Are the public spaces contiguously external and internal?
Yes: Cortlandt Street, which becomes a pedestrianised internal shopping precinct when it crosses Church Street, is a good example. There are multiple levels to the plan, and a lot of what you call contiguousness between external and internal: for instance, you can walk from the World Financial Center through to the new train station along wide pedestrian pathways which continue all the way up to Broadway and beyond. It’s hard to say for sure, because much of the detailed design work hasn’t been done yet, but the idea is very much to have a light-filled and pleasant walk around the non-memorial areas of the site which makes it very easy to get to, say, the World Financial Center or the various PATH and subway lines. The 600,000 square feet of retail is on many different levels, from below ground to above it, and no one has any interest in recreating the fluorescent nightmare that was the original shopping mall. The retail presence, indeed, is likely to provide another easy way of gettin
