A plan for the World Trade Center site by Think includes an esplanade running from the foot of St. Paul's Chapel. Within this park, it would relocate St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church.Posted on 01/10/2003 1:15:33 PM PST by Destro
January 9, 2003
Looking for God in the Details at Ground Zero
By DAVID W. DUNLOP
A plan for the World Trade Center site by Think includes an esplanade running from the foot of St. Paul's Chapel. Within this park, it would relocate St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church.
DOES God have a place at ground zero?
This is not a metaphysical inquiry but a planning question, although the quick rejoinder to both might be: which god? Or, whose god? Or, what god?
As it happens, there is an answer. Among the program requirements laid out by the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation for the design studies of the World Trade Center site were the rebuilding of the nearby St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church, which was destroyed Sept. 11, and the "recognition of the historic role of St. Paul's Chapel in the Fulton Street corridor."
To judge from the studies, however, the response of most architects to these requirements ranged from diffidence to indifference, though some attributed an innate overall spirituality to their projects. (The United Architects team likened the enclosure created by its five interconnected towers to the domed sanctuary of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul.)
The guiding principles for a memorial, released yesterday by the development corporation, speak of respecting the "sacred quality of the space" and encouraging "reflection and contemplation." Yet some visitors will surely wish to do more, to worship or pray.
Perhaps the last major public work in New York that placed organized religion on a prominent architectural footing was Tri-Faith Plaza at Kennedy International Airport, which stood from 1966 to 1988, with individual Jewish, Protestant, Roman Catholic sanctuaries overlooking a lagoon. The synagogue was the most explicitly iconographic, its facade composed of a 40-foot-high evocation of the tablets of the Ten Commandments.
Today, you would need at least a Quad-Faith Plaza, if not a Faithplex, with room set aside for those alienated or troubled by the presence of religious sanctuaries in the first place.
But leaders of the two religious institutions with the biggest stake in the redevelopment of the trade center site, the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America and Trinity Episcopal parish, insist that the churches' presence be acknowledged.
"We want to be part of the plan," said the Rev. Samuel Johnson Howard, vicar of Trinity, which includes St. Paul's Chapel. "Can St. Paul's and St. Nicholas continue to be good citizens and servants of the neighborhood? Make that possible for us."
"The designers and architects can make the memorial so bland, mundane and secular as to reduce its spiritual power," Father Howard said. "And they can certainly turn their backs on St. Paul's Chapel and any kind of restored St. Nicholas. They can isolate the site from the church and in so doing attempt to keep God out. But God is always going to be there."
Father Howard said Trinity appreciated those designs that provided open space around St. Paul's, in some cases reaching all the way to West Street.
Just such a greensward was proposed by a team including Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, whose overall plan has a dense cluster of towers. This would serve the transportation goal of extending Fulton Street river to river, said Roger Duffy, a partner at Skidmore.
"It so happens that St. Paul's is there and has become, de facto, the memorial piece," he said. "It had its own sacred quality and it has acquired new sacred qualities." Mr. Duffy said the greensward would offer a memorial site that could be used almost immediately.
IN the Sky Park proposal by a design collaborative known as Think, an inclined, elevated esplanade would run west from the foot of St. Paul's. Within this park, at Vesey and Church Streets, Think proposed relocating St. Nicholas.
"We thought it should be given a more prominent location," said Frederic Schwartz, one of the architects. "We do think the church is going to take on a new life and new meaning."
Under the Memorial Square proposal — notable for five fingerlike towers, one with a chapel on top, interlaced by horizontal crossbars — St. Nicholas would be relocated to a triangular parcel on Vesey Street, between West Broadway and Greenwich Street.
"It becomes part of the portal into the site," said Richard Meier, one of the architects behind Memorial Square. With St. Paul's only two blocks away, Mr. Meier said, the effect would be akin to the Piazza del Popolo in Rome, an entrance to which is framed by two 17th-century churches.
But Archbishop Demetrios, the spiritual leader of Greek Orthodox Christians in America, said his church's strong preference, buttressed by commitments from Gov. George E. Pataki, was to rebuild on its historical location at 155 Cedar Street, even though the new St. Nicholas would be more of an ecumenical pastoral center than a parish church.
"It is good," the archbishop said, "to have a symbol of the beyond and the unspoken."
Do you have a (non christian site)link for that statement. I don't believe that is true, In fact it took them a while to figure out why the Towers didn't survive.
The fact is everyone below the impact floors got out of those buildings alive
That isn't true either, Quite a few people were killed by falling debris.
The reason why so many people got out below the impact wasn't because of GOD but because of previous "Secular" Fire Drills.
I believe that God held those buildings up after the attacks
Well then why didn't God keep the Towers up permanately? Did the people above the impact somehow not deserve to live while the people below did? If god wanted to do something he could have caused a malfuntion in the south tower's intercom system when it was announced that "It is safe and everybody return to work" after the hit on the North Tower or even better God could have at the very least made it a cloudy day.
It's not directly mentioned, but implied in a quad faith would be some deference to Islam. At ground zero? I don't think so. What an insult that would be...
No. Perhaps he is an idiot because God made him so. Adding to his idiocy was his assigning a smidge of blame to us rather than entirely to the bad guys who did this. He later 'extended and amended' his idiotic statements as any good pol might.
Any God I pray to does not allow innocent decent moral righteous people to die, and die a horrible death in flames or falling, just to prove a point. Nor allow the innocents on the planes that hit the towers or the Pentagon or the Pennsylvania field to die to prove the same point. Lott was able to get Him to agree to spare a bunch of very bad people if he could find just ten good ones. There had to be that many in the towers.
Sorry about your friend...and about all the innocent people who died.
Many Muslims died in the WTC, too.
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