The interiors follow the same pattern of discreet corporate pomp: black columns, marble floors, rotunda lobbies that quickly deadend. It's ironic that something grandiosely selfstyled "the World Financial Center" should show so few public signs of the business activity ostensibly taking place within its walls. You come to a complex with such a name expecting to see, smell, or hear evidence of "filthy lucre" passing hands; and all you are given are boutiques, bookstores, temporary art exhibits, restaurants. At the very least, it would have been nice to have a public viewing gallery' overlooking one of the trading floors, such as the New York Stock Exchange offers. Compared with Wall Street, that narrow ghetto of passions, where the hoarse futures traders, elderly messengers, and young runners rub elbows, argue the headlines, and grab a quick hot dog before diving back into the fray, the World Financial Center has the abstract ambience of a new conference center. Some eerie social selection seems to have weeded out the colorful Wall Street characters, the oldtimers, street vendors, shoeshine men, errand boys, loiterers, not to mention drifters or lowlifes, and left only men and women in dark suits and gray flannel decorously passing each other in cool, neutral hallways. Many of the people who work in the World Financial Center are commuters from the tristate area. What the center gives them is a work environment that quarantines them from the city: they can arrive on trains or commuter buses, take the elevator to their desks, do all errands within the connected buildings, and never have to interact with the ungainly streets of New York. The sadness of Battery Park City is that it may never feel part of the city; its smugness is that it may not want to be. New Yorkers who work elsewhere have little reason to travel to the World Financial Center for shopping, since most of its retail outlets are branches of ubiquitous stores. There is, of course, the Winter Garden, the World Financial Center's dramatic indoor public space, with its sixteen palm trees and frequent free performances. At first I was swept away by the improbably giddy grandeur of the place: its ribbed, vaulted glass roof, its immense staircase ideal for royal balls. On subsequent visits I felt hemmed in by the retail outlets and food courts that made it seem less a true public space than a leftover from mall shopping. The celebrated palm trees, meant to suggest columns, are forbidding and severe, thanks to their spiky, plasticlike bark-not a tree you want to get close to. I would have preferred a real winter garden, lush, verdant, and steamy. The Winter Garden has recently been restored and reopened (it had to be closed, after taking a heavy blow from a pedestrian bridge shoved into its midsection on September n, 2001). One feels guilty picking on Battery Park City after all it has gone through since September 11.