What was Gov. Patakis role in the process?
Pataki was very taken by the Libeskind plan. The governor, who has always been the most powerful person in the Ground Zero planning process, was struck both by Daniel Libeskind personally and by his ideas. So the governor was quite willing to buy into this notion that Libeskind had done more than just a layout; that he had actually designed buildings, and it’s fine to carry his vision forward. The governor, in fact, didn’t expect that he would hit against a stone wall of people objecting to that, among them Larry Silverstein, the developer who was actually building the tower, who wanted his own architect, and then others who argued that Libeskind, whatever his other virtues might be, did not have much experience designing skyscrapers, and [that] a big tower — in fact, the biggest skyscraper in the world — shouldn’t be done by somebody who’d never designed a skyscraper before. And so the idea arose that Libeskind would do it in collaboration with David Childs from Skidmore, Owings & M
