No urban design project in modern American experience has aroused such high expectations and intense scrutiny as the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site in New York City. It has taken fifteen years since the terrorist assault of September 11, 2001, for the principal structures of this sixteen-acre parcel in Lower Manhattan to be completed. In a field where time is money in a very direct sense (because of interest payments on the vast sums borrowed to finance big construction schemes), such a long gestation period usually signifies not judicious deliberation on the part of planners, developers, designers, engineers, and contractors, but rather economic, political, or bureaucratic problems that can impede a speedy and cost-efficient conclusion.

For example, in contrast to this slow-motion rollout, it took less than a decade to erect the Associated Architects’ twenty-two-acre, fourteen-building Rockefeller Center of 1930–1939, accomplished without benefit of the countless technological advances devised since then. That swiftness was owed in part to the project being underwritten by the richest family in America during the Great Depression, when jobs were scarce and both designers and laborers were grateful for work, but it was a logistical triumph nonetheless. With Ground Zero (the popular name for the site that emerged in the attack’s immediate aftermath), the lengthy delay reflected the project’s divided and ambiguous leadership as well as the political tenor of the times.

Who was really in charge of the undertaking remained a persistent and vexing question.

A rendering of the new World Trade Center buildings in Lower Manhattan, with the reflecting pools of the National September 11 Memorial in the foreground. Three of the buildings have been completed, including One World Trade Center (far left).
A rendering of the new World Trade Center buildings in Lower Manhattan, with the reflecting pools of the National September 11 Memorial in the foreground. Three of the buildings have been completed, including One World Trade Center (far left). © DBOX/Little, Brown and Company

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High among other factors that greatly complicated the rebuilding of the Trade Center site are recent advances in DNA verification methods. The conjunction of those new capacities with the 2001 catastrophe is the basis for a thoughtful and solidly informed meditation, Who Owns the Dead?: The Science and Politics of Death at Ground Zero by Jay D. Aronson, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and director of its Center for Human Rights Science. Because it is now easier than ever to identify human remains found at sites of mass disasters, expectations ran high among many families bereaved by the Twin Towers attack that they might reclaim some corporeal vestige of their dead relatives. It was once expected that those lost at sea would lie forever asleep in the deep, much as soldiers killed in foreign wars would be buried near where they fell. However, modern science has encouraged a broad belief that the retrieval of physical matter, no matter how tiny, is essential to attaining “closure”—that obsessive yet elusive goal of contemporary grieving.

As of last autumn, remains of 1,113 of the disaster’s victims—or some 40 percent of the death toll—continue to be unidentified. At several points during the slow, painstaking, dignified, and respectful recovery process, officials announced that the search had concluded, but family members who had not yet been given definitive physical proof demanded further forensic investigation.

As it turned out, spot checks confirmed that minute amounts of residue from the victims were still discernible in the surrounding area, a finding that prompted an even more microscopic search that in some areas went inch by inch through newly discovered concentrations of possible physical evidence. This late phase was pursued with a vigilance that the participating experts vouchsafed was much more thorough than any they had witnessed before, verging on the exactitude of an archaeological dig. And indeed, additional names were associated with the powdery particulate. But to what end was this increasingly obsessive search? As Aronson writes:

The thought of unidentified remains is unnerving, especially for a society that wants to believe it has the technical capacity to provide some measure of certainty in an uncertain world…. It is ironic, then, that the individualization of the victims of the World Trade Center has made it more politically palatable for the US government to engage in a seemingly perpetual war that has created innumerable casualties in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere.