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Good morning. How are you?

Thanks for joining us this morning.

Bright sunny skies,

65 degrees at 7:00 in the morning.

And sunny and pleasant for the rest of the day.

80 degrees.

It's kind of a guilty pleasure,

as beautiful as this weather is going to be.

That's the news for now.

Thanks so much for watching.

Have a good morning, everyone.

I'm Diana Williams.

And I'm Bill Ritter.

All of us here, Sam, Scott

and Denver the entire team.

Have a great morning.

What I remember most of all

is how incredibly beautiful the weather was.

It was a beautiful, beautiful day.

You know, crystal clear blue

wasn't a cloud in the sky.

There was something so peaceful about the city.

You know, he was so excited

to go to work on 9/11

because he was taking his last sailing class.

Kiss me, goodbye, I love you.

And then, you know, I went back to sleep.

Good morning. On this Tuesday, September 11th,

- I'm Michael Palmer. - And I'm Lisa Hill.

Of course, it's primary day today.

CBS2 has live coverage

on what you need to know about the candidates

before you go out and vote.

Democratic front runners are Fernando Ferrer

and Mark Green.

I had moved to New York about two weeks prior.

And I was helping to staff a hotline for voters.

I got there at 8:30.

I had just come out of the voting booth.

I remember I just voted for Mark Green.

I was downtown

about a block and a half

I was getting out of my car

when the first plane hit it.

Ran to the window, saw this huge fireball.

And then I remember the sparkles in the sky.

Glass or paper.

I don't know what it was, but it was the explosion

was catching the light

and there was just sparkles in the sky.

We want to tell you what we know as we know it.

We just got a report in

that there's been some sort of explosion

at the World Trade Center in New York City.

We don't know anything about

what they have concluded

happened there this morning.

I was on the 78th floor of the south tower.

I felt a little vibration and I saw papers flying.

I thought the air conditioner blew out.

I went back to my desk.

I called my wife, said,

listen, something happened in tower one.

It was hit by a plane or something.

And she goes,

What? The moron didn't see the building?

And I said, listen, I can't talk to you now.

And she goes, whatever and hangs up on me.

I went straight to the elevators,

doors opened up, looked like a war zone outside.

You know, he calls me right before 9:00

and I'm like, what's going on?

He said, just turn on the TV.

I'm like, okay.

And I turn on the TV.

And that's when I see the big gaping hole.

This just in.

You are looking at obviously a very disturbing live shot there.

That is the World Trade Center.

There is a major incident in lower Manhattan.

Just a few moments ago, something

believed to be a plane crashed into the South Tower

of the World Trade Center.

We have no idea what it was.

It was a tremendous boom.

A gigantic sonic boom.

We were setting up TVs in the conference room

and everyone was standing around watching.

So he calls me back.

They said to stay where we are

and we're safe here.

We're not leaving the building

because it's safer in the building.

Call the family and friends and let them know

I'm okay. Everything is fine.

He said, I gotta go.

People are jumping out of the windows

and I'm like, okay, and he hung up.

I remember one of my colleagues said,

you know, what was that?

It's like somebody push a desk out the window.

And I said, no, I think it was a person who jumped.

Then all of a sudden I see this thing

and I'm like, what's that thing?

Oh my God, that's like a jumbo jet.

The TV went out a split second before we heard it.

Oh my God!

Oh my God!

Another plane has just hit.

Another one just hit.

Oh my God.

The loudest bang of thunder.

It was unimaginably loud.

Did I just see that?

You can't even believe what you're watching.

I never saw it. I was too close to it, I felt it.

Seventy floors down.

My husband came to the door and he said,

Juanita, another plane just hit the other tower

and my heart sank.

Something completely different was going on.

We knew it was an attack on this country.

We were under attack and had to spring into action right away.

Call up the National Guard.

Put in place our emergency procedures.

I talked to Mayor Giuliani,

let him know that I was in the city

and that I was going to be staying in the city

and anything he needed to get ahold of me,

I called President Bush, spoke to him.

We didn't know what might happen next.

So people should remain calm.

They should remain where they are.

What do we know right now?

Is it two airplanes struck the two large towers

of the World Trade Center.

We spoke to the White House.

There also apparently was an attack on the Pentagon.

We asked that the airspace around the city of New York

be sealed by military aircraft.

We've been informed that it has been

and we've seen military aircraft over the air.

So...

Downtown, you would hear loud jets

going ahead and you would think it's another plane coming in.

People were scared.

Across the entire country right now,

the FAA announced just a short time ago.

Again, all airports are shut down.

Some people were quite fearful

that it was an all out attack on the United States.

This is war. There's no question about it.

This is deliberate attacks.

So that's when the nightmare begins.

I'm on the 83rd floor.

Am I going to die?

No no no no no no.

I'm going to die.

Ma'am, ma'am, say your prayers.

You gotta help people to get off the floor.

Now...

I am going to die...

Let's go to the Trade Tower again.

Because, John, we now have a...

What do we have?

We don't...

It looks like a new plume.

A new large plume of smoke.

Oh my God.

Oh my God.

We're not sure exactly what happened,

but there was another explosion.

On the far side of one of the buildings from where we're standing.

The reverberation and another explosion

on the right hand side.

And. I can't. I'll tell you that. I can't see that second tower.

But there was a cascade of sparks and fire,

and now it looks almost like a mushroom cloud.

What is behind it?

Which I cannot tell you.

Perhaps the second tower.

The front tower, the top portion of which is collapsing.

