"A lot of rumors were flying," said Ms. Plaza, whose office had become a virtual team center.
Later, the new residents cleared a plaza whose obligatory maintenance, organized by the shaman through communal labor, or minga, architecturally centered the developing community.
The Plaza, whose first guest in 1907 was Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, heir to the Vanderbilt industrial empire, has been struggling in recent years after a conversion into condominiums.
It was also clear that the Taj was cannibalizing the Castle and the Plaza, whose combined gambling revenues dropped by $58 million the year it opened.
A large metal-and-glass marquee at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, whose primary tenant is NBC but which also houses the Rainbow Room, will be permanently removed.
The magnolia trees along the plaza, whose springtime flowering is an iconic part of the Princeton landscape, will be removed and will be replaced by a new row of magnolias, McCoy said.
As designed, the terminal encroached on Mr. Libeskind's Wedge of Light plaza, whose outlines were defined, Mr. Libeskind said, by the angle of the sun's rays on Sept. 11.
It was a chance, they believed, to correct a painful planning error of the 1960s, when a lively, jumbled gridiron of riverfront streets, anchored by a clamorous appliance district called Radio Row, was bulldozed into oblivion to create a barren, windswept plaza whose only evident purpose was to serve as a pedestal for the twin towers.
Four New York Plaza, where The Daily News is based, could be closed for a year, though One New York Plaza, whose basement shopping center took on 30 feet of water, should reopen in two weeks, according to a spokeswoman for the building's landlord, Brookfield Office Properties.
But unlike the Plaza, whose facade of brick and stone has a magnificent, sumptuous presence, the Home Savings building is sheathed in a cheap precast concrete material, its very thinness completely at odds with the image the architect is hoping to convey.
