By Julie Shapiro
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
LOWER MANHATTAN — A towering steel trident from the original Twin Towers exterior was raised at Ground Zero Tuesday, where together with a matching 70-foot, 100,000-pound beam it will stand sentry at the entrance to the 9/11 memorial.
Five days before the ninth anniversary of the attacks, rebuilding leaders hailed the tridents’ arrival as the latest of many recent milestones at the World Trade Center site.
“Yes, there is life at Ground Zero,” Gov. David Paterson said at a press conference in 7 World Trade Center Tuesday afternoon. “Though we have had delays and unfortunately we have had disagreements…we are now, we believe, on the road to great success.”
City, state and industry officials, who spent much of the past year arguing over how and when to rebuild the site, stood side by side Tuesday and praised a recent agreement between the Port Authority and Silverstein Properties that will allow work at the site to move forward.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg and others also pointed to Conde Nast’s recent interest in moving to One World Trade Center as evidence that the development is on track.
“Predictions of a dire future for lower Manhattan — nine years of predictions — consistently have been proven wrong,” Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver said. “People are not running away from lower Manhattan. People are running to lower Manhattan."
Bloomberg said the 9/11 memorial — a tree-dotted plaza with waterfalls in the tower footprints — is on schedule to open in one year, on the 10th anniversary of 9/11.
Although construction will still be going on all around the memorial in 2011, a portion will be open to the public, with access along the West Side Highway, Bloomberg said.
On Tuesday, the 16-acre site remained very much a construction zone, as a crane lifted the first steel trident into the sky and then lowered it into place on the memorial plaza. Construction workers stopped and took pictures of the steel beam, wrapped in protective material and an American flag.
The second trident will likely rise later into place later this week. Over the next year, a glass pavilion and the rest of the memorial will be built around the tridents.
“We looked at a number of different artifacts to install within the pavilion,” Museum Director Alice Greenwald said in a statement, “but the tridents seemed most fitting because they epitomize the buildings, while also conveying the spirit of fortitude that characterized the response to the attacks.”
