THE rebuilding of ground zero and the erection of the Freedom Tower in New York have been stalled by security concerns.

The soaring design by the architects Daniel Libeskind and David Childs, with a spire rising 1,776ft above Manhattan, has gone back to the drawing board.

When the plans were unveiled George Pataki, the governor of New York state, boasted that the proposed skyscraper, next to the site of the World Trade Center’s twin towers, would be the safest ever built. But New York police declared last week that more could be done to protect the site from terrorists.

The expected 2009 opening of the tower has been put back and the site of the September 11 attacks of 2001 is still a gaping hole.

Ground zero was supposed to be a hive of activity by now. Excavation work for the foundation of the Freedom Tower was due to begin last February and piles of steel should already have been driven into the ground. But the steel has not even been ordered.

Nearly four years on, only one building has emerged from the rubble: No 7, World Trade Center, erected by the twin towers’ owner, Larry Silverstein. He has yet to find a single tenant. Earlier this month Goldman Sachs, the investment bank, shelved plans to build its own $2 billion (£1.05 billion), 40-storey headquarters at the site.

Families of the 9/11 victims are growing increasingly upset. “They just want a place to go that is solemn and peaceful and quiet,” said Scott Warner of September’s Mission, a foundation dedicated to establishing a memorial to the nearly 2,800 people who died that day.

“They feel they have been put at the back of a very long queue.”

Nina Libeskind, the wife and business partner of the architect, said the delay was manageable. “We are having to take a new look at the Freedom Tower but there are many possible solutions. We have to make security as a first priority.”

In a scathing editorial last week, The Wall Street Journal mourned the “death of a dream”. The iconic tower, originally designed by Daniel Libeskind, has already been shorn of much of its original drama to make way for a more practical office structure. “We have lost what we hoped to gain — a creative rebirth downtown,” the newspaper concluded.

Libeskind, who was forced to accept Childs as an architectural partner, has been turning his attention elsewhere. He has won lucrative commissions building apartment blocks in cities across America.

Sacramento, the fashionable home of Arnold Schwarzenegger, the governor of California, may get its own version of the Freedom Tower before New York. There are striking similarities between Libeskind’s designs for ground zero and the geometric shape of Aura, a 37-storey apartment block, which has the same sharply graded, sloping roof without the spire.

The project’s architect, Yama Karim, said the likeness was not intentional. “But you’re absolutely right, there is a resemblance,” he admitted.

Libeskind is also building a high-rise block of flats in Covington, Kentucky, and has commissions for more apartment buildings in Toronto, New Jersey and Denver, Colorado.

“We are doing lots of middle-range housing, it’s the hottest thing,” said Nina Libeskind. The developers are touting the Denver project with the slogan: “Location, location, architect”.

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