Oh, there it goes, there it goes, there it goes, there it goes.

They seem to have the problem at the north tower.

Oh my God.

There are no words.

America offer a prayer.

One has to assume that thousands of lives have been extinguished.

I was a reporter at the New York Times.

We watched the towers collapse on TV in the newsroom.

Then they sent me to a hospital.

The feeling was that they were going to be a lot of people

coming to the hospital.

One thing I remember was people lining up to give blood,

but they didn't need it

because there were not people who survived.

There were people who were either dead,

or there were people who got out of the buildings before they collapsed.

It was a horrible day.

A horrible, horrible day.

I spent the rest of the day trying to get home to my family in Manhattan,

which was not easy because the mayor had closed

all the tunnels and the subways, the bridges.

And ultimately I walked.

I think a group of us in the office who lived in Brooklyn decided,

okay, let's walk together

and we're on this migration across the bridge

and, you know, huge numbers of people largely in silence.

I mean, New York, you're all aware of how loud it is all the time

when it goes quiet.

People who had never met each other

had very little in common,

found that we had a lot in common

just by the experience of being New Yorkers on that day.

I think that was the day I became a New Yorker.

We're here on the corner of 26 and Lexington

with Governor George Pataki

just saw him hugging people

who are looking for their family members,

tears in his eyes.

What can you say to people here?

They're not alone.

The people of New York are with them.

The people of America are with them.

We continue to make the search and rescue

effort the highest priority.

We're doing everything we can,

and thousands of people are helping right now.

And millions and millions are praying right now.

I remember going out at night

because I couldn't sleep,

and I ended up at Washington Square Park

and there, you know, late at night,

2 or 3 in the morning,

there were a few people standing around that fountain.

And then off the park, that circular fountain,

and there were candles there, and there was no speech.

There was no ceremony, but there were just people standing together.

And I remember walking up to the edge of that fountain

and standing next to a stranger

and off-set and just feeling a sense of connection

that was almost redemptive.

I felt like I belonged to New York.

Anywhere you went, there were these reminders of the loss of life.

The smoke and matter coming from the tower.

It was unavoidable.

Horrible, acrid smell.

Like fire, but with like a sourness.

And that includes lives.

There are bodies and not just metal, but bodies.

So we had tasted it.

Drove to the train station and it was empty,

except for a smattering of cars.

And I thought, okay, these are cars.

These people are not coming home again.

The memorials started immediately.

Our Eyewitness News man was parked here last night.

This is mobile three parked here last night.

And somebody asked us, could they put a picture on the windshield?

As you can see, it started on the windshield.

It has now worked its way down the hood of the car

and all the way down to the front of the bumper.

Everywhere you went, there were memorials.

People would just put up pictures of loved ones,

just wondering where they were.

They were everywhere.

People would spend hours walking through those

areas of the city where the memorials popped up.

They were a combination of grief and hope.

There was still hope in that, and that made it even more sad.

And you knew those people weren't coming home.

Many, if not most of those who were lost there,

their remains were never really found.

You expect that bodies would be found.

And that did not happen because they were cremated in the rubble.

It was 3000 bodies incinerated in this hole,

and there were 3,000+ people waiting to get some kind of closure.

There's no closure if you have no body.

A quarter of us still don't have remains.

I have nothing, nothing.

Nothing of him. Not even ID, a ring.

Nothing. Zero.

There started to be a sense of

we have to harness this.

We have to put this into something.

We have to do something.

We can't just all sit here and be sad.

I mean, after the debris would be cleared

and the bodies recovered and buried, we had a city to rebuild.

We at Regional Plan Association received boxes and boxes

of unsolicited letters and proposals and drawings.

They came from all over the world.

Ideas for how to rebuild.

Some ideas that were preposterous.

I remember like

Massive sculptures, you know,

picture like a giant winged dove,

a wooden binder with a snake inside it

representing the original colonies.

Impractical but heartfelt.

Let me hold it.

I'll just hold this.

Oh. Thank you.

You're welcome.

Here. This is going well.

That's going all together.

Can I ask you to not make this...

No, wait a minute.

Too...

extensive representation?

Thousands of people wanted to be involved.

Just an incredible outpouring of professionals.

Civic activists and regular people

who had proposals for how rebuilding could be a tribute

to the people who had died there.

This is an amazing opportunity.

We should channel our rage and sadness and creativity

into building something better than what we had there.

People were coming in from the earliest days

with dioramas that would illustrate what the memorial should look like.

People were brought together wanting to respond to the tragedy,

but response meant many things to many different people.

We would get letters from around the world.

It wasn't just their perspectives on the site.

You started realizing, it's their hopes and dreams for the site.

So, you know, grade school children are

professional architects, professional designers.

Everybody suddenly had an idea.

Should there be two towers linked by a gigantic bridge?

Should we go up even higher?

Should we put a symbolic height on it?

There was a group of people who were absolutely...

You couldn't convince them otherwise

that the World Trade Center towers needed to be rebuilt as they were.

You know, stick by stick.

Beam by beam.

It should be exactly as it was.

Some people were very concerned about housing.

People who said we should have nothing but affordable housing

for very low income people.

There were others who said we should have free housing

for the families of those who were lost.

There should be a university there.

Museums. Cultural use.

There were people who felt we have to build some bold statement

of architecture that reaches back up into that sky,

maybe even taller than the Twin Towers.

This is still a commercial center.

That was a very strong voice that came out of Chinatown

where people were saying, like, look, we live here.

This is where we do our business.

We can't turn this into a memorial.

