WTC staircase plan slammed.

As groundbreaking on Larry Silverstein's WTC Tower 2 project looms closer, the fate of the World Trade Center's Survivors Staircase--the last above-ground standing remnant of the 2001 bombing that many survivors followed to safety--is threatened again.

The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation that has taken over responsibility for the edifice is considering a proposal to cut up portions of the staircase--which currently sits in the footprint of Tower 2--and incorporate several stairs, or the treads, into the new building.

The proposal--which will be reviewed following a public response period of 30 days--is driving preservationists, including those forming the Lower Manhattan Emergency Preservation Fund established immediately after 9/11, to consider taking more drastic measures.

"We feel very strongly that kind of approach, dismantling something that is already a ruin, would reduce both its impact and its intelligibility to the public, and that it would be a big mistake" said Frank E. Sanchis III, senior vice president of the Municipal Art Society, one of the five groups that form the LMEPF.

"We feel that, collectively, if they ever had the desire and the will to preserve it, they obviously could have. They have a very talented designer and archeological ruins have been incorporated into large buildings in the world as features of new spaces, such as those at the Louvre [Museum in Paris, France], so it seems to us that they were simply instructed not to do that."

At a meeting last week, the LMDC reportedly rejected a plan proposed by structural engineer, Robert Stillman, who functioned as an independent consultant, to move the staircase in its entirety. Stillman estimated the move would cost somewhere between $500,000 and $700,000 to complete. Those supporting dismantling the staircase claimed such a procedure would cost Over $2 million.

The staircase--which has been listed as one of America's 11 most endangered places by the National Trust for Historic Registry--has been championed by advocates since 2001.

"The developers are anxious to move forward and we are in a way being cast as an impediment to that happening and that is really not the case. If they had taken any of our suggestions to heart or come up with a reasonable alternative, this would have been finished by now," Sanchis III said.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey declined to comment on the public response period. Nobody could be reached at the LMDC for comment.