Or would you like a New World Peace Center consisting of a series of crabgrass-like towers covered with stock-ticker message boards programmed to read "Fight for Environment" or "Remember Seattle"?

Or what about twin titanium towers that look a little like the coffin they put Spock in at the end of "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan"?

Or how about a pedestrian bridge to Jersey City?

Or how about nothing but a sheet of glass covering Ground Zero so that "the evil act" will "not be forgotten"?

The choice is yours, New York. These and other ideas for a World Trade Center memorial currently line the walls at the Max Protetch Gallery on West 22nd Street, which asked 50 of the nation's best architects and visionaries to delve into the hottest controversy to hit this city since the Indians realized they got snookered when they sold the place for $24.

Controversy? You bet. This is a city, after all, where a nice gesture like trying to put up a statue in honor of the city's fallen firefighters can devolve into infighting, lawsuits, petition drives and charges of reverse racism.

Don't count on the World Trade Center memorial being any less dicey, as even a quick stroll through Max Protetch's eponymous gallery could reveal.

For every architect who wants to build the "new Twin Towers" at 110, 111 or even 120 stories, there's another architect who envisions the former trade center site as a perfect place to build a nice residential neighborhood with a small memorial in the middle.

And for every architect on either side, there's a relative of a World Trade Center victim who believes that the entire 16 acres are hallowed ground, Manhattan's largest cemetery, that should remain untouched.

This is not going to be easy.

"This is New York," said Protetch. "We're never going to get a consensus on what the memorial should look like. But as long as we build something great, people will come to love it."

Of course, when I asked Protetch to define the word "great," he paused as if I'd asked him to calculate pi to the 45th digit.

And that's the problem. Every architect peddling his wares has a different definition of "great" or "appropriate."

For architect Brad Cloepfil, who designed a modest maze of 30-story buildings, it means low scale. "Building tall would be inappropriate," he said.

Meanwhile, an architecture firm called Foreign Office Architects dismissed the entire notion of a memorial in favor of building the world's tallest building.

"Let's not even consider remembering," said their proposal, which certainly isn't going to win points for tact. "We have a great site in a great city and the opportunity to have the world's tallest building back in New York." (Yeah, the victims' families are going to love that one!)

In the end, of course, the choices will not be limited to putting a bull's-eye on lower Manhattan with the world's tallest building or planting 16 acres of "moist grass" so we can all sit around reflecting like they do in Oklahoma City.

No, before this process is over, there will be so many designs for a World Trade Center memorial that the only thing we'll want to memorialize is our sanity.

gersh.kuntzman@verizon.net