Arturo Lamberto Ressi di Cervia, who died last month at 72, supervised the construction of the slurry wall around the trade center foundation in the 1960s.
The National September 11 Memorial and Museum at the World Trade Center Foundation, of which Mr. Bloomberg is chairman, does not want the sculpture.
Against the vastness of the trade center foundation, where PATH cars look to be HO scale, the jagged garage floors may not seem that big.
It is difficult to look at a site as vast as the trade center foundation, known as the bathtub, and imagine it starved for space.
Then there is the fact that the ground floor of the Freedom Tower is 70 feet above the trade center foundation.
Mr. Pataki lingered along Tracks 2 and 3, some 60 feet below the sidewalk, looking out across the bathtub, as the trade center foundation is called.
Even then, the 70-foot-deep, concrete-lined trade center foundation was referred to as a "bathtub," though it was a bathtub in reverse, designed to keep water out of the site.
"These have never been moved," said Joseph C. Daniels, the president and chief executive of the National September 11 Memorial and Museum at the World Trade Center Foundation, as he looked over a row of the column remnants.
Taylor enjoys an especially close relationship with former President Jimmy Carter, a fellow-Baptist, who travels frequently to Liberia to oversee "democracy building" and human-rights programs that the Carter Center foundation operates there.
As it rounded its way to the platform, the slurry wall of the trade center foundation came clearly into view, as did the long ramp leading into the site from Liberty Street.
Mr. Libeskind, who first proposed setting the memorial within the 70-foot-deep trade center foundation, said yesterday that the voids in Mr. Arad's design were a "meaningful connection" with his own design intent.
