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The study is built around the premise of an uninterrupted Greenwich Street, long ago dead-ended at points north and south by the super-block design of the original World Trade Center.However, a source familiar with planning at the WTC site tells GlobeSt.com that Greenwich Street will only be a limited access road, because of security concerns.

That doesn't deter the mission of Liz Berger, president of the Downtown Alliance, said to be the largest BID in North America. She tells GlobeSt.com the key to bringing several of Lower Manhattan's most bustling, vital and active sub-districts together is "the restoration of Greenwich Street, northward from Battery Park." She adds that she hopes "this study is yet another ambitious effort to change the character of Lower Manhattan."

Greenwich Street extends from the intersection of Ninth Avenue and Gansevoort Street in the Meatpacking district, all the way down to Battery Park at Manhattan's lower tip. Along the way, it passes through some of the city's most colorful neighborhoods, the centers of fashion, art and retail like the West Village, Tribeca and Soho.

Berger tells GlobeSt.com that the new study is not a master plan, but instead, a collection of "big ideas," what she calls the Downtown Alliance's "point of view about what ought to drive development." She notes the results of the study's work detail how "some of today's most imaginative and creative thinkers chose to illustrate those ideas."

The Greenwich South effort was led by Architecture Research Office, Beyer Blinder Bell Architects & Planners and OPEN but also featured input from Thom Mayne of Morphosis, WORKac, Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis Architects, Coen + Partners, IwamotoScott Architecture, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Dewitt Godfrey, Transsolar Climate Engineering and Jorge Colombo.

Beyer Blinder Bell partner Neil P. Kittredge tells GlobeSt.com "the potential of Greenwich South is the opportunity for it to be transformed from an overlooked district-and a major barrier separating the more vibrant areas of downtown from each other-to a lynchpin that becomes the critical link between widely varied areas, from Battery Park City to Wall Street, and from the World Trade Center site to Battery Park.

In other words, as Kittredge sums it up, "transforming the design, land uses, identity, and access to and through Greenwich South will result in a more interconnected and vibrant Lower Manhattan overall."

Berger explains that the 23 blocks south of the WTC site are not zoned differently, but for whatever reasons, the area simply developed in a different way. Looking back in time, when Henry Hudson first sailed into the New York Harbor, most of the area now being called Greenwich South was underwater. As Berger notes, the area now the subject of forward thinking sustainable designs, was actually created by landfill in the early 18th Century.

Then came years of outsized infrastructure, "from the Greenwich Street L train in the 1860s to the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, built after World War II, to the original 'super-block' design of the World Trade Center," cutting the flow of Greenwich Street at points north and south. All that further obscured and isolated the area, according to Berger.

Ultimately, the cocktail of poor planning decisions prevented the neighborhood from thriving as an urban district agrees Kittredge. He says the area's "future will depend on the re-integration of infrastructure into the city fabric and re-thinking the district as a place designed for people first.

In fact Kittredge says because the area has no "dominant use, or theme" like many of its neighbors, "it can also become the most intensely mixed-use part of Downtown, with strong combined appeal to all three major groups of users: residents, workers and visitors.

Worth noting, the New York State Department of Labor said in the fourth quarter of 2008, 314,832 were already employed in Lower Manhattan. The Downtown Alliance estimated that in 2008, 53,900 people lived in Lower Manhattan, while the area saw around six million tourists annually.

Kittredge envisions a new transportation and pedestrian link "along a reopened Greenwich Street from the Battery all the way up to the High Line, tying together a series of waterfront neighborhoods to form a new spine for the "Lower West Side" of Manhattan.Berger says of the study, "we hope it will get people talking."