Still, starting last year, Mr. Silverstein and his company began to refer to the three towers on the eastern edge of the site by their Greenwich Street addresses. While unveiling updated designs at a news conference on Sept. 6, Mr. Lieber took pains to introduce speakers in the order of the street address of the building they were working on, starting with 150 Greenwich Street (Tower 4) and working his way up, as opposed to going in order of the tower number, which would have put Tower 2 (200 Greenwich Street) first.
“‘Greenwich Street’ does not have nearly the amount of weight that ‘World Trade Center’ does,” said Petra Todorovich, a senior planner at the Regional Plan Association, which played a big role in getting part of the street grid reinstated. “Silverstein is clearly trying to establish a new identity for the buildings and not associate them with a tragic past.”
Michael Sorkin, an architect who early during the planning process advocated keeping the entire site as a memorial and public space, was neither surprised nor overly dismayed to learn of Mr. Silverstein’s rebranding attempts.
“Obviously he is going to be rebranding this to make as much money as possible. Why should we be surprised that he is maximizing his business opportunities at this site?” said Mr. Sorkin, the director of the Graduate Urban Design Program at the City College of New York. “Certainly nobody is going to fail to recognize where they are. To me, the battle was lost when they decided to replace the 10 million square feet of office space.”
But what will we be talking about when we talk about the World Trade Center in five years, when towers 1 through 4 are supposed to be finished? The office towers? The whole site west of Church Street? The memorial plaza? Or a historical idea?
In some ways, the disappearance of that name would represent a victory for the planners and neighbors who saw the destruction of the towers as a singular opportunity to undo an urban planning mistake, a giant, 16-acre plaza that was elevated and separated from the rest of the city like a castle surrounded by a moat.
Rather than two nearly identical towers designed by one architect, the new World Trade Center is all about diversity and mixed use. Five different architects are building six variously styled buildings. The Church Street sides of the lower floors of Mr. Silverstein’s office towers will be occupied by retail stores, melting into the shopping strip that now hosts Century 21 and Brooks Brothers. A performing arts center, if it ever gets built, will bring a little bit of culture into the site. And then there’s Greenwich Street, which will carry people north and south into more residential areas.
Even the eight-acre memorial quadrant, which will re-create the footprints of the twin towers, World Trade Center 1 and 2, with waterfalls, has been renamed. It is now “The National September 11 Memorial and Museum at the World Trade Center.” The change, according to Joe Daniels, president of the nonprofit organization of the same name that is raising money for it, makes it more relevant to the rest of the country. In doing so, however, the memorial’s geography is now secondary to its place in history.
Oddly enough, there is one place where the renaming seems to be going in the other direction. In July, a high-ranking administrator in the Port Authority, which still owns the 16 acres (Mr. Silverstein is just leasing), sent out an e-mail to all concerned.
The e-mail proclaimed, according to a copy obtained by The Observer, “Effective immediately references to the skyscraper being built by 1 World Trade Center LLC at the WTC site should be as follows: 1 World Trade Center, ‘the Freedom Tower.’” It seems that, no matter what value the World Trade Center brand may be losing, “Freedom Tower” is losing it faster.
