This'll do. (City Review)

Michael Kimmelman returned to the public realm for this week's column, where he all but declared what appears to be his raison d'etre going forward: "We’ve been so fixated on fancy new buildings that we’ve lost sight of the spaces they occupy and we share," he wrote in the Sunday Times. But instead of Zuccotti Park and protest spaces, this time Mr. Kimmelman turns his attention on Midtown, where he ambles about with the esteemed planner (and mayoral soothsayer) Alexander Garvin.

Together, they argue that the city needs to do more to plan these spaces, which are largely designed ad hoc, if at all, by the developers who own the properties. They point to Holland, that godhead of urban enlightenment, as a prime example from which to learn:

The Dutch today put together what they call “structure plans” when they undertake big new public projects, like their high-speed rail station in Rotterdam: before celebrity architects show up, urban designers are called in to work out how best to organize the sites for the public good. It’s a formalized, fine-grained approach to the public realm. By contrast, big urban projects on the drawing board in New York still tend to be the products of negotiations between government agencies anxious for economic improvement and private developers angling for zoning exemptions. As with the ill-conceived Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn, the streets, subway entrances and plazas around Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues, where millions of New Yorkers will actually feel the development’s effects, seem like they’ve hardly been taken into account.

It is a very good point, one the developers would no doubt argue against, even if it is for their own good. Look no further than the High Line, which has been a boon to development in Chelsea, even if the landlords betwixt the elevated park fought for its demolition for years. Messrs. Kimmelman and Garvin raise the potential of closing 33rd Street between Seventh and Eighth avenues, a measure that would no doubt be fought just as hard as the proposal to close 34th Street, which was defeated earlier this year.

And yet consider the success of Times Square and Broadway, which have seen retail rents rise and public satisfaction grow. Like a temperamental child, builders and landlords do not always know what is best for them. By making the space surrounding their buildings more appealing, the buildings themselves will rise in value. The rise of quality architecture and sustainable design only underscore this fact. People will pay for quality, especially in a city with such high demand for property like New York.

Far superior—and developer-built in Williamsburg, no less. (WaterfrontCondo.wordpress.com)

The Observer is reminded of something Mitchell Moss, the N.Y.U. open space guru, has told us on more than one occasion, that the city should be building neither roads nor bike lanes but instead expanding the sidewalks. This is our front yard, he likes to say. (Again, cf. Times Square.) But it is also important that these lawns on not weedy and full of crab grass.

Given the right constraints, however, the city's developers can actually do good. Even if Atlantic Yards will be a public space disaster as Mr. Kimmelman seems to suggest, Bruce Ratner has pushed his architects at SHoP to create the best space around his arena possible, even if it is not nearly enough space.

Things have been getting better, too. Messrs. Kimmelman and Garvin point to the Citicorp plaza, built in the late 1970s as a decent model, while the one across the street, is not, but keep in mind that the new public plazas tend to outshine the old, which were first inaugurated in the 1960s. Then again, august examples exist as well, such as Rockefeller Center or the Seagram Building, so developers do not always follow the best leads.

That is where the city comes in.  The Williamsburg waterfront, derided in an aside by Mr. Kimmelman, has actually shown a great deal of promise. The waterfront esplanades and open space surrounding the buildings there have become popular destinations, jam packed with fisherman, flea markets and, most recently ferry goers. The problems actually lie with the spaces the city has tried to create, such as Bushwick Inlet Park, a sizable waterfront complex that has languished due to budget constraints. Is privatization of the public realm good? Rarely, though it does have its merits.

At the Edge, Northside Piers and 184 Kent Street, a genuine waterfront is blossoming. It may lack the grandeur of the centrally planned Brooklyn Bridge Park, and the lampposts and benches might not match, but it still follows strict guidelines set up by the city that have created an inviting public realm. It is a hodgepodge, but so is New York.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

Michael Bailkin, who is known as the best go-to guy if you’re a company looking for a tax break from the city, bought an option in February to get first dibs on about 43 acres of the rail yards closest to Long Island City.

That property has suddenly become much more valuable since the revelation in August of a confidential plan drawn up by architect Alex Garvin for Deputy Mayor Daniel Doctoroff, which envisions a new Battery Park City to be built on the site.

The option, purchased for an undisclosed price, means that Mr. Bailkin could hold such a plan hostage, leverage his stake for a cut of the action, or demand a high price to relinquish his rights should such a housing scheme come to pass.

A new neighborhood over the vast Sunnyside Yards, which is still actively used by railroads, is several steps—and years—away from fruition.

