The Battle For Ground Zero

Though it may never feel right to describe the place as clean, the cleanup of the World Trade Center site is done. What was "the Pile," a jagged mountain of knotted steel and concrete, is now a hole, a neatly squared-off, rectangular cavity of 16 gray-brown acres. On May 30, in a ceremony to be attended by thousands of recovery workers, uniformed officers and family members of the victims, an honor guard will carry a flag-draped stretcher out of the pit. With that, the search for bodily remains will effectively end. The fire fighters and construction workers who have raked through the dirt for shoes and fingers, for any last trace of the dead, are going home.

What they will leave behind is the most contested ground in America. From the moment the Trade Center fell, people everywhere, but especially New Yorkers, have had fierce opinions about what should rise in its place. In a city with more than its share of bristling constituencies, a whole collection of "stakeholders" now claim the place. One is the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the agency that built the Trade Center and still owns the site. The towers, with their 10 million sq. ft. of office space, were a crucial source of P.A. rental income that it badly needs to get flowing again. Then there are the well-organized residents of lower Manhattan, people who want their neighborhood brought back to life, but not just any which way. Plus there's Larry Silverstein, the New York City developer who was leasing the towers from the P.A. for 99 years. Silverstein is developing plans for the site too.

But so is Monica Iken. What she has in mind is "a place to heal, a place of peace." Her husband Michael was a 37-year-old bond trader who died on Sept. 11, 11 months after they were married. Shortly thereafter, she founded September's Mission, a nonprofit group dedicated to creating and sustaining a memorial. Of the 2,823 Trade Center victims, the remains of only 1,058 have been identified. Iken's husband is not one of them. "It's important that we understand that's sacred space," she says. "It's a cemetery without tombstones."

The various family groups have no real legal power over the site. What they have is an emotional hold on the public that makes them a force to be reckoned with. "We're here to make sure the business interests don't override the possibility of doing something dignified and poignant," says Marian Fontana, head of the 9/11 Widows' and Victims' Families Association. "There are ways to make the area economically viable and satisfy our needs too."

Some family members would still like the entire site reserved for a memorial. Increasingly they recognize that that's unlikely. Yet they are prepared to fight for every inch of quiet space. Silence may be the only response that can equal in power the atrocity that was Sept. 11. But in a city like New York, where commotion is everything, silence has few advocates. "We want a reflective area where people can mourn and be quiet," says Rick Bell of the American Institute of Architects. "But a district that's revitalized is also a living memorial."