Why the World Trade Center Is Taking So Long to Finish -- TIME

But there is one thing we have done. On Sept. 11, 2011, New York City will officially unveil 9/11 Memorial to victims' families and invited guests. (It will open up to the public the following day.) It is a stone plaza peppered with 400 swamp white oak trees that surround two square reflecting pools and waterfalls, which are located where the original towers once stood. The names of the 9/11 victims, as well as the six people killed in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, are inscribed on parapets that run along the waterfalls' perimeters. Of the seven major construction projects currently going on at Ground Zero, it is the only one that's finished.

Even given its size and complexity, the World Trade Center has taken an unusually long time to rebuild. If everything goes according to plan, the site won't be finished until 2016. That's nearly 8 years longer than the initial projections offered by New York's then governor George Pataki in 2003. To give you an idea of how long that is, the original towers were completed in just five and a half years. (See photos of views from the Twin Towers.)

"It's easy to ask, 'What's taking so long?'" says Chris Ward, the executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, "but it's harder to say, 'O.K., this is how we build it.'" The World Trade Center construction site is a $20 billion venture — according to Ward, it is the biggest public-construction project that has ever been undertaken in the U.S. It is a vastly complex partnership between the Port Authority, a bistate government organization that oversees the regional transportation between New York and New Jersey; a private real estate developer named Larry Silverstein; and dozens of smaller companies and organizations that have been brought on to help design, build, fund and oversee everything from the subway and commuter-train center to a performing-arts venue. The site has suffered repeated delays, budget overruns, design changes and several serious lawsuits. After 9/11, it took nearly a year and a half for the city to even decide upon a rebuilding plan.

In fact, the first attempt at such a plan had to be completely scrapped. In July 2002, the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. (LMDC) — the agency that oversees the World Trade Center's redevelopment — released six proposals for how to rebuild the site. They were bland, largely uniform structures that maximized office space to generate as much revenue as possible (estimated at the time to be $120 million a year). For the most famous construction site in the U.S., the plans showed surprisingly little creativity or forethought. And so, the LMDC tried again. An international competition was held, and in February 2003, a Polish-American architect named Daniel Libeskind was awarded the project for designing a very tall, asymmetrical skyscraper that would come to be known as the Freedom Tower.

See TIME's special report, "Beyond 9/11: Portraits of Resilience."

"It wasn't a normal project for me. This site isn't just a piece of real estate," says Libeskind. "I had to figure out a way to maintain a balance between the idea of memory and moving forward." His designs were heavy in symbolism: the 1,776-ft. structure was topped with off-center spire intended to mirror the Statue of Liberty's torch and aligned with the sun so that no shadow would be cast on the anniversary of the attacks.

At least, this was Libeskind's original idea; it's not what's actually being built. At the time of his hire, he had only a handful of completed buildings to his name, none of them very tall. "Dan was master planner, but he was not a high-rise specialist," says developer Silverstein, who had leased the original towers and was now in charge of rebuilding what was lost. Silverstein brought on another architect, David Childs, with whom he had worked before. He and Governor Pataki asked the two architects to work together.(See the definitive photos from 9/11.)

Childs replaced Libeskind's torchlike spire with a more traditional antenna, and the sun alignment turned out not to be very feasible. The architects clashed publically for many years — "Architects like to work on their own," as Silverstein explains — but now take a benign, diplomatic tone in interviews. When asked about the changes to his design, Libeskind only says, "It's a challenge to bring a consensus to so many people with different interests."

Preliminary work on the tower began, symbolically, on July 4, 2004, but safety concerns and structural precautions necessitated major revisions. One critical problem was the issue of placement: a highway runs along the west side of Manhattan, and the Freedom Tower was set so close to it that the New York Police Department worried about security. "They couldn't be sure that a truck wouldn't come and blow it up," says Ward. The tower had to be completely redesigned; construction was delayed for another year. By the time work began in earnest, it was already 2006. At the time, officials said it would be finished in 2011. But in order for that to happen, Silverstein Properties, the real estate company owned by Larry Silverstein, had to come up with the money — much of which he hoped would come from insurance payouts on the original towers.

The New York real estate mogul had signed the lease on World Trade Center buildings just six weeks before 9/11 and spent the next five years locked in litigation with 22 insurance companies over what was at the time the biggest policy on a single piece of real estate. At issue was whether the towers' destruction counted as two different events, requiring two separate $3.5 billion insurance payouts, or just one. Ultimately, it came down to legal wording: for most of the companies, the towers were considered one event. Although Silverstein ultimately received more than $4 billion in payouts, he was still haggling with the insurance companies in court as late as 2007. (See photos of the evolution of Ground Zero.)

Things were moving slowly, and the 2008 financial crisis didn't help. (10 million sq. ft. of office space are tough when the economy is in a tailspin.) "At this point, five years had already elapsed and nothing was happening on the site," says Silverstein. "It became obvious that we had to get moving." To speed things along, Silverstein turned the Freedom Tower's construction over to the Port Authority in 2008. He is now in charge of only three buildings on the site: towers two, three and four. They are much smaller projects, between 72 and 88 stories tall, all scheduled to be completed between 2013 and '16.