Mr. Bailkin’s option would kick in only after the Metropolitan Transportation Authority decided that it no longer needed the yards—and maybe not even then.

But Mr. Bailkin’s expertise lies in getting what he wants from government. He won $37 million worth of sales-tax exemptions and other incentives for Condé Nast and Reuters in the late 1990’s, in an effort to ensure that New York didn’t lose its title as media capital of the world to a place like Jersey City.

Four years ago, he won $26 million in tax incentives for Met Life to move to Long Island City, virtually next-door to the rail yards.

(Despite that effort, Met Life is now seriously considering moving back to midtown Manhattan without any tax incentives at all. So much for retention!)

“He is who you hire if you want a retention or development deal. He is kind of the ultimate insider,” one longtime New York City business figure said. “He has deep connections in city government that go way back.”

The option itself, according to transaction records filed with the city, permits Mr. Bailkin to buy an underlying option, held by a New Jersey property manager named Paul Marshall, on the Arch Street Yard on the southwestern triangle of the yards between 21st Street and Thomson Avenue, and Yard A, which runs in a thin strip on the north edge of the yards parallel to Jackson Avenue.

In an arrangement dating back to the days of the Penn Central Railroad, Mr. Marshall’s option applies only to the land and the first 22 feet of air rights, and he would have to buy the property at fair market value.

The city controls the air rights above that plane, but would likely need permission from below to drive supports for its platforms into the ground.

By controlling that narrow layer of land and air, Mr. Bailkin in essence controls any development above it—and the future possibilities of solving the city’s housing shortage.

“It’s a strategic position,” said Mr. Marshall, who bought the underlying option in 1987, when he was doing deals on what became the Queens West development nearby.

He said he did not know about Mr. Garvin’s report and the possibility of city-led development until told of it by The Observer.

“It is something that everyone has long thought of,” Mr. Marshall told The Observer. “It’s terrific. The city’s focus is always on Manhattan—that is every outer borough’s lament. There are things that you can’t do in Manhattan.”

Mr. Bailkin did not return telephone messages for comment.

An individual with knowledge of the transaction said, “There is no specific plan for the area. They are in a position to negotiate for the air rights.”

‘Let’s Deal With Bailkin’

Real-estate developers with legendary names like Lefrak and Zeckendorf have attempted to develop Sunnyside Yards before, with no luck. Mr. Bailkin may have more success if the city gets behind the effort, now that the residential market is booming.

“It is very complicated to say how this translates into real value,” said John Reinertsen, first vice president of CB Richard Ellis, a Long Island City real-estate broker who represented Mr. Marshall in the past. “There has got to be a directive to say, ‘We need to maximize the value of this thing. Let’s deal with Paul. Let’s deal with Bailkin.’”

A native of Philadelphia, Mr. Bailkin became an adventurer in his teen years, joining the Army before he was of age and later the circus before settling down to a bureaucrat’s life at a city economic-development agency.

Then one day, Donald Trump stopped by his office to ask for help in reviving the Commodore Hotel on East 42nd Street, now the Grand Hyatt. Mr. Bailkin fashioned a financial-aid package that helped institutionalize a whole way of doing business in New York City—real-estate tax breaks—that was just beginning to emerge.

Investigative reporter Wayne Barrett, in his biography Trump: The Deals and the Downfall, says that Mr. Bailkin “had already been chasing dreams for a lifetime” by that point. The night after the first approval, he sat on the steps of City Hall with his counterpart from the state, David Stadtmauer, the two men “savoring their triumph and sensing that the business incentive plan that had grown out of the Commodore deal might have also created an opportunity for them.”

The next day, Mr. Bailkin quit his job to set up a law firm dedicated to economic-development incentives, and Mr. Stadtmauer joined him a few months later. They have been in business together ever since.

The idea proposed by Mr. Garvin in his secret report was to build a platform above the train tracks, much like the one north of Grand Central Terminal or the one proposed for the Atlantic Yards project in central Brooklyn, on which high-rise towers with 18,700 to 35,300 apartments would be built. Mr. Bailkin’s position affects only one golf-club-shaped piece of the entire yards, although it would be developed first, according to Mr. Garvin, because it is closest to the city and four subway lines.

Mr. Doctoroff did not return messages placed through a spokeswoman and his office.

But the Sunnyside Yards plan is believed to be just part of the overall strategic plan that Mr. Doctoroff has been working on to ensure his boss’ legacy.

