- How could the flood of interests be contained in a single, coherent design (WTC)? How could the countless financial, political and moral claims on the site be sorted out? Not so well, viewers may conclude from "Sacred Ground," airing Sept. 7 at 9 p.m. EDT on PBS (check local listings). Press release
FRAZIER MOORE, AP Television Writer
SFGate.com

One day, it had been 16 acres of commercial real estate with the two looming towers most New Yorkers took for granted. A day later, it was a hideous rubble, an open wound that cried out for healing.

But what should ground zero re-emerge as? A memorial to the 9/11 attacks? A defiant restatement of capitalistic zeal?

How could the flood of interests be contained in a single, coherent design? How could the countless financial, political and moral claims on the site be sorted out?

Not so well, viewers may conclude from "Sacred Ground," airing Sept. 7 at 9 p.m. EDT on PBS (check local listings).

Telling and poignant, this "Frontline" documentary exposes the contentious first year of the rebuilding effort on the World Trade Center site.

A turf battle over this sacred ground, it pitted architect Daniel Libeskind -- who won an official competition to design the site's master plan pledging to address "our vitality in the face of danger, and our optimism in the aftermath of tragedy" -- against David Childs, the architect privately chosen by the site's developer, Larry Silverstein, whose own top priority was seeing rentable properties with maximum square footage rise as soon as possible.

Caught in between: New York Gov. George Pataki, a fan of Libeskind's vision but also a realist who knew that, while ground zero might belong to everyone, Silverstein alone held the lease.

Despite all sides' struggle to publicly maintain a happy face, the architectural "collaboration" rapidly crumbled. "Sacred Ground" tracks the festering behind-the-scenes feud, which eventually found Libeskind excluded from the design process and his contest-winning ideas all but dismissed.

Granted special access by the Libeskind camp, filmmaker Kevin Sim had begun "Sacred Ground" as a portrait of this Polish-born son of Holocaust survivors who grew up in the Bronx. With credits that included Berlin's Jewish Museum, Libeskind in February 2003 had prevailed over some 500 rivals with a design whose centerpiece was a 1,776-foot Freedom Tower meant to echo the Statue of Liberty.

"He had been chosen to make a project that would somehow satisfy everybody: the families of the victims, the politicians, the developers, the people who wanted to remember," said Sim, whose other documentaries include "Remember My Lai," "The Man Who Shot John Lennon" and "Hitler's Search for the Holy Grail," in an interview last week from his London office.

"For a moment, it seemed he had the answer, and when we started the film, it seemed that was what we were going to be following. But during the making of our film, Daniel seemed to be less and less in command, until he was more or less excluded. So, in a sense, our man who was supposed to be there in the center of events found himself marginalized."

A small, dynamic man with an effusive manner and wraparound eyeglasses, Libeskind radiated a humanistic approach to architecture. He is heard in the film marveling at "the spirit" of the World Trade Center site, "full of its own forces."

But the force Libeskind clashed with was David Childs of the architectural firm of Skidmore, Owens and Merrill, who, in the view of The New Yorker magazine's architecture critic, Paul Goldberger, preferred a nuts-and-bolts approach to design: "The structural idea should come first (and) architecture should reflect the structural reality."

Interviewed for the film, Childs sounds coolly dismissive of his nominal colleague as someone who "has never yet had the opportunity of dealing with" a project of this scope.

In such an environment, Libeskind had clear need for Ed Hayes, a seasoned New York lawyer hired, he explains, to lead his client "through the jungles of New York without getting ambushed and eaten alive."

The film is full of these larger-than-life figures. But two human-scale people keep "Sacred Ground" grounded: Ellie Hertz, a suburban widow who recalls how her husband took the morning train to the World Trade Center for 13 years, and Gordon Huie, a young man from Chinatown whose sister was at a business meeting on the 106th floor.

"It was important to stay in touch with them," said Sim, explaining why he returns to this pair throughout his film. "The design process was so huge, and became such a dogfight, that it doesn't touch the condition of ordinary grieving people."

On July 4, construction began on the $1.5 billion, 70-story Freedom Tower, sporting a last-minute version of Libeskind's spire tacked atop the Childs camp's torqued, windmills-equipped skyscraper.

"A sad compromise," says Goldberger. But "Sacred Ground" argues that, on its way to becoming the world's tallest building, it perhaps was always doomed to come up short.


FRAZIER MOORE, AP Television Writer