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The eight new designs for the World Trade Center Memorial are coming under growing criticism on various fronts. WNYC’s Beth Fertig has this report on what happened to the original conception of saving what was left of the Towers.

In the days after the September 11th attacks, there was one image of the destruction that came to symbolize the shattered city. The poignant remains of two jagged facades looming over the piles of debris like Gothic ruins. Many people inquired about using them in a future memorial. The question was raised when former mayor Rudolph Giuliani took several members of Congress to visit the site on October first, 2001.

CONGRESSMAN: Will you leave anything up as a memorial?

GIULIANI: I think they’re going to take it all down and preserve it. And then decide what kind of memorial they want so if they can they can rebuild something like that…

But preserving those ruins wasn’t so easy.

HOLDEN: That was a great idea. The problem is that those pieces represented the bottom sections of the exterior skeleton of towers 1 and 2.

Ken Holden was in charge of the site, as former commissioner of the city’s department of Design and Construction. He says the fragile looking skeletons were really anchors – making them so heavy, that each foot of steel weighed almost a ton. And the facades were each several stories high.

HOLDEN: We were not cutting it down with intention of setting it aside for a memorial. We were trying to take it down in the fastest possible manner because leaving them standing represented a safety hazard to the construction workers, fire fighters and police officers who were working on the site.

The skeletons had to be cut into small pieces in order to be safely removed. Holden says he consulted with engineers about whether they could be taken down in a way that would allow them to be rebuilt. But he says that wasn’t possible.

HOLDEN: I imagine someone could with a gifted group of steel workers and artisans and with a considerable amount of money. My fear is that it would look somewhat Frankenstein like. And I just don’t know how much of that raw material the Port Authority has stored.

A spokesman for the Port Authority says the agency has only 31 pieces left from the North Tower’s façade. Each is about 40 to 45 feet long and 10 feet wide. They’re all cataloged and tagged in a hangar at Kennedy Airport along with the last beam that was removed from the site. But that’s just a tiny part of the wreckage. And the agency says it doesn’t have any surviving pieces from the façade of the South Tower. Ken Holden believes it was all recycled.

Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney was among those urging the city to keep the wreckage and she’s disappointed.

MALONEY: I feel that nothing would have been more appropriate than the fragments themselves. That’s the photograph that’s in my mind, that’s the one that we saw the rubble, the steel frames sticking up like arrows into our hearts.

The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation allowed for original artifacts to be used in a memorial. But that wasn't mandatory. Two of the finalists chose to incorporate pieces of steel.

In a way, that may represent an evolution. Rick Bell heads the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects. He also belongs to a group that’s criticized the new designs. Bell says the concept for a memorial is now heavily influenced by Daniel Liebeskind’s site plan – which relies on preserving part of the old foundation or slurry walls of the Trade Center.

BELL: The issues of authenticity became much more evident in the retention of the slurry wall whether at 30 feet or partially or 70 feet down. That de-emphasized in many people’s thought the need to bring back physical artifacts of the buildings themselves or the things that were in it. It doesn’t mean they’re mutually exclusive. It never did.

Bell believes there are still many possibilities for using what’s left of the towers. The LMDC says it expected a healthy debate. For WNYC I’m Beth Fertig.