‘The Rising’ Review: How to Rebuild From Rubble

Larry Silverstein recounts his role in a significant chapter in New York City history: rebuilding the World Trade Center.

Everyone who was in New York that shining morning still remembers hearing the news. I was shaving while listening to WINS, the all-news radio station, before heading down to the vast city-room of the New York Daily News to oversee the next edition. It was supposed to be a routine day.

Then, a little after 9 a.m., I heard the newscast interrupted by a report that a small private plane had crashed into one of the 110-story World Trade Center towers at the foot of Manhattan.

I bolted into the next room to turn on the television. It was, of course, no Cessna but the first of two airliners, hijacked by Islamic terrorists, that had plowed into the Twin Towers. Soon the second plane followed.

The ultimate death toll, including those who perished in a simultaneous attack on the Pentagon, would be 2,977 victims plus the 19 hijackers. I wrote the News’s front-page headline, which ran in big red type: “IT’S WAR.” The attack’s psychic impact on the city and the nation—soon to be battling in Afghanistan and Iraq—was profound and enduring.

Larry Silverstein, the New York builder and real-estate investor who held the $3.2 billion, 99-year lease on the landmark properties, had the traumatic experience of watching his towers crumble into dust. “The Rising: The Twenty-Year Battle to Rebuild the World Trade Center” is his comprehensive account of his crusade—against financial and design challenges, against bureaucratic pettifoggery—to lift his phoenix from the rubble pit that tragedy had transformed into sacred ground.

Mr. Silverstein’s adversary in his telling is the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the agency that owns and operates the World Trade Center campus along with the metropolitan area’s bridges, tunnels and airports. His detailed description of the back-and-forth is a glimpse behind the scenes of how New York’s celebrated power brokers conduct business. Like watching sausage-making, it’s not a pretty picture—and it can be tedious, too.

However familiar the tale, the fall of the towers and their protracted resurrection is a significant chapter in the city’s history. And Mr. Silverstein is alive to chronicle the death and rebirth of his buildings because of one of those inadvertent moments that can be pivot points in our lives.

He writes that he should have been having breakfast, as was his morning routine, at Windows on the World—the restaurant on the 107th floor of one of the towers—when the first plane hit at 8:46 a.m., because he had planned to cancel a morning appointment with his dermatologist. But his strong-willed wife, Klara, intervened. She pointed out that he’d already canceled the appointment once and insisted he keep it this time. “This is your health,” she said, unaware of how prophetic her words would be.

So he was about to leave his apartment for the appointment when the phone rang and Klara answered. “Is Mr. Silverstein okay?” asked the captain of their yacht, which was moored at Chelsea Piers, in sight of the burning tower.

“Yes,” said Klara. “Why would you ask?”

“Turn on your television set,” said the captain.

The landlord vividly describes the planes striking his buildings:

Eleven thousand gallons of jet fuel was a savagely effective propellant, and the buildings burned ferociously; in their desperation, people trapped inside began to jump to their deaths. The flames roared out of control. . . . And suddenly there was a terrible sound, a great and widening noise that would, in time, echo throughout America and across the world, and the buildings, one after the other, came tumbling down.
Mr. Silverstein immediately feared for his son, Roger, and daughter Lisa, who worked in the towers. Both of them cheated death—but with scant cellphone service in Lower Manhattan after the attack, the fearful father didn’t learn that his children survived until hours later, when the two, covered with dust, walked into his Midtown office after trudging uptown amid the chaos. Four of Silverstein’s employees weren’t so fortunate and perished.

Compared with the attack and destruction of the World Trade Center, the saga of its resurrection can be anticlimactic. We learn of bureaucrats haggling over deal points and ambitious politicians jostling for credit and prominence at the topping-off ceremonies for the replacement buildings. Still, the author meticulously catalogs his hard-won advances and potentially crushing setbacks.

There are the seemingly endless hassles as a carousel of world-class architects gets involved in designing and redesigning the successor buildings. At one point, an exasperated Mr. Silverstein tries to win over a designer who insists on leading the entire project himself—a proposed development complex of five buildings—despite having no experience building office towers. The architect is touted as a “quick learner.” Mr. Silverstein would rather bring on a second architect, one with more experience in constructing high-rise buildings. “Look,” the developer said, “suppose you had cancer of the brain and needed a brain surgeon. Would you go to someone who’s a ‘quick study’? Who would try to learn everything in an afternoon. Or would you go to a specialist?”

After all the reversals and turmoil, the builder prevails. “From my vantage point in 7 World Trade Center,” Mr. Silverstein writes, “I can see the three other gleaming towers on the site, each climbing high into the sky, each bustling with the productive activity of tens of thousands of workers.”

“We turn tragedy into triumph.”