For more than three years they have come. Day by day, the faithful gather at the wall, drawn to the place where the unthinkable happened. After the obligatory photograph, they stare down, past the PATH station discharging its human cargo, into the gaping void, wondering what will become of Ground Zero. Little wonder. Even vigilant city dwellers and professionals have lost focus on the development spiral.

For a few short months, particularly in the days surrounding the selection of a master planner, we had hoped for more. Daniel Libeskind mounted the stage with élan, flourishing authoritative rhetoric in words and images, pointing a way out of the 75-foot-deep mire. He had a vision (we could see it; it was near-tactile in the imagery) that rested on bedrock at one extreme and spiraled toward new heights for Lower Manhattan. That plan was founded on architecture.