URBAN PLANNING

April 19, 2002 -- IF we'd wanted the 9/11 terrorists to do our urban planning, we could have paid them consultants' fees and saved them all their trouble with jets and box-cutters.

Yet some influential New Yorkers sound ready to cede our Downtown redevelopment agenda to Mohamed Atta & Co. - whose efficient removal of 14 million square feet of office space these civic sages regard not only as irreversible, but as synchronized to pre-existing trends.

Surprise: The worst threat to getting Downtown back on its feet lies not in the wheel-spinning ways of the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. Rather, it is the nutty notion that Downtown's days as financial capital were already over before Sept. 11 - and the attack merely served to drive the point home.

You can laugh off this sophistry when it's enunciated by socialists eager to scatter Wall Street to the winds, or by real-estate dealmakers opposed to new buildings that would compete with projects uptown.

But it's no joke when it pops up on the op-ed page of The New York Times, under the headline "The Old Downtown Economy Won't Return" - under the byline of Kathryn S. Wylde, chief executive of the New York City Partnership and Chamber of Commerce.

The credentials of Wylde, a well-respected advocate for the business community, are above reproach: There is no questioning her capitalist bona fides, her patriotism or her commitment to the city, Downtown and the financial community.

But it doesn't preclude applying critical thinking to her premise - that the "unprecedented" economic damage caused by the attack means that "traditional business-retention strategies" won't restore "what was the nation's third-largest business district." (Was? Funny - as of this week, when I checked with Cushman & Wakefield, it still is.)

Citing the old-news dispersal of some Wall Street companies before and since the attack, Wylde asserts the need to lure "new knowledge-based industries" downtown - biotechnology in particular. Because, she solemnly concludes, "The truth is that the downtown we knew last autumn will not be coming back."

Wylde is not alone in this view. Relocation consultants try hard to promote the seepage of financial-sector jobs from Downtown into a mass exodus. Certain facts stand stubbornly in their way. For one: If financial-sector dispersal is inevitable, why is Larry Silverstein champing at the bit to build anew at Ground Zero?

Why, for that matter, did he spend $3 billion to buy the World Trade Center lease in the first place? Why, if Downtown's financial-center days were over, did three of the world's greatest publicly-traded real-estate companies bid against him for the same properties?

Did Silverstein and his rivals expect to fill the WTC with bio-tech firms or with the cultural nonprofits so dear to the LMDC?

No - if the "downtown we knew" doesn't return, it won't be because something was fundamentally wrong with it. It would mean, rather, that we chose not to have it back, preferring a different vision in its place.

And there's no scarcity of different visions. Some politicians and planners claim that Sept. 11 created the opportunity to do something new - and theoretically better - with the intense tangle of concrete and steel below Chambers Street.

Modern electronics made the concentration of financial services obsolete, they say - so let's replace them with other industries, and scatter Wall Street into the outer boroughs.

Let's build housing instead of offices to replace the ones that were destroyed - after all, hadn't some office buildings already been converted to apartments?

And wasn't downtown a mess! Transit was lousy! There weren't enough stores and restaurants! And - omigod - West Street "cut off" Battery Park City from the rest of Manhattan.

Nuisances all. Cities are full of nuisances. Correcting them is a worthy goal. But God save us from rerouted trains and dug-up streets if the goal is to create a 24-hour tourist destination, with "knowledge-based" industries and something LMDC calls a "Freedom Park."

The truth is that until Osama bin Laden's butchers took to the air, Downtown was thriving. It was (and remains) the incubator of more than $3 trillion a year in global capital, and of one-fifth of the city's tax revenue.

As of Sept. 10, 2001:

* Downtown's 100 million square feet of office space were almost fully spoken for. Even in a slump, the 7 percent vacancy rate was much lower than in the early '90s, and the envy of any business district in America except for Midtown.

Sure, with sublets, "availability" was rising. But real estate is a cyclical business, remember?

* Downtown's residential population had leapt to 25,000 compared with just 10,000 in the early '90s. New apartments were filling as soon as they became available.

If Downtown's future was so bleak, why did so many people want to live there? Why were new hotels opening?

* Downtown was in its best physical condition in generations - congested, but clean, virtually crime-free, full of wonderfully restored older buildings, and blessed with a vibrant streetscape few other cities could match.

Remarkable qualities for a district defamed as obsolete. The only thing that failed Lower Manhattan was two airplanes crashing into its tallest towers.

If we let that event govern what we do next, then Mohamed Atta is still calling the shots.