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"  Published in the February 2013 issue &amp;quot;I believe that love is the greatest thing in the world; that it alone can overcome hate; that right can and will triumph over might.&amp;quot; \u2014John D. Rockefeller Jr., according to a plaque placed at Rockefeller Center in New York City Love is the most literally accurate word for my feelings about the World Trade Center; what began as a professional marriage \u2014 I&amp;#039;ve written feature stories about the post-9/11 story of those sixteen acres since 2005 \u2014 somehow turned into holy journalistic wedlock. I feel infuriated all too often, even over little things \u2014 a design change made for money&amp;#039;s sake, a newspaper columnist getting it wrong \u2014 and too often I&amp;#039;m bored, but I&amp;#039;m never bored or angry for too long, and never, ever as deeply as the way that piece of land, with all of its metaphoric freight and earthly wonder, has made my heart its home. I first knew that it was love on the morning of June 23, 2006, when a crew from Bay Crane extracted and trucked away the Freedom Tower cornerstone laid nearly two years before, on July 4, 2004, with empty, insufferable pomp by then-governor George Pataki. That version of the tower \u2014 ugly, unsafe, unbuildable \u2014 was, like Pataki&amp;#039;s feckless effort to use Ground Zero as a springboard to the White House, a stillbirth, but that cornerstone sat and sat under a plywood box painted blue, sat and sat in puddled filth, sat and sat in the empty pit where the thousands of lives it was meant to honor were forever lost. I saw it roped and raised and put in a flatbed, saw it covered with a plastic tarp, saw it rolled away up a construction ramp. There were no politicians, no TV cameras, no speeches. I was the only witness other than the guys on the crew, and the sadness and anger I felt were way out of proportion to my job as a journalist. I feel much better lately. After a decade of mud wrestling and machination \u2014 blame the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the property; blame the pols; blame Al Qaeda first and most of all \u2014 the next four years will bring the whole shebang, give or take the performing-arts center, to completion. I&amp;#039;ll be the second-happiest lad in New York City then. The happiest will be Larry Silverstein, the Brooklyn-born real estate developer who signed his lease on the World Trade Center seven weeks before September 11, 2001. Castigated by politicians and the press for being hard of heart and head and greedy to boot, found guilty of high crimes by the lunatics known as &amp;quot;9/11 Truthers,&amp;quot; Larry never budged in his belief that restoring the vaporized millions of square feet of office space was good business and fit tribute, too, not only to those who died that day but also to the soul and spirit of New York City. There were, and still are, plenty of folks who disagree \u2014 regional-planning visionaries, housing advocates, some of the victims&amp;#039; families, rival real estate magnates \u2014 but none of them held an iron-clad lease on the World Trade Center. Four years more and few will recall their objections, or the clown parade of post-9/11 governors, or the innumerable ground-breakings that turned out to be mere photo-ops. The first time I spoke with him, in 2005, Larry had just spent $700 million rebuilding 7 World Trade Center, which was due to open in a matter of months, offering 1.7 million square feet of office space adjacent to the scorched earth of Ground Zero. He had one tenant \u2014 Silverstein Properties Inc. \u2014 but no doubt whatsoever about the tower&amp;#039;s future. &amp;quot;There has never been an exquisite building built in this city \u2014 well-designed, soundly built, superbly located \u2014 that has not ultimately rented. Sooner or later, they all rent.&amp;quot; He was correct. He filled 7 WTC when no one else believed he would, and he did so at rents nobody thought he could command. Four years more, and he&amp;#039;ll have three more towers to fill. &amp;quot;I just want to be around,&amp;quot; says Larry Silverstein, who&amp;#039;ll turn eighty-two in May. &amp;quot;I want to be around to see it, to experience it.&amp;quot; Me, too. Man, I get tired of writing about it sometimes. &amp;quot;You? How do you think I feel?&amp;quot; Over the next four years, twenty million pilgrims will pay homage at the 9/11 Memorial, a miracle of remembrance anchored to the agony of those who died here, and those who still grieve, by two vast pools cast in the footprints of the Twin Towers. (Five million have already come since the plaza opened on 9/11/11.) You ought to be among them. PLUS: Read Scott Raab&amp;#039;s Stories on the WTC Rebuilding "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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