It’s One Way to Get Your Hands on a Bit of New York Real Estate

On a topic of more general importance for the urban psyche: If the museum starts updating post-2001 commercial projects like the Edge in Williamsburg, won’t it be anachronistic to leave the twin towers standing?

The museum will not put a hole at ground zero, Mr. Strauss said. Instead, once the new skyscrapers planned for the site are in place, a model of them will replace the model of the towers.

“That’s something that obviously we’d like the developer to take care of,” Mr. Strauss added, hinting at the $10,000 donation. “But we’d probably do it anyway, since it’s such an important structure to the city.”

But that decision is years away, with the ground zero project facing logistical delays and the challenges of the economic downturn, unless a tribe of enormous aliens comes up with an Adopt-a-Building program for the real city.