On Sept. 21, the Mayor formally announced the creation of the Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability, which will oversee the creation of the strategic plan and be headed by Rohit Aggarwala, a former McKinsey consultant and Columbia University graduate whose dissertation focused on postcolonial New York City. No deadline for the plan was announced, though it is already several months overdue after being announced last January.

It is unclear whether Mr. Bailkin knew about Mr. Garvin’s report when he purchased the option, although drafts of the Garvin report had been going back and forth for months before it was finalized in June, according to one source. Mr. Bailkin had purchased a short-term option on the option before, when he was also trying to develop an office building at nearby Queens Plaza. That deal fell through four years ago, when Mr. Bailkin’s partner, the Louis Dreyfus Property Group, backed out after Sept. 11.

Joe Conley, the chairman of the local community board, said that the economics are still not there, and that diverting the focus from undeveloped Long Island City parcels that are ready to go would only hurt those efforts.

“This is unfortunately going to divert attention from the real issue, which is how are we going to get Long Island City developed,” Mr. Conley told The Observer. “Most people will sit back and be the dreamers, but once you put pen to paper and make these things work, they look very futuristic.”

Michael Bailkin, who is known as the best go-to guy if you’re a company looking for a tax break from the city, bought an option in February to get first dibs on about 43 acres of the rail yards closest to Long Island City.

That property has suddenly become much more valuable since the revelation in August of a confidential plan drawn up by architect Alex Garvin for Deputy Mayor Daniel Doctoroff, which envisions a new Battery Park City to be built on the site.

The option, purchased for an undisclosed price, means that Mr. Bailkin could hold such a plan hostage, leverage his stake for a cut of the action, or demand a high price to relinquish his rights should such a housing scheme come to pass.

A new neighborhood over the vast Sunnyside Yards, which is still actively used by railroads, is several steps—and years—away from fruition.

Mr. Bailkin’s option would kick in only after the Metropolitan Transportation Authority decided that it no longer needed the yards—and maybe not even then.

But Mr. Bailkin’s expertise lies in getting what he wants from government. He won $37 million worth of sales-tax exemptions and other incentives for Condé Nast and Reuters in the late 1990’s, in an effort to ensure that New York didn’t lose its title as media capital of the world to a place like Jersey City.

Four years ago, he won $26 million in tax incentives for Met Life to move to Long Island City, virtually next-door to the rail yards.

(Despite that effort, Met Life is now seriously considering moving back to midtown Manhattan without any tax incentives at all. So much for retention!)

“He is who you hire if you want a retention or development deal. He is kind of the ultimate insider,” one longtime New York City business figure said. “He has deep connections in city government that go way back.”

The option itself, according to transaction records filed with the city, permits Mr. Bailkin to buy an underlying option, held by a New Jersey property manager named Paul Marshall, on the Arch Street Yard on the southwestern triangle of the yards between 21st Street and Thomson Avenue, and Yard A, which runs in a thin strip on the north edge of the yards parallel to Jackson Avenue.

In an arrangement dating back to the days of the Penn Central Railroad, Mr. Marshall’s option applies only to the land and the first 22 feet of air rights, and he would have to buy the property at fair market value.

The city controls the air rights above that plane, but would likely need permission from below to drive supports for its platforms into the ground.

By controlling that narrow layer of land and air, Mr. Bailkin in essence controls any development above it—and the future possibilities of solving the city’s housing shortage.

“It’s a strategic position,” said Mr. Marshall, who bought the underlying option in 1987, when he was doing deals on what became the Queens West development nearby.

He said he did not know about Mr. Garvin’s report and the possibility of city-led development until told of it by The Observer.

“It is something that everyone has long thought of,” Mr. Marshall told The Observer. “It’s terrific. The city’s focus is always on Manhattan—that is every outer borough’s lament. There are things that you can’t do in Manhattan.”

Mr. Bailkin did not return telephone messages for comment.

An individual with knowledge of the transaction said, “There is no specific plan for the area. They are in a position to negotiate for the air rights.”

‘Let’s Deal With Bailkin’

Real-estate developers with legendary names like Lefrak and Zeckendorf have attempted to develop Sunnyside Yards before, with no luck. Mr. Bailkin may have more success if the city gets behind the effort, now that the residential market is booming.

“It is very complicated to say how this translates into real value,” said John Reinertsen, first vice president of CB Richard Ellis, a Long Island City real-estate broker who represented Mr. Marshall in the past. “There has got to be a directive to say, ‘We need to maximize the value of this thing. Let’s deal with Paul. Let’s deal with Bailkin.’”

