Elizabeth Greenspan

Elizabeth Greenspan has been documenting the events at Ground Zero since the fall of 2001, speaking with scores of neighborhood residents, rescue workers, and victims’ relatives, as well as attending key meetings where the site’s fate was decided. Battle for Ground Zero takes the reader behind the scenes to reveal how grieving families, commercial interests, and politicking bureaucrats have clashed at every turn – from security concerns to the design of the memorial to the role of office space in the rebuilding — confounding progress and infuriating the public. Drawing on unique interviews with key New York players like Governor George Pataki, über-developer Larry Silverstein, Port Authority director Christopher Ward, and master planner Daniel Libeskind, Greenspan provides an unprecedented look at this dysfunctional process, which so often mirrored the complex challenges of the times.

One WTC may again be the tallest building in New York, but Americans will never forget how long it took to get there. In Battle for Ground Zero, Liz Greenspan captures the intervening decade with vital, uncompromising clarity.

“Elizabeth Greenspan, an urban anthropologist, vividly recounts the dysfunctional process and controversies that put her favorite graffiti, “America the Re-build-iful,” to a grueling test that is only now about to be graded by the public… a valuable and highly accessible primer for everyone who wants to better understand how government works and why it does not.”
— The New York Times

“Greenspan pulls out the best of contemporary history … Her urban ethnography methodology does what so often failed to happen in the hands of idealistic and opportunistic politicians, bureaucrats, and commercial interests – give voice to the people.”
— London School of Economics Review of Books

“Absorbing and illuminating about the tortuous process of deciding what should rise from the ashes of the 16-acre Ground Zero site…Elizabeth Greenspan, an urban anthropologist at Harvard, is not a New Yorker…which helps her remain scrupulously fair-minded…the level of detail is impressive but never overwhelming”
— Sunday Times (London)

“A must-read study of the power of democracy and shared memory to shape our public spaces.”
— Kirkus (Starred Review)