We've got to reopen the streets.

We've got to get access to our means of making a living and feeding our family.

Prominent people saying we shouldn't build anything.

Others... a stadium, actually,

and these are not just fringe ideas.

We had plenty of those.

These are from people with some influence.

You could see very early on that it was all going in a thousand different directions.

It was initially unclear who was going to be in charge

of the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site.

It was the most complex site you can imagine.

It was owned by the Port Authority and it's

a bi-state New York, New Jersey organization.

One of the most dramatic events in New York City in the 1960s

was the construction of the World Trade Center.

The MTA, with its subways, had thruway through the whole thing.

The PATH tubes had a train station

and a train track running around the entire site.

The towers had been purchased by a private developer.

It was just an incredibly complex site.

And overall that you were in a crime scene, a burial ground,

the largest terrorist attack on the United States.

There was an enormous concern about the lack of coordination.

You're going to hear me say that again about the utility replacements.

All utilities, transportation, telecommunications, electric and water.

Concern about need for competition, lower prices.

Who's going to pay for all of this stuff?

Larry Silverstein.

You know, he had bought the rights to the World Trade Center lease

just three months before 9/11.

He had a $3.5 billion insurance policy.

It was clear early on that the funding for what was going to be done

was Larry Silverstein and the insurance proceeds.

He initially said we should rebuild the towers as they were.

We have to rebuild it.

And he pulled out these charts.

Larry Silverstein said,

look, I have an obligation here.

There's what people want and there's how people feel.

And then there's what I signed a piece of paper saying I am obligated to do.

And what he was obligated to do was get that thing rebuilt

and leased out all over again,

foot by foot and dollar by dollar.

He had to try and replace the World Trade Center.

He was trying to fulfill his legal obligations at a time

when people didn't want to hear about legal obligations,

where this was an attack on the United States,

the United States arguably was at war.

There was a whole different set of discussions going on.

And then here comes Larry Silverstein wanting to talk about money.

Should we build a structure on that site?

Well, I believe we should.

Larry Silverstein says that rebuilding would deny terrorists

the victory they sought.

When we come back, thousands of reserves...

When Larry entered into the lease for the site prior to 9/11,

he didn't realize that what he had really bought

was really a civic site.

And there was resentment

that a private developer would have a degree of control

over a civic site,

with some members leaving the site being paid for by blood.

Tonight, we welcome two leaders who embody the extraordinary spirit

of all New Yorkers.

Governor George Pataki and Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.

As a symbol of America's resolve

my administration will work with Congress

and these two leaders to show the world

that we will rebuild New York City.

There was going to be federal funding coming in,

but it wasn't clear where that federal funding should go.

I mean, I don't want to inject politics into this,

but what happened was Mayor Giuliani,

who was mayor at the time, and I sat down and said,

Okay, we want these funds to be used in the right way.

We have Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer as our senators.

If, as is likely, a Democratic mayor will win the next election,

they're going to cut the state out.

So we sat down and said, we're going to create a new organization,

a new entity, to receive those 20 billion.

Ladies and gentlemen, let me call to order

the meeting of the directors of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation

for Friday, January 25th, 2002.

Thank you for being here at this early hour.

The redevelopment and reconstruction of Lower Manhattan.

That was the mission.

Mr. White... but you don't have any public hearings.

So who are you listening to?

We're forming these advisory groups.

I was writing a story a day.

The biggest hurdle in the beginning was really about making sure

that there would still be a downtown to redevelop.

There was absolutely a fear that this was the end of New York.

There were people who thought 9/11 was going to be a death blow

to New York City,

that it would never come back.

People would never go up into tall buildings again.

Because New York was clearly a target for terrorism.

Maybe it wasn't safe to be here

and that businesses and families would accordingly make a decision to leave.

People were all going to be moving out.

We'd never get anybody else back downtown.

So you would have a ghost downtown.

This is New York City.

It's not an easy place to get things done.

There is a lot of power,

a lot of competing power, competing interests.

Things can take a long time to happen in New York.

It would be good for the public to realize that

it does take a long time.

And so there was a real kind of concern

that if the rebuilding takes a long time,

it's going to be very damaging to the city

and make it more likely that people will never come back.

So Silverstein was trying to move quickly.

Essentially replacing the commercial space, plus a memorial.

That's what it felt like.

We're beginning to develop a plan and looking at...

We wanted to start off with

what should we do?

What's the right thing to do with the World Trade Center space?

And how do we create an open and democratic

conversation around what should be done?

How do you respond to this terrorist attack?

You respond to an attack on democracy by showing democracy.

Ladies and gentlemen, if I could ask you all to sit down

and take your places and to settle down.

We'll get our meeting started.

We're here to listen.

There's no good or bad ideas.

Ideas might be different,

but I think we're all united in our purpose to rebuild.

They knew that they needed public input

and that they needed to engage the public in creating the plan.

They wanted to do that.

They genuinely did,

and they weren't sure exactly how to do it.

To have a public meeting about urban planning,

where the outcome was so enormous,

where the subject being considered was so large,

had never been tried before.

The LMDC set up a series of public hearings.

I went to several of them and testified,

and those things weren't great.

I remember going to a meeting and

it was a typical New York kind of community meeting

where somebody says something a little wacky

and somebody gets up and says something very serious,

and somebody gets up and starts reading a statement.

There was a woman there who had a framed photograph of her son,

and she stood up, holding it over her head

for the entire meeting wordlessly.

When I saw that woman that night, I remember thinking, uh oh,

this is going to be a really hard discussion.

