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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
July 7, 2002
That hole
NEW YORK. Time passes. Where the World Trade Centre once collapsed in the heart of Manhattan there is no longer wreckage but something that looks like a standard construction site except in two respects