A native of Philadelphia, Mr. Bailkin became an adventurer in his teen years, joining the Army before he was of age and later the circus before settling down to a bureaucrat’s life at a city economic-development agency.

Then one day, Donald Trump stopped by his office to ask for help in reviving the Commodore Hotel on East 42nd Street, now the Grand Hyatt. Mr. Bailkin fashioned a financial-aid package that helped institutionalize a whole way of doing business in New York City—real-estate tax breaks—that was just beginning to emerge.

Investigative reporter Wayne Barrett, in his biography Trump: The Deals and the Downfall, says that Mr. Bailkin “had already been chasing dreams for a lifetime” by that point. The night after the first approval, he sat on the steps of City Hall with his counterpart from the state, David Stadtmauer, the two men “savoring their triumph and sensing that the business incentive plan that had grown out of the Commodore deal might have also created an opportunity for them.”

The next day, Mr. Bailkin quit his job to set up a law firm dedicated to economic-development incentives, and Mr. Stadtmauer joined him a few months later. They have been in business together ever since.

The idea proposed by Mr. Garvin in his secret report was to build a platform above the train tracks, much like the one north of Grand Central Terminal or the one proposed for the Atlantic Yards project in central Brooklyn, on which high-rise towers with 18,700 to 35,300 apartments would be built. Mr. Bailkin’s position affects only one golf-club-shaped piece of the entire yards, although it would be developed first, according to Mr. Garvin, because it is closest to the city and four subway lines.

Mr. Doctoroff did not return messages placed through a spokeswoman and his office.

But the Sunnyside Yards plan is believed to be just part of the overall strategic plan that Mr. Doctoroff has been working on to ensure his boss’ legacy.

On Sept. 21, the Mayor formally announced the creation of the Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability, which will oversee the creation of the strategic plan and be headed by Rohit Aggarwala, a former McKinsey consultant and Columbia University graduate whose dissertation focused on postcolonial New York City. No deadline for the plan was announced, though it is already several months overdue after being announced last January.

It is unclear whether Mr. Bailkin knew about Mr. Garvin’s report when he purchased the option, although drafts of the Garvin report had been going back and forth for months before it was finalized in June, according to one source. Mr. Bailkin had purchased a short-term option on the option before, when he was also trying to develop an office building at nearby Queens Plaza. That deal fell through four years ago, when Mr. Bailkin’s partner, the Louis Dreyfus Property Group, backed out after Sept. 11.

Joe Conley, the chairman of the local community board, said that the economics are still not there, and that diverting the focus from undeveloped Long Island City parcels that are ready to go would only hurt those efforts.

“This is unfortunately going to divert attention from the real issue, which is how are we going to get Long Island City developed,” Mr. Conley told The Observer. “Most people will sit back and be the dreamers, but once you put pen to paper and make these things work, they look very futuristic.”

His brand of urbanism with a free-market conscience appealed to Mr. Doctoroff, who was then just another investment manager with an Olympic dream. The two got together and worked out a way to bring the games to New York.

First it was NYC2012. Now it’s NYC2025.

With the Olympic bid by the wayside, Mr. Garvin has been working on a report on housing and infrastructure investments for the Strategic Land Use Plan, a nearly covert effort by the Bloomberg administration on what should be done to accommodate the nine million New Yorkers of the future (up from 8.1 million today). It is believed to be just one of a handful of reports that various consultants are preparing for the strategic plan, and was secret until Aug. 16, when Aaron Naparstek, a writer, posted it on StreetsBlog, a transportation Web site. Mr. Naparstek, whose own book, Honku: The Zen Antidote to Road Rage, may at one time or another may also have been found in Barnes & Noble, said that he had obtained the finished report in June from “a City Hall insider.”

Some of the ideas included in the report were mentioned in an Aug. 21 Observer article on the strategic plan, but the 87-page document delves into copious detail. The introduction cites “opportunities to build between 160,000 and 325,000 housing units, with virtually no residential displacement, and to dramatically improve city’s public realm through strategic capital investment.” Chief among them is a platform over Sunnyside Yards, the 166-acre commuter and passenger train yard in Queens, which would, when built out over three phases, provide space for up to 35,300 apartments. A more controversial idea that The Observer said is under consideration--congestion pricing, or charging cars for entering lower Manhattan and midtown weekdays--is not mentioned in the report.

“If housing production does not accelerate to match the growing population, housing prices will climb still higher,” the report states. “Such an expensive housing market will make it difficult for New York to attract the world’s top companies and employees, to retain an economically and culturally diverse population, and to continue expanding opportunities for every New Yorker.”

Of course, Mr. Garvin could have put his pen down right there. How much of an overpopulation problem would we have if no one wanted to live here?

But it becomes clear that Mr. Garvin wants the city to grow: increasing housing, he writes, “absorbs the city’s growth,” while improving the “public realm … helps ensure that growth occurs in the first place.”

And so, while the first part of the report is about creating housing, the report is illustrated with charming photos of tree-lined streets in Paris, bicycle lanes in Vienna and trolleys in Minneapolis, giving the impression that Mr. Garvin actually believes that just a little more urban planning will make New York City a civilized place to live!

“Alex is one of the pros in the business, and he’s raised a lot of interesting ideas about development potential,” said Robert Yaro, the president of the Regional Plan Association, a nonprofit planning group. “It’s particularly useful if it’s going to be a catalyst for public discussion, and I think that’s the key, that it needs to be seen as a beginning for dialog.”

It is unclear just what Mayor Bloomberg thinks of the report and how much of it will end up in his final plan, but outside consultants typically submit numerous drafts, get feedback, and shape their final versions to make them more or less acceptable to their clients. Mr. Garvin, a Yale professor as well as head of his own planning firm in New York, referred questions about the report to the Mayor’s office, which refused to comment. Mr. Doctoroff, reached separately, said he was tied up in meetings, but previously he has promised that the public would have a chance to provide input during the creation of the plan.

The idea of building platforms is nothing new for New York: Park Avenue was created over the New York Central rails; the Bloomberg administration is trying to build a deck on the West Side; and developer Bruce Ratner is proposing to cover Long Island Rail Road tracks in Brooklyn. Developers have likewise eyed the Sunnyside Yards for a long time, but no one has jumped.

“We’ve been looking at these sorts of opportunities, but as a private developer, it is very hard to figure out how to get involved,” said Jon McMillan, the planning director for Rockrose Development Corp., which is developing part of Queens West nearby. “There are several layers of ownership: the city, the M.T.A., and there’s even a private owner that has an option on part of it. Opportunities like this really have to be competitively bid.”

The trick to making it work economically is to figure out how many apartments developers are allowed to build on top of the platform in order to pay for the cost of the platform. At some point, Mr. McMillan said, “you turn the dial” and find the density that is at once acceptable to the community and also profitable for developers.

“If it’s not there already, it is almost there,” he said.

Another experienced developer in the outer boroughs, though, doubted it could be done without government subsidizing the cost of the platform.

“The concept is an excellent concept, the concept of building housing wherever it may be built,” he told The Observer. “The problem is that the infrastructure costs of a site like that are so enormous.”

Mr. Garvin estimates that maybe R8 zoning (roughly eight- to 10-story buildings, depending on its footprint) and definitely R9 zoning (roughly 12- to 18-story buildings) would be sufficient to make the platform worthwhile, but he does not spell out the specifics.

“Sunnyside Yards probably has more potential than any area in New York,” said Councilman Eric Gioia, who represents the area. “Platforming would give us an opportunity to build schools, homes that the middle class can afford, and create a vibrant new neighborhood.”

The idea of building over the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway in Cobble Hill appears to be more controversial, however. The local congresswoman, Representative Nydia Velázquez, recently secured more than $300,000 to study how to cover the expressway, which runs in a ditch along the neighborhood’s western edge. But community members are leaning in favor of cantilevering a broad sidewalk over either side of the ditch, narrowing the gap but leaving a slit through which car exhaust could escape.

“I don’t understand how putting housing over the highway will still let the highway breathe,” said Murray Adams, president of the Cobble Hill Association. “What that does is put all of the burden on either end of the platform instead of dissipating fumes throughout.”

Mr. Garvin’s ideas may run into other difficulties as well: He recommends rezoning 21 blocks of Sunset Park for housing while the Bloomberg administration set them aside earlier this year as part of an “Industrial Business Zone,” a designation meant to keep manufacturing companies from getting pushed out of New York City because of rising real-estate prices. “For housing to be built in these areas, the city must make a policy decision--as recommended by this report--that each site holds greater benefit to the city as a residential or mixed-use community than under its current uses,” the Garvin report states.

Other ideas are innocuous by comparison, and Mr. Garvin argues that they are relatively cheap. Planting trees along streets, for example, can be accomplished for the bargain-basement price of $650,000 a mile. (Keeping them alive is another issue.)

