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Last of the Ground Zero Ramp Is Removed
By DAVID W. DUNLAP
The last remaining structural remnants of the 460-foot-long ramp at the World Trade Center site, leading from street level down nearly to bedrock, were hoisted up and out of ground zero by a crane on Wednesday — there being no ramp any longer on which to haul the X-shaped truss work.

A ramp section during the hoist, with the Goldman Sachs tower behind it.
The dismantling of the ramp, a utilitarian structure that assumed a special symbolic importance during memorial ceremonies, was necessary to permit further steel erection at the south end of the below-ground site.

Tom O’Connor, a senior engineer at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, smiled when he was asked whether removing the ramp would hinder construction progress. “It doesn’t slow it at all,” he said. “It was a very long ramp to walk up and down. Stairs are quicker.” Materials will be picked up and hoisted by cranes.

When the impending removal of the ramp was announced last month, victims’ family members paused to reflect on its significance. Jefferson Crowther said he had no deep-rooted feeling about it as an artifact but explained that the ramp indirectly aided the search for his son, Welles Remy Crowther. Welles was an equities trader who worked on the 104th floor of the south tower, and he died after organizing rescue efforts in the 78th-floor sky lobby. (He became known in 9/11 lore as the “man in the red bandanna,” since he wore one that morning to protect his nose and mouth.) Recalling that Welles’s body was not found until March 19, 2002, under the earthen roadway that the structural ramp replaced, his father said, with a sigh, “If they hadn’t built it, we might have had to wait longer.”

The removal of the ramp was among the specific milestones that the Port Authority has set for itself for the first three months of 2009. On Wednesday, the authority released an update of the nine milestones it had hoped to achieve during the last three months of 2008.

In the update, Christopher O. Ward, the executive director of the authority, told Gov. David A. Paterson that eight milestones had been achieved. What has not yet happened, Mr. Ward said, is the scheduled turning over of the sites for Tower 2 and Tower 3 to Larry A. Silverstein, who would develop commercial skyscrapers on those lots. The authority and the developer have not yet settled issues over a retaining wall that impinges on an area Mr. Silverstein needs for construction and access to the E train subway station through the Tower 2 site.

But it is also unclear how quickly Mr. Silverstein could proceed even if he had timely control of the sites, given an ever-deepening recession and the breakup, shrinking or disappearance of the financial institutions that would be among his likeliest tenants. A near future without Towers 2 and 3 is looking ever more probable.