9 years gone, everyone’s a ground zero stakeholder

The mosque furor has brought 9/11 back to the fore of America’s consciousness. It had been quiet for a long time, bogged down in the bureaucracy of what would be built, for how much and when.

Amid all the disputes and all the compromise, the World Trade Center site had lost some of its hold on the public’s imagination.

Freedom Tower, the site’s signature skyscraper, rising a symbolic 1,776 feet, was renamed One World Trade Center, thought a better draw for corporate tenants. Even the ethereal design imagined by architect Daniel Libeskind came back to earth, restrained by the boundaries of physics and financing.

The plan for the memorial pools set in the footprints of the towers, though, remains.

At the 9/11 Memorial Preview Site at ground zero, a mob of visitors is snapping pictures, clustering in around a small-scale model of what this place is supposed to become.

There are the footprints, with lines standing in for what are to be the largest manmade waterfalls in the nation. There are tall, elegant buildings. There are tiny trees, each miniature trunk no thicker than a pushpin.

It looks peaceful. And it looks ready to come to life.

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Associated Press Writer Amy Westfeldt and AP researcher Monika Mathur contributed to this report.