The Freedom Tower got its name from a speech given by Pataki in 2003. It was a defiant stance for what would be the tallest building in a city that refused to be cowed by fear. But by 2009, the need for rhetoric had faded and Port Authority quietly renamed the project after its legal address: One World Trade Center. Local tabloids blasted the move as "unpatriotic," and Pataki complained about the use of the original north tower's address. The building's first lease went to a Chinese real estate company.

As construction work started and stalled and started up again, the LMDC and the Port Authority continued with another project: the 9/11 Memorial. Libeskind's original designs included a memorial, but it was stark and dispiriting, an 8-acre area dropped 70 ft. below street level. So in 2003 the LMDC held a second competition and selected Israeli-American architect Michael Arad's "Reflecting Absence" design from 5,201 entries. But instead of quick construction, Arad, Libeskind, the Port Authority and transportation-hub architect Santiago Calatrava found themselves tangled in a seemingly endless web of problems.

See a video of four unlikely 9/11 survivors.

Where would the victims' names go? In what order? How would the waterfalls flow? What about the museum? Part of Arad's memorial served as the ceiling for Calatrava's underground transportation hub — a massive subway and train station designed to accommodate an estimated 250,000 commuters every day — and the two architects' designs didn't match up. The decade crept by. In a September 2008 Wall Street Journal op-ed, Mayor Michael Bloomberg called the project "frustratingly slow" and demanded the memorial be finished by the 10th anniversary of the attacks. The Port Authority reluctantly agreed.

"We made the announcement and after we said it, we just kind of looked at each other," says Ward. "Did I ever think we could accomplish it? Honestly, not in my wildest dreams."

Because the transit hub sits underneath part of the memorial, construction — which usually starts from the bottom and goes up — would have to be reversed in order to make the deadline. "We're essentially building from the ceiling down," explains Ward. "But we are building." (See photos of the Twin Towers from 1970 on.)

Today, the World Trade Center is the site of continuous, frenzied activity. To stay on schedule, the construction must go on 24 hours a day, stopping only during bad weather and, as was the case in May, when President Obama visits. "It's extremely hard and grueling," says Brian Lyons, a superintendent with Tishman Construction, the company that is building several of the Port Authority's projects, including One World Trade Center. "You're either climbing deep down into the ground or way up into the sky. There are so many different layers it's absolutely mind-boggling."

Like many of the 3,200 workers on site at any one time, Lyons works six or seven days a week, often for more than 12 hours at a stretch. He's helped construct Seven World Trade Center, one of Silverstein's buildings, successfully completed in 2006; One World Trade Center; and several other projects. He is currently overseeing the construction of the transportation hub. "We're blasting, chopping and drilling. Meanwhile, there's a live subway that passes us every four minutes during the day," he says. "Because of that, most of the work is done in the middle of the night."

One World Trade Center will cost $3.2 billion to build — that's a lot more than its original price tag of $350 million — but it's currently 83 stories tall and rising at the rate of a floor a week. In May, Condé Nast agreed to a $2 billion lease, giving the project the financial backing that it has needed for so long. The building's rust-colored skeleton can be seen, creeping up slowly to take its place along the Manhattan skyline. (See the psychology of the Sept. 11 attacks.)

"I had no idea they had built so much," says Keith Ellison, 49, from Bend, Ore. Ellison had seen Ground Zero only a few months after the initial attacks and returned last week to see it again. "When I first went, they'd blocked off everything so I couldn't see much," he says. "I hadn't heard anything about progress that was being made so I thought it would still be the same."

It's now just days before Sept. 11, and the 9/11 Memorial is almost finished. The waterfalls have been done since the spring, and the plaza was completed mid-August. Port Authority workers scramble about like hostesses about to throw an elaborate party. They're checking every stone and making sure every light bulb is screwed in tightly. Last week, they finally planted the shrubbery.

"The unveiling can't be like Spider-Man," says Ward, referring to the recent Broadway production beset by so many problems. "We can't have an opening night where something doesn't work or the curtain doesn't rise properly. This is a one-shot deal."

And around the memorial, construction on the rest of the World Trade Center is finally moving along. The buildings will be different, of course — sleek and graceful titans that will do their best to replace what we once loved. The financial district is thriving again, with new restaurants, wine stores, produce markets and dental clinics popping up around the steel skeletons, providing services for those who have decided to live their lives there in the wake of tragedy. It may feel strange, even a little bit wrong, to think about the future during a week so dedicated to remembering the past. But that is the beauty of this city. This country. A decade ago, a part of us was reduced to rubble. Not only do we find ourselves standing up again, but growing taller by the day. Every year that passes will bring a Sept. 11. But when it's over, there will always be another Sept. 12.