In those early days, it's hard for me to think about a meeting

in which it wasn't contentious.

Once we were living in the red zone,

The small businesses there are just devastated.

They have not included Chinatown as part of the rebuilding effort.

I also like the idea of the towers of light,

possibly something with colored lasers.

Affordable food markets.

The fires are still burning at the site.

Lead, cadmium, benzene, PCBs, mercury

in their ventilation systems.

It was not normality that we returned to.

It was a toxic diet.

We talk about money.

You can print all the money you want,

but there's no value on a person's life.

Stand up with us. Go to war.

War for the future of New York.

Re-erect the World Trade Center towers.

As tall as we can.

Those towers are gone.

They're done.

The reason they are not here is because they represented dollar signs.

The idea of rebuilding and pretending that it didn't happen.

It did happen.

They can do it.

They did do it.

It's time to rebuild those towers.

We as Americans are not afraid.

No terrorists will come here and knock down our buildings

and tell us how we're going to live.

How can we sit here and talk about rebuilding

on all those lives that will sacrifice?

They went to work.

These meetings are exhausting.

It's exhausting, truly draining.

It's very upsetting to hear some of the comments made.

And my son asks me every day when the Borders is going to be rebuilt.

Why are we thinking about bookstores?

Her son keeps asking her,

Mommy, when is Borders Bookstore coming back?

And you're going to have all these children

and more 10,000 children asking,

Mommy, when is daddy coming back?

And that answer is never.

You start raising all of these questions.

You start to realize democracy is very messy.

People's interests are very different,

and if you're not ready to process that,

it starts to look like maybe not such a good idea.

We love the notion that if you're walking down the street,

there'll be somebody who's, you know,

a Wall Street broker next to a tattoo artist, right?

But do they ever actually talk?

Do they ever actually talk about something important?

Do they ever talk about something important

and try and get to a common decision about what should be done?

That almost never happens.

It's New York.

People aren't afraid to express themselves.

And I got a little crazy.

I was going to change my self defenses.

I had nothing to live for.

I didn't have a child.

He was my soulmate.

We were just newly married.

I'm young, I don't care.

You can build right over me. I'm fine with that.

You're not building over my dead husband, I'm sorry.

Then the next thing you know, it took off.

The sound bite took off.

I'm not gonna build up with dead people.

It felt sometimes like it was a Gordian knot

that we were never, ever going to resolve.

There were so many different viewpoints.

It felt overwhelming.

You had this just completely impassive line of public officials

sitting up on the stage with stone faces.

They would not say anything, but they would just listen.

And for hours and hours

and hours and hours and hours,

New Yorkers come and say their piece

and then they leave.

And then nothing happens.

None of it was very productive or helpful.

I don't think.

It was horrible.

I mean, it was just a horrible model for public input,

encouraged grandstanding.

People would root and applaud for

Statements that they agreed with.

And it was very like

us and them.

It doesn't really change anything.

And yet here we are.

You know, for over 50 years,

we've been using this broken model

to try and determine what the public wants more

when we are making decisions.

This is what we have.

And this sucks.

We can do it better.

We can do something different.

And one day I was talking to one of my colleagues

about how do we do this?

And she said, talk to Carolyn Lukensmeyer.

One of the gifts of American democracy to the world

was the philosophy of self-governance.

And in our New England states,

we still do pretty well at those town meetings.

We also know that sometimes, even in those town meetings,

one person dominates.

Only the usual suspects show up.

So one of the things we've tried to do in America Speaks

is to take the spirit of the town meeting

and revitalize it in terms of Jefferson's intent,

which is it is truly an equal level playing field for all voices.

I said, absolutely, we would be happy to help.

You know, because of its New York

and because, you know, there are 5 boroughs and 8 million people in New York.

You know, this had to be big.

And we came up with an agreement

that we would invite 5,000 New Yorkers.

My job was to come out with some serious recommendations

about what should be rebuilt in Lower Manhattan.

It wasn't just saying,

Hey, do you like this?

It was really fundamentally asking people,

What did they want to do?

It was intriguing as an idea, but we certainly had our doubts.

We knew it was a hard sell when we started.

No one had ever looked at a planning effort

at this level of civic engagement.

It was hard to conceive how this would work.

It's not how we normally do things, right?

It's not how things are done.

Never, ever had been done before.

Ever.

And of course, never before.

Really, you know, in modern history

had there been an event that the entire world

was paying so much attention to,

and that the process of urban planning

was going to have so much symbolic,

cultural and political importance.

So moving on now to the discussion of a town meeting

or meetings in mid-summer

to promote citizen involvement in the planning process.

Thank you, Chairman Whitehead.

Delighted to join you for a few moments this morning.

The first reaction from government officials was,

Well, wait a minute, how are we going to keep control of this

if we just kind of open it up to everybody?

The idea of giving up that degree of control

really, really scared them.

To me, it was like a leap into the great unknown.

I didn't know what was going to happen.

I didn't know if there would be like fistfights

at the event or screaming denunciations,

or if people were going to just retreat

into their separate corners.

It was completely contrary

to nearly the entire history of development in New York City

up to that point.

This is the city that Robert Moses built.

Robert Moses has been praised as the man

who got things done,

and damned as the man who didn't care what it took to get them done.

Now I ask you, what was that neighborhood?

It was a Puerto Rican slum.

Do you remember it?

No, I don't.

Yeah, well, I lived on one of those streets there for a number of years,

and I know exactly what it was like.

It was the worst slum in New York.

