20 years later: The transformation of Ground Zero

Healing never comes as quickly as the injury. The smoldering bramble of concrete and steel at Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan took only a few minutes to amass, but it took years to decide what to put in its place.

Leave it empty, out of respect? Rebuild, as an act of defiance? “I think they should do something that kind of preserves the other towers, like remembering them,” one woman said.

The stakes in stitching up Ground Zero’s gaping wound were monumental.

“There hasn’t been any project in our lifetime that combined an emotional component like Ground Zero with its physical size,” said Paul Goldberger, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his architectural criticism in The New York Times. He kept a watchful eye as a multitude of different plans were proposed for these 16 acres – land as sacred as it was precious.

“Selling just to rebuild and not having commemorated somehow would have been callous, cruel and foolish,” Goldberger told correspondent Lee Cowan.

This is why, at its heart, is the calm of the 9/11 Memorial and Museum. The sound of falling water drowns the chaos of the city.

The names of those lost circled footprints apparently made by the ghosts that were once there.

The public space that surrounds it is open, bright and alive.

The train station that once hid beneath it all has been replaced with a sort of cathedral above the ground – a spire structure known as the Oculus, said to resemble a dove leaving the hands of a child.

GALLERY: Oculus, the new World Trade Center transport hub

Goldberger said: “He’s aiming higher, he’s striving higher, he’s trying to uplift us all, and that’s what great architecture should do.”

But like anything that makes a big statement, there are those who don’t like what the sharp tips of the Oculus have to say.

The skyscrapers that sprouted from Ground Zero (including the 1,776-foot One World Trade Center) haven’t always exceeded reviews, either. One man said, “It’s too modern. I would appreciate it if it were similar to what it originally looked like.”

GALLERY: A global trade center

Yet despite all the competing interests, what remains to us, without being perfect, has succeeded where the terrorists failed. Souls lost on September 11 will not be back, but the city that so many have called home has risen again.

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Story produced by Robert Marston. Editor: Karen Brenner.