Mr. Garvin also suggests closing more major streets on Sundays as now is the practice in Central and Prospect Parks, and “pedestrian reclamations,” which means getting rid of parked cars along one side of the street, and broadening the sidewalk to create a sort of mall, with trees and benches along the side. In general, cars, especially parked cars, do not come off very well.

Far from being in the early stages, as his people like to claim, the team drafting Mayor Bloomberg's Strategic Plan had commissioned a study by Alex Garvin (Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff's Olympics designer) on housing, which was completed in May. The list of projected housing platforms is far longer than we reported yesterday, including not just the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and Sunnyside Yards but also the Prospect Expressway, the 36th Street Yards, and the Bay Ridge Line.

"This report," the introduction states, "presents opportunities to build between 160,000 and 325,000 housing units, with virtually no residential displacement...."

By way of explanation, from the housing chapter: "In some sections of the city, the cost of land now exceeds the cost of buildign a platform."

There is a lot more of it to dig through, also about the "public realm," which an urbanist like Garvin surely put a lot of thought into. Aaron Naparstek has it all on StreetsBlog.

-Matthew Schuerman

Unlike any of the competing proposals, Mr. Libeskind's plan did something that had profound meaning for the bereaved: his design called for a new tower that would be set in the old foundation, which remained behind when the towers collapsed. The actual pit-the enormous bedrock-lined hole in the ground where the World Trade Center once stood-would be left virtually untouched, a testament to the memory of the dead.

For many of the families, Mr. Libeskind had deftly captured the emotional contradictions inherent in building a new commercial center on what is effectively a mass grave. His design embodied a series of wrenching questions: How can we merge mourning and morning commuters, retail and remembrance? If the site is made beautiful, is tragedy faithlessly forgotten? If it is raw, and bares the scars of loss too vividly, will it maintain the requisite respect for the dignity of the dead?

"There's going to be living here," Mr. Libeskind told The Observer as he picked at a poached egg in the restaurant of the Four Seasons hotel. Sitting there with his wife, Nina Libeskind (who is also his business manager), the couple looked almost like twins: short crowns of salt-and-pepper hair, black leather blazers, glasses. Mr. Libeskind, a neat and practical man, succinctly summed up what New Yorkers want from the new structure: "They want streets; they want shops; they want a memorial."

Such understatement belies Mr. Libeskind's ability to connect with the profound emotional needs of the families, as well as with other New Yorkers who don't want the new structure to bury the past. In fact, Mr. Libeskind, the son of Holocaust survivors, a man who arrived in New York harbor by boat in 1960, is undoubtedly the man who has the best chance of uniting the cacophony of interests squabbling over the site's future.

Consider his design: It calls for a crystal spire whose foundation is firmly set in the pit-it has come to be known as "the bathtub"-a hole that is lined with ancient bedrock that, for millennia, has kept the waters of the Hudson River at bay. The spire rises up out of the pit, and as it does, it appears to repeat the lines of the Statue of Liberty, spiraling upwards and thinning out like the line from the strong shoulders of the statue to the hand held aloft, its torch topped by a copper flame. The upper stories are set off by gardens that seem to hang in the sky.

The beauty of the design is that by rising up out of the pit, it proceeds upward from memorial to cultural to retail to office uses. And so the business end of the new structure appears conceptually at the other end of a vertical spectrum that is grounded in the memorial. "I don't think there's a disjunct there," he said.

Mr. Libeskind is no stranger to reconciling paradoxes. Although he's an expatriate who moved to Berlin a decade ago, his design is packed with patriotic gestures-the tower is exactly 1,776 feet tall. Mr. Libeskind is the son of Holocaust survivors, and yet he has aided in the rebuilding of Berlin with his design for the Jewish Museum there. He is a world-class architect, and yet he once supported his family by playing the accordion.

The greatest weapon Mr. Libeskind may have is his life story, which has taught him how to use architecture to heal the wounds of loss while simultaneously keeping the past alive, to preserve historical memory and connect it with the practical needs of the future. As the structures he proposes morph from a memorial at the bottom into a business center and a garden at the top, it moves in space up out of loss and into a world of day-to-day business decisions, from loss to normalcy, which is where New York hopes to move as we go forward in time.

A month ago, it would have been impossible to predict that Mr. Libeskind would emerge as the front-runner. When he first unveiled his design in December, the instant polls in CNN, the Daily News and the New York Post gave it roughly third or fourth place in the field of designs presented by seven contending architectural firms.

But in the month since, Mr. Libeskind has slowly maneuvered his way to the front of the pack, by making a series of subtle political alliances, working to make his plan accessible to everyone who will listen, and making constant efforts to deepen his emotional connection to the families. He has met with developer Larry Silverstein, who owned the lease on the site, to discuss the compatibility of his plans with the developer's needs. He has fielded over 300 phone calls and e-mails from families who lost loved ones in the attack. He has pitched his plan on television and on the radio. He has worked with engineers at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the site, to discuss the feasibility of grounding the design in "the bathtub." With his particular brand of almost self-deprecating politesse, Mr. Libeskind has emerged, in the words of New Yorker architecture critic Paul Goldberger, as "the most likely figure to pull together the conflicting constituencies" that have a stake in Ground Zero.

In a trade that's dominated by ego-driven builders who often seek to impose their vision on city dwellers, Mr. Libeskind is acutely focused on pleasing New Yorkers, many of whom are inordinately focused on this emotionally fraught project.

"It's extremely unusual for New York that [Ground Zero] is not just being planned in a back room," he said. "Every New Yorker that has eyes and a soul has been rooted to that spot."

"His plan has a sensitivity to the memorialization process," said Pratt Institute architect Ron Shiffman, a co-founder of New York New Visions, a coalition of 21 architecture, planning and design firms that has lately been critical of the rebuilding process.

"It shows that you can have a strong place for remembrance and still deal with the enormous logistical and commercial needs," Mr. Shiffman continued. "And my guess is that this has led to communication between various poles in the rebuilding process."

Mr. Shiffman noted that when another civic group watching the rebuilding efforts, Imagine New York, printed nine principles for the rebuilding effort and distributed them to architects working on Ground Zero proposals, only Mr. Libeskind responded, requesting meetings with representatives from all the group's constituencies. "He has the ability to engage New Yorkers of all stripes," Mr. Shiffman said.

That's exactly what needs to be done, and fast. The turf war between the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation continues to cloud the project. And time is running out. LMDC planner Alex Garvin and the Port Authority's own separately hired architect, Stanton Eckstut, are now facing a February deadline to choose one of the proposals. Whichever architect wins will work with Mr. Garvin and Mr. Eckstut, as well as a welter of other conflicting interests, to reach a final design and oversee the building of it. (Mr. Libeskind's design for the site, in a characteristic move, also allows other architects to design some of the buildings in later phases of the redevelopment.)

Mr. Libeskind is exactly the sort of diplomat this job needs. "It's important to me as an architect to communicate with the public, to engage with the public and answer their questions," he said. "I'm not a cynic and I'm not a skeptic. I believe in the civic process, and I have faith in it. There has to be a line of integrity through the whole project."

Mr. Libeskind's political skills have reassured many of the power brokers involved in the process. "I think we're focused on design, but character is something to take a look at," said one source close to the decision-making process. "It's not going to drive it, but certainly you have to be concerned with who you're working with."

When he was young, Mr. Libeskind supported his family by playing the accordion, through concerts and scholarships won grinding away on that ungainly instrument. He and his family put their savings together and emigrated from Communist Poland to Israel, and then New York in 1960. Mr. Libeskind is probably one of the last immigrants to see the Statue of Liberty from the deck of the ship that brought him to the New World.

"I have never forgotten that sight or what it stands for," he said. "This is what this project is all about."

Once in New York, he continued to play the accordion. Isaac Stern instructed him to move on to piano, saying he'd winded the bellows of the accordion already after he gave a performance at Carnegie Hall. He attended the Bronx High School of Science and Cooper Union, where he learned to be an architect.

"We saw [the World Trade Center] being built when I was in architecture school," Mr. Libeskind remembered. It was not, at the time, an altogether popular project with the students there.

His own relatively successful career in architecture didn't earn him a significant international reputation-until he was chosen to design the Jewish Museum in Berlin. A controversial project, the museum was more than 10 years in the making, and the New Yorker decided to move his operations to Berlin to participate in the civic debate that accompanied the development of the museum. The move earned him enmity from many of his closest Jewish friends and relatives, who had also emigrated from Europe to New York.

"I was almost disowned by my family," he said. "This was not a place we wanted to go back to."

As the museum neared completion, however, his father forgave him. Visiting him in Berlin, his father told him, "You did the right thing."

The museum opened on Sept. 9, 2001.