Do you want to leave it there? Why?

To do kind of a neighborhood business?

Well, Christ, you never could have been there.

It was the worst slum in New York.

We cleared it out.

Now, we spent all...

The development work that Robert Moses did in this city,

there was no civic input except for public protests.

We realized that we had to kind of start this process

and begin to demonstrate its efficacy

and not go for the big event right away.

Before the big one in the summer,

we had this smaller one at South Street Seaport,

which was a kind of proof of concept.

Lisa Colagrossi is at the South Street Seaport with details.

- Good afternoon, Lisa. - Good afternoon, Steve.

It's really a meeting of the minds,

there are about 600 people meeting inside at pier 17

as part of the Civic Alliance to rebuild downtown New York.

The alliance is made up of about 100 groups

that are using their expertise and experience

to help rebuild Lower Manhattan.

A very key component of this process is the public's input.

What you are about to do this morning

is most difficult of all

because indeed, it's not just about Listening to the City,

it's about listening to each other.

I've had 16 years of experience in representative democracy.

I know how difficult it is to make it work.

That was a real turning point,

because it proved to all the powers

that be that this was not going to be

unruly mob action.

It was going to be a very deliberative exercise in democracy.

What was interesting about the proof of concept.

We did that and we thought,

Oh, we got this all figured out,

and we had no clue.

It was, oh boy,

and now we have to pull it off

and pull it off in a relatively short period of time.

For the next four months,

you're going to do nothing but live, breathe and eat.

And Listening to the City.

It was the big time, and I was doing a lot of the legwork.

And I was 21 years old and just out of college.

So we were, you know, faking it till we made it.

You know, we were,

we were betting the farm on this.

It was a huge logistical nightmare.

I was responsible for getting 5,000 people into the room.

And we had never gotten 5,000 people

to go to a spot on a Saturday

in the summer in New York.

5,000 people.

You don't know them.

They don't know you.

They don't know each other.

You work in a very dedicated, very structured way

to ensure you got all the stakeholders.

You have a demographic that represents all folks involved.

We set up a hotline.

Like a phone number, the translation service

for the hotline.

Our flyer was translated into Mandarin.

Recruiting.

There was the public affairs and media messaging.

There was outreach to the elected officials.

There was a huge outreach for volunteers.

You had to have facilitators at each table.

And then you say,

Okay, we got to get these folks ready for this big conversation

we're going to have.

So you have another team that's building a participants guide,

that's building all the facts,

that's doing all the research

so that there's this guide

that people have in hand

so that when they get there, they're informed

to have these productive conversations at these tables.

What are we going to share with people

when are we going to share it with them

for them to react to?

How much pre-work do we give people

and then what happens in the room?

So you have to have all the technology working perfectly.

Lighting and audio visual.

It was a huge undertaking.

I mean, honestly, the week leading up to it,

it was like late nights

because everything had to be done on just a really tight budget.

In the lead up, I was interviewed by TV stations

in the UK, in Hungary, Japan.

Worldwide interest in this.

And like anybody throwing a party, you wonder,

Oh gee, I hope a lot of people show up.

Thousands of people will help decide the future of Ground Zero tomorrow.

A cross-section of some 5,000 New Yorkers

will discuss six redevelopment plans

for the former World Trade Center site.

The group has been invited to attend a town hall meeting

that will happen at the Javits Center.

The nightmare scenario is walking in, in the morning.

The press are there, the TV cameras are there

and be a half empty room.

It had rained the night before

and there were buckets everywhere to catch the leaks.

That was kind of shocking that we had to deal

with water coming through the roof.

We had a day to get in

and the get go,

it seemed like we were behind schedule.

And how in the world are we going to make this?

There was 500 tables.

We weren't anywhere close to meeting the deadlines

to be ready for the morning.

It was delay in the union running power to the...

Oh, I don't know if I should throw the union under this.

When we were half set up,

all the union guys went home.

We all individually went into just

this kind of zen like,

do the next thing,

just do the next thing,

test the next system,

do the next thing,

do the next thing all night long.

Problems.

Debugging.

at 2 AM, at 4 AM, at 6 AM, at 8 AM,

we're still doing the same thing.

And then the doors open and then people started filling the room.

The Javits Center is huge.

It is huge.

It was like being in an airport.

It was just mind blowing how many people had descended.

It was frightening.

Total craziness to see that many people.

It took your breath away.

I remember going there and being really annoyed

because they got the name wrong on the sign outside of the Javits Center

on the electronic like billboard,

it said, listening to the cities, plural.

I was really annoyed.

I remember being like, come on, guys, this is the wrong name.

I remember walking in, just a huge room, tons of tables.

I don't think we knew just how powerful it would be.

The events of 9/11

call us all to action,

to strengthen the voice of free people here

and free people all around the globe.

She's a force of nature.

Carolyn Lukensmeyer has such charisma.

She indeed commands the room.

There are a lot of people who can talk a big game,

but she delivered.

You know, Carolyne Lucasmeyer got on that stage and said hello!

And it really felt like a wow moment.

Hopefully what we do here today

will be one more step

on the long road of healing

that has impacted us deeply as individuals

and deeply as our collective community.

Three weeks ago, we put out a request

for professional facilitators from around the country

to give of service to the New York City region.

In fact, are you listening?

In fact, all 50 states are represented here,

including Alaska and Hawaii.

We have people who found this on the internet

and joined us spontaneously from six other countries.

From Afghanistan.

From Australia.

And then we were just off to the races.

At the end of each round of discussion.

