Battle for Ground Zero: Inside the Political Struggle to Rebuild the World Trade Center

In the aftermath of 9/11, Americans came together in a way not seen for a generation, pledging unity to rebuild after the horrific loss of the Twin Towers. People were signing up to go to war; rescue workers were laboring to clear rubble.  But instead of becoming a rallying symbol in the fight against terrorism, Ground Zero has been plagued by intense conflict and controversy from the very start. Battle for Ground Zero goes behind the scenes of this fight to rebuild, revealing how grieving families, commercial interests, and politicking bureaucrats clashed at every step of the way, confounding progress and infuriating the public. Since the fall of 2001, author Elizabeth Greenspan has been documenting the drama—conducting interviews with neighborhood residents, architects, officials, rescue workers, and victims relatives, as well as key New York players like uber-developer Larry Silverstein, and Governor Pataki. Here she provides a warts-and-all look at this pivotal decade—from the bitter feuding between city officials and victims families, to the endless controversy over the memorial design, to the fraught tenth anniversary, against a still-unfinished building. Publishing just as the memorial is finally completed, Battle for Ground Zero is an exhaustively researched reminder of how long it took to put a brave face on the horror of 9/11.

"The tension between commerce and commemoration at the World Trade Center site is given a riveting narrative construction by urban anthropologist Greenspan. Among the many questions Greenspan addresses is how to recreate millions of square feet of commercial office space on a site that has become a national symbol of mourning and, in some quarters, rage. Within days of the disaster, plans to rebuild arose amid contrasting, often conflicting, attempts to define what the site represented, and what it should become. From disaster area to graveyard to tourist attraction to construction site, Greenspan utilizes years of reporting on Ground Zero for the Atlantic Monthly and other publications, to create an engrossing and evolving portrait of unrealized expectations and political gamesmanship. Constantly returning to the streets surrounding Ground Zero, Greenspan captures the mood of both New Yorkers and the nation, as devout attempts by those less affected to claim a piece of spiritual ownership of 9/11 transform into frat-boy antics of jingoistic posturing in some cases, and developers battle designers over memorial space, while politicians opportunistically hover. As One World Trade Center (Freedom Tower) approaches completion, Greenspan's exactingly researched and artistically rendered reportage thoughtfully details its twisting journey upward. Agent: Irene Goodman, Irene Goodman Literary Agency." Publishers Weekly Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Elizabeth Greenspan is a writer and urban anthropologist currently teaching at Harvard University.  She writes regularly about Ground Zero for The Atlantic online.  Her writing has also appeared in The Washington Post and The Harvard Review, among other publications, and she has worked for the Associated Press Rome Bureau, and National Journal magazine. She has lectured about Ground Zero and 9/11 at numerous colleges and universities, including Harvard, Brandeis College, the University of Pennsylvania, Haverford College, Temple University, and SUNY-Albany. She lives in Cambridge, MA.