Two days later, his American cohort in Berlin was marooned in Europe, with international flights to New York canceled in the wake of the Sept. 11 terror attacks. Mr. Libeskind and his kin sat around the television, watching and wondering. As the cameras swept over the harbor, depicting that unforgettable image of the two towers ejecting a steady plume of smoke eastward over the city, the Statue of Liberty was often foregrounded-just as it was when he arrived by ship decades earlier, and just as it is in the soaring spire that will be built if his proposal carries the day.

Mr. Libeskind decided to try to design the new building in part because his brother-in-law worked for the Port Authority for 15 years. But he also saw his work on the Jewish Museum in Berlin and on the World Trade Center site as part of a single, larger mission.

"You can't just rest," he said, both of Europe after Auschwitz and New York after Sept. 11. "You have to assert your vigor in the face of attack, and also your optimism."

Mr. Libeskind began paying visits to Ground Zero-"to listen to the voices there," as he put it.

"When I went down to Ground Zero, and when I stood 70 feet below the bedrock and saw those walls, those foundations, continue to support and function, I said, 'You know, that's really what draws together life and the memory and the sacred space of that site'," he said when presenting his plan last month.

Mr. Libeskind's proposal to ground the memorial in the bare slurry walls of "the bathtub" met a burst of early skepticism. One report characterized grieving families as upset with the idea: too depressing, too reminiscent of death. But that report was followed by tearful and apologetic phone calls to Mr. Libeskind's Berlin studio, and a dialogue with family members about the memorial was underway.

Little by little, the subtle touches of the plan began to be appreciated. For instance, each Sept. 11, the sun will strike the site between 8:46 a.m. and 10:18 a.m. in such a way that light will bathe the pit where the towers stood.

"The bathtub" would also be visible from above, from a curving promenade that would give access to a museum and then, sweeping up first the northern and then the eastern sides of the site, would cross through commercial buildings, including the tower with the garden in the spire-which, at 1,776 feet, would be the world's tallest building.

The dead of Ground Zero are memorialized even in the pavement, where the names of the rescue companies that responded to the attacks will be inscribed, drawn at angles from the center of "the bathtub" out in the direction of their various firehouses and headquarters.

"I didn't design a memorial. But the question is how to integrate a memorial," Mr. Libeskind said, reflecting the broadly held opinion among victims' families that the memorial should be central to any site design. "[This design] goes all the way down to the bedrock. At the same time, I protect the site with the cultural institutions. What is on the street has to be lively and entertaining, and not just make these things contradictory."

Of course, even if Mr. Garvin and Mr. Eckstut decide to work with Mr. Libeskind's plan for the site, the memorial portion is likely to look different. An international competition to design the memorial portion inside of the site plan that's selected next month will begin in the spring, and yet another designer will be brought to the table then.

Mr. Garvin has acknowledged his esteem for Mr. Libeskind. In the fall, when a team was selected by the LMDC to vet architects who wanted to submit plans for this latest round, the effort was led by architect Billie Tsien and Chelsea Piers developer Roland Betts. Mr. Garvin reportedly wanted Mr. Libeskind to join that panel after tracking him down at the Venice Biennale for architecture, and Mr. Libeskind accepted; his firm had already been thinking hard about the site, but he didn't expect to be one of the architects selected by the panel, so he joined.

But when he couldn't make the first meeting, he submitted his credentials and was selected. The committee was impressed not just with Mr. Libeskind's design work, but also because of his constant and public involvement over the course of 12 years in the glacial process that brought the Jewish Museum in Berlin into being. It's a kind of atmosphere that Mr. Libeskind professes to thrive in.

While architects were free to dip down to as little as six million square feet of office space-a bit more than half of what the Port Authority lost in the Sept. 11 attack-few of the architects skimped on office space. Mr. Libeskind's plan, like some of the others, is more sympathetic to the economic realities of the site than one would expect from an artist.

"We can't do two 110-story buildings with giant floorplates, because I think it's unrealistic," Mr. Libeskind said. "But I certainly believe that we should have a higher point that resolves the skyline … and it has to be economically viable! Some say, 'This is all public money-this should be all about public space.' But it isn't!"

Since his main personal connection to the site is through the Port Authority, he is also sympathetic to the losses of the agency, as well as those of Larry Silverstein, whose company will have to struggle with rent payments to the Port Authority without deriving any income from the site until it's rebuilt-a commitment Mr. Libeskind said he admired.

"A very kind man," Mr. Libeskind said of Mr. Silverstein. "It's sort of a coalition of interests we are talking about, and we've had a sympathetic greeting from everyone. It's been very gratifying.