Your volunteer will tap into the computer

exactly the ideas that your team has pulled together.

Those ideas are all collected into a central computer

and go to the theme team.

And at the theme team,

we have 12 neutral, excellent analysts

who will read every idea that comes to the computer today.

Summarize it and put it back up on the big screens

for all of you to see.

Then we go back to the fundamental unit of democracy.

These are the pads that we'll be using for you

to express your preferences about the sites.

So much of the power of Listening to the City

was who was in the room.

From the stage, Carolyn asked everybody,

where are you from?

What's your age? What's your demographic?

Press one, if your household income is $25,000 or less,

two if it's $25,000 to $49,999,

press three, if it's $50,000 to $74,999.

Okay, let's look at what we've got.

Okay. The New York region is just about exactly like that.

Give a round of applause for a very, very good representation

of virtually every walk of life.

Like, I remember that feeling

looking up at those big screens

and being like,

Holy cow, he did this.

And I'm getting chills

just thinking about that day

and standing there and being like,

Wow, we're all here.

This was like wizardry to everybody.

And nobody had ever done any of this before,

it seemed like a miracle that you could press a button

on a thing and then see it and see the results up on the screen.

It was kind of mind blowing.

It was very cutting edge in 2002.

This is before this cell phone revolution.

You know, fax machines were still a big deal.

And the tables were organized in a way

that there was a really good cross-section

of New Yorkers at each table.

What are the messages that 5,000+ people from the New York region

want to give in the right spirit for right action

to the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation

and to the Port Authority?

Transportation with the priorities...

One issue with...

You know, people were having conversations.

There was a constant hum of people talking.

To me, it does not address...

how, beyond getting to...

I like to see them put the towers back...

Even possibly a little bit taller than they were.

We don't want to see any commercial office space.

We don't want Tiffany's,

and we don't want fancy restaurants being built on this site.

Everybody needs their own space.

Most people hated that.

I mean, people love to hate the World Trade Towers.

All things to everyone...

Especially for the memorial.

I'm afraid it's going to be uninspired.

I think that we should have a memorial for the people who did die.

But I don't want Lower Manhattan to be a tourist graveyard.

It's going to be if you have this huge concourse and...

Just the energy.

I remember it being loud and,

you know, pencils and people are at tables and chairs moving.

And it was just there was like an electricity in the room.

You could feel it.

You could feel the power of thoughts and ideas coming.

What sets this model apart from other events?

This ability to rapidly make sense of all these conversations

that are happening in real time,

such that everyone in the room can see what we think.

They were feeding information to us,

and we were trying to compile that into statements of themes

broad enough to capture hundreds or thousands of comments,

but not so broad that they were just vague.

So what you felt was that you were at a table

with nine other ten other individuals in a huge room,

and something that somebody said at your table

was very similar to something that somebody had said at that table.

And that table.

It was such an efficient way of aggregating opinion

and presenting it back,

because that step in and of itself said

these people actually heard me

because you all of a sudden you see your words on the screen

from the conversation you had at your table,

on the screen in front of the whole room.

The point is that, that's what I said.

I said that, and now it's up on this jumbotron.

It was real excitement.

That people could be engaged,

that their voice was being heard.

You know, people were in the room who had lost loved ones.

And they were trying to express on behalf of people

who had been murdered,

what they would have wanted.

And I think people in the room felt

it's hard to say to somebody, you know,

I understand, but I feel differently.

Everyone's voice was speaking at that time

and giving their opinions.

And you had to listen.

Even if you didn't like them, you had to listen.

It was really good to hear from the people who were living down there

and what they were experiencing and how it was affecting them.

Take their opinions.

Take their concerns under consideration.

You have to hear everybody's voices.

It can't just be yours.

People were simultaneously not only expressing their view,

they were engaging with others and altering their view.

So I don't want that to get lost in this.

One of the things that made Listening to the City so interesting

and so unique in a way,

and ultimately led to a different outcome,

was the fact that people were forced to actually engage with each other.

Expressive you and hear what their table mate felt.

Democracy on display in the best way.

The drama at the meeting was really

the revelation of multiple options

for orienting a commercial program at the site.

This has been terrific.

We've been,

we pushed ourselves to get to the point

of being able to release six plans.

This Tuesday we released those six plans.

We went public with them, as you well know.

I remember seeing the Beyer Blinder Belle's designs

for the first time and thinking,

you know, is this all?

Is this all you got?

I mean, this...

Can't we do better than this?

You know, it was really one design.

Tweaked five more times to give you six.

There was nothing that said

one of the greatest tragedies on American soil took place here.

That was not evident from what you were looking at.

You were like... office park, different office park.

I thought that the plans that were being created were banal,

dull, didn't really have any ambition to them.

I think the folks working on them were so focused on the small details

of this that they were missing the big picture.

I think they hoped to get a consensus

about which themes were the best.

And so they presented the first one.

And people's responses were tepid.

I would say...

Let's go to the second one, which is referred to, entitled the Memorial Square.

Put that up, please.

Sort of a murmur and a pause,

and then they moved on to the next one.

And people were bolder in their disapproval.

And I recall at this point Bob Yarrow was moderating.

He was making some remarks like,

Oh, oh, well, don't be too harsh.

Then they moved on to the third

and sort of the momentum built with the crowd.

People were like, thumbs down,

this stinks.

So far, they don't like any of these.

Don't they like any of that right now?

Well, I got a...

I said so far they haven't liked however many they've been through.

I could walk around and I could hear it sounds like

Horrible! Insulting!

Not New York. Not American.

These were done with crayons.

I could have drawn this.

I could not give you enough negative adjectives

for how people felt about the original plans.

Because I think the memorial is the most important thing.

The Port Authority thinks that commercial space.

Silverstein thinks that commercial space,

you know, all these other

they have all these requirements.

And if you look at, look at what they require,

this is the only thing that they can do in terms of the memorial.

And we don't think it's enough.

And I think that's, that's what we're reflecting right now.

One of the comments that came directly from the table in quotation marks

that went up on the screen was

"It looks like Albany."

It was almost a pause and then a roar.

It was about as harsh an insult as you could throw.

The meeting delivered in terms of those moments of drama.

I'm sure more than the public agencies had anticipated or desired.

I was like... This...

I can't believe we did this.

For those of us at the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation

the LMDC,

We're brand new.

We weren't an agency

that had always been around and always needed to be around.

We were there for a purpose,

and if we didn't satisfy that purpose,

it was a real question as to whether we would continue.

I had expected it,

but John Whitehead had not.

He had a look on his face,

like of just shock,

and I remember him kind of standing next to John Whitehead,

wondering what he's going to think or do.

And he turns to me and he says,

I think you've just saved us a couple of years

of going in the wrong direction.

And I thought,

Wow, good for him because we have.

John Whitehead could have said,

Well, okay, we've heard the public,

but you know, we have the responsibility.

And so we're going to do x, y and z.

And he didn't.

He said, you know what,

this is what the terrorists didn't understand.

This was the epitome of democracy.

This was what what makes our country great.

He basically said, we're going to go back to work.

And that was the headline from the event.

Today is about listening,

listening to all of you.

We need to go back and consider how to turn the comments we heard today

into amendments to what we're doing.

And you...

We heard you.

We're not going to do this.

We're going to go back to the drawing board.

And no one expected that.

It was a stunning announcement.

It meant something.

And I think it gave people an outlet, I really do.

It was like.

This is serious.

We're being taken seriously.

We're gonna do something quite spontaneous at this moment.

What we want to do is open them up about a three minute period of time

for all the tables to say, what message would you like

to tap into the computers to give the planners more information

about what you wanted for the memorial treatment

that obviously isn't here?

It gave people a sense of we have a voice,

but also we have an obligation to get it right.

And we used our voice to make that happen.

I came back to the New York Times office on 43rd Street

and said, this has to be on the front page,

a new chapter completely in what was going to be done there.

My brother in law had a restaurant.

That night I went out to dinner with him and I said,

I did this thing today.

That's going to be on the front page of The New York Times tomorrow.

And they were like, Oh, good for you.

And I was like, No, no, it's... it's like...

it's going to be on the front page of every newspaper in America tomorrow.

And they looked at me like I was crazy.

There was the next day.

I think we all kind of knew that we were being part of writing history.

Looking at it, looking at the picture, looking at the tables,

looking at the media coverage and the amount of, you know,

press reports that came in,

it hit me just how big a deal it was when we had done.

Pete Hamill, who was a columnist for the Daily News.

His column started out,

So you bring 5,000 New Yorkers into the Javits Center,

and you say, what should we do in downtown Manhattan?

How should we plan for this thing?

Are you out of your mind?

Invite 5,000 New Yorkers to a meeting.

What would you expect?

Food fights, maybe even a fistfight?

But what happened was democracy.

And guess what?

It was beautiful.

New Yorkers are a famously argumentative bunch,

so it's remarkable when so many New Yorkers agree on something.

And something we're talking about are the six proposals

for rebuilding lower Manhattan down by the Trade Center.

In a nutshell, no one seems to like them very much.

Edward White is covering the planning for the site

for the New York Times, and he joins us tonight.

- Nice to have you with us. - Thank you.

And this was a pretty good smack in the face to the Port Authority, which had...

The themes that emerged were there should be a statement on the skyline.

There should be nothing built on the footprints.

No amount of money or real estate value

was worth building on those footprints.

There should be reflective open space.

There should be a serene and fitting memorial.

We learned that transportation had to be restored

so that this site could be visited from around the world.

The site needed to be more than just a development.

It needed to be a symbol.

It needed to be a representation.

The space should transcend

what was there physically.

It needed to not just be another part of Lower Manhattan.

It had to be something that had its unique markers

and unique parameters,

so that it would always and forever be noted

that this is where it happened.

Those are the lessons we learned, and that's what we did.

That public process led us to have a master site plan

and a memorial that I think people today look at and say,

Wow, how did they do this?

Well, that's how we did it.

This process is our first operating principle,

and we are now backing up words with actions.

Yesterday, under Lou Thompson's and Roland Betsy's leadership,

we demonstrated that we are indeed Listening to the City.

We've been involved.

You cannot understand the history of the recovery from 9/11

without understanding Listening to the City.

There's not an element of site that wasn't impacted by Listening to the City.

Everything was impacted by Listening to the City.

All of it really is a reflection of what Listening to the City said,

which is the site is more

the site needs to be more

and frankly, the people are going to demand that it be more.

And that carried itself through to the end.

And that's what you see today.

I would like to begin with the first proposal.

It is from Studio Daniel Libeskind from Berlin, Germany.

Thank you very much.

It's an honor to be here and to be part of this process.

I made the project Memory Foundations

because I believe it to be a memory of the day

that altered all of our lives, altered forever.

I call that foundations because...

I was totally inspired by the conversations

that were generated by the public at those meetings in New York.

A lot was written, a lot was said.

I read all of it.

That was really a program.

It wasn't what the Port Authority wrote,

it was what those people talked about.

We want this, we want that.

We don't want a memorial small, just a plaque.

We want something important here because the public didn't care really about

how does it feel to be in an office on the 30th floor or 50th floor.

The public cared about public space

because that's the gift to the city.

And I thought about actually my parents.

You know, my parents were factory workers.

My mother works in the sweatshops,

and my father right here on Stone Street as a printer.

And I said, you know, they'd never be in those offices.

They'd never be the lobbies of those office buildings.

Where would they be?

On the streets of New York, going to work,

trying to get food for their kids.

What do they get for this?

And I thought, you know, it's not a glorious fight

because nobody sees it.

Make the sidewalk, you know, two inches wider.

I mean, nobody sees it.

It appears to be completely irrelevant.

But in terms of public space, those are the fights you have.

Because every square centimeter, every square inch is expensive.

It's a piece of real estate.

Somebody can build something on it.

It's not for free.

You have to fight for it.

You don't think, oh, that's something people thought about.

But, you know, everything was contested.

The memorial that we designed is first and foremost

a public space in New York City

that brings people together to remember the past,

to bear witness to it.

And it does so by trying to make absence visible and present.

Walker, who did the park,

Calatrava with the station.

Everybody did the best.

What I like about it is not by one hand,

you know, you see the variety there.

Even the tall buildings are different from each other,

even though they are within a compositional movement.

And I liked it that it's not a project done from top down,

but from the bottom up.

And I think that's why it's real.

It's sometimes the very disorder

and the very mixed, slightly chaotic nature of our cities

that reflects democracy best.

Authoritarians, they say,

Build me something and it's built like that overnight

and everything is perfect.

And those things are hollow.

To me, there is something not real about them.

What is real about Ground Zero is that it's an expression of all the interests.

It's an expression of reality and vitality,

of often contradictory ideas of New Yorkers.

We live in a democracy and we're all part of it.

And we build these spaces and they in turn build us.

They affirm that sort of bond and sense of both individual and communal identity.

So it's not just the fact that it is an open space in an urban setting.

It also has to be a place that affirms our values and fosters them

and says, these are important and...

they are who we are.

When you look at the site today,

there's the beautiful memorial

and the sensational buildings that have been built,

starting with One World Trade Center, the Freedom Tower, and moving on.

birds chirping

There's a performing arts center celebrating the best of humanity,

a museum that tells the story of 9/11.

When you walk outside, there's a forest of trees

and there is the rumble of trains

that are still passing through the site.

If you look at all of that and you think,

that was a terrific accomplishment by the professionals involved.

That would be true.

But the remit to those artists,

the mandate to those artists,

the charge to us all was brought to us by the people,

5,000 people in a convention center

telling us how to go about this process,

telling us what to do.

The outcome matters.

But how you got there matter the hell a lot more.

I can't say how much gratitude I feel standing here.

That we were able to do what we did.

It's the most visited site in New York.

It's the most visited site in the United States.

Many millions come here.

And people even who have just heard about Ground Zero,

who don't know much about the event,

make their way here and then get some sense of connection

to the past of New York and to the future of New York.

It really showed that democracy works.

People need to be listened to.

And if you listen to the people,

they come up with good ideas.

It demonstrated the efficacy of deliberative democratic engagement,

new ways to invigorate the democratic process,

and to give people agency.

And when I think about that today,

a lot of people don't feel that they have agency in our democracy.

They don't feel that their voice or their vote really count.

Coming out of that event,

I would have thought that we were learning ways to engage people

that would lead to a more inclusive and democratic society.

And we're not.

We haven't seen anything like it since.

It's one of my, frankly, disappointments with this.

Why don't we do this more often?

The technology of democracy.

It's kind of outdated, right?

An infrastructure of deep democracy is something we should permit

some time and resources to.

There may be a need for this model more than there has ever been.

It's these kinds of modernizing innovations of democracy

that I think can renew that confidence,

renew that civic spirit, and give people agency.

When you actually tell people they have a voice,

when you tell people what they say and what they do matters,

you can be amazed at what the results can be.

I couldn't think of something more important than

that of people realizing they have a voice.

Democracy can't be one day in July,

can't be this moment in time.

It has to be an ongoing commitment to a conversation.

You don't get good democratic outcomes

unless you've had really good democratic process.

We have to do a lot of work in this country

to reignite the civic spirit from the bottom up,

and that's where the change will come.

I feel very fortunate and very proud to be an American.

I recall one of the things that de Tocqueville said about America,

that the genius of America lies not in being

more enlightened than any other country,

but rather in her ability to correct her faults.

And I believe that.

I really have a deep, abiding faith in the American people

that we will right our ship.

I would love it if people walk away thinking,

gee, we don't have to put up with the denatured kind of democracy

that we've had so far.

We don't have to listen to a bunch of people shouting at each other

over cable television, and then go cast a vote every four years.

I think people should walk away from here with an important recognition

that they matter,

and then it's worth getting involved.

I think that people don't hear that often enough now.

What they think actually matters, and it's worth getting involved.

Show them not just what happened in the towers

and what happened to those 3,000 lives.

But show them what happened afterwards

and show them that in a moment of terrible tragedy and horror

and deep, deep worry that actually citizens came together.

They found new energy with each other.

They found a way to heal together,

and they found a way to contribute to a better society.

And that, I think, is an inspiring story.

And I think it has real resonance with where we are today.

This story helps us to believe in ourselves and in our capacity.