While reserving its final decision until 1 World Trade Center is completed in early 2014, the council had previously been inclined to include the mast because it was clad in a fiberglass and steel enclosure called a radome. The radome was a tapering, multifaceted structure of interlocking triangles, 23 feet in diameter at its widest, that had been designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill with the sculptor Kenneth Snelson.

Without this cladding, the mast is a more straightforward pole of galvanized steel trusswork, about six feet in diameter for much of its height, intersected by wider maintenance platforms.

This additional cladding costs $20 million, and the Port Authority does not want to pay it.