built. “Even the technical solutions are embedded with meaning about what the American response is.”
THE MEMORIAL MUSEUM
The Oslo, Norway architectural firm of Snohetta had an interesting challenge: to construct the only building on Memorial Plaza. And so they designed a glass and steel pavilion housing two of the WTC’s most precious remnants, as well as something even more precious 100 feet below: a 40,000 square-foot underground museum that will tell the story of 9/11.
“You’ll descend into bedrock, the deepest point of Ground Zero,” Forster says.
The pavilion is actually the front door for the museum, whose panels mimic the lines on the WTC. “They took the memory of looking up the black-and-white stripes of the World Trade Center and rotated it so it’s like looking at the façade.”
Inside are the two “tridents,” part of the support structure of the two towers that didn’t fall, and so became strongly symbolic. Before they found their new home they were living in JFK airport’s Hangar 17 for 10 years.
Descending into the museum you encounter another significant relic: the slurry wall, the dam holding back the Hudson River. “Had it collapsed, it would have flooded the subway of Lower Manhattan and been a serious calamity,” Forster reveals. “But it didn’t fail, so it’s a symbol of resilience.”
Ground Zero master planner Daniel Libeskind said the wall should be exposed as a national landmark, “and it’s still weeping,” Forster says, “with the Hudson coming through.”
In essence this is not a museum with paintings and art, but the artifacts of the day telling the story. “The site is the biggest artifact — objects like the Ladder 3 truck, an elevator, airplane turbines,” Forster says. “It’s a powerful walk under the voids that marked the Twin Towers.”
THE TRANSPORTATION HUB
One hour of Rising will be devoted to PATH (Port Authority Trans-Hudson) Hall, the crown jewel designed by world-famous Spanish architect-engineer Santiago Calatrava, which will be downtown’s new Grand Central Station.
“Over a quarter million workers were coming in from New Jersey to the temporary PATH station,” Forster says. “They had to loft the subway up and build over it and under it and not disrupt service.”
The massive hub evokes a dove or a dinosaur, with a huge light well bringing sun all the way to the trains below. “One of the hallmarks of Santiago Calatrava architecture is that steel, which was brought in from Spain on a barge. Calatrava wanted to expose it so people saw what was happening, but it had to be incredibly strong.”
Thus the structure, or Oculus, resembles a human rib cage, half of which has to be finished today so families can walk onto the plaza and look at their loved ones’ names on the memorial pools.
Forster says that by 2014, this transportation hub will reorganize the balance of New York City. “Every day, 750,000 people walk through Grand Central,” he says. “It’s the most profitable shopping mall in America — more people visit it in a day than the Statue of Liberty in a year. That scale of project is being built here and it’s a game changer for Manhattan.”
THE MEMORIAL POOLS
The next hour will be spent on the most emotional and evocative part of the site: the memorial pools, the two largest manmade waterfalls in North America. Built within the footprints of the fallen towers, each pool measures 200 ft. x 200 ft, the exact size of the North and South towers.
Michael Arad, a young Israeli immigrant architect, won the competition to design the pools with his proposal of “Reflecting Absence.”
“Rather than tell the story of 9/11, I wanted a memorial that would let you experience the gravity of the loss,” Arad says, “so you walk to the edge of the pools, stand in front of the very same space where the towers once stood, depressed 35 feet into the earth, and see the eternal flow of water into not just one void, but two.”
Wrapping around the pools are the names of everyone who died that day, those who perished in the North Tower at the north pool, and so on. But the way the names are arranged has an incredible hidden meaning.
“Three thousand people lost their lives that day, so how would you organize those names — alphabetically, by company, hierarchy, age?” Arad’s solution was to let the families get involved, and though it was a difficult process filled with dissent, they eventually came up with “meaningful adjacency,” locating the names in a way that would tell how they lived their lives, what their relationships were with other people who were lost.
“It reflects where people were that day, family relationships, coworkers, those who died together,” Arad says. He received 1,200 requests and had to arrange the names to fulfill each and every one, using algorithmic software that was like a giant 3D puzzle. “A designer couldn’t have designed this; it had to come out of a process like this,” he says.
For example, one of the names on the list was Richard Ross, who died on Flight 11. Next to him is one of the names listed for the North Tower, Stacy Sanders. Their link? Ross’ eldest daughter Abigail. “Abigail Ross lost both her father and her best friend that day,” Arad says, “and their names are side by side.”
While the memorial plaza becomes open public space tomorrow, on 9/12, today is reserved for the victims’ families. “They can touch water, touch the names, the bronze is heated and cooled so whether it’s summer or winter you feel the warmth of a body,” Arad says. “But the arrangement of the names is the real power of the project.”
THE NEW CITY
The final hour looks beyond the 16 acres at the 60,000 residents whose lives were also destroyed that day. “People couldn’t go home, they didn’t know if their homes were safe or contaminated, whether schools and restaurants would be rebuilt,” Forster says. “In the past 10 years they’ve turned the neighborhood into a vibrant, diverse residential community again.”
A native New Yorker, Forster’s own office is located two blocks from 7 WTC, and he’s been in the area filming nonstop for two and a half years.
“Our skyline is going to be very, very different,” he says. “Rather than having two exclamation points defining the southern edge of Manhattan, we’re now going to have a new series of towers wrapping up from Tower 4 in an ascending spiral to the tallest building, Tower 1.”
Ground Zero is no longer just a place for mourners and sadness; it’s a balance between tragedy and hope.
Rising is the best six hours of film distilled from over 1,000, the goal of which is to help everyone understand what’s being built there.
According to Spielberg, “What we’re doing here is to record their stories, and really immortalize what they’re doing, not only for New York City but the future of this country. This is very, very significant to everybody at Discovery, everybody around the world.”
For Lee Ielpi, today will be his first chance to visit his son’s burial site, and touch the headstone he’s been lacking all these years.
“To stand by a name — not just my son, my best friend — and 80 to 100 good friends of mine that died here, it’s going to be meaningful,” Ielpi says. “What I see right now is recovery.”
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Rising: Rebuilding Ground Zero premieres on the Discovery Channel Wednesday, Sept. 14 at 9 p.m. Encores on Thursday, Sept. 15 at midnight, 8 a.m. and 2 p.m., and Saturday, Sept. 17 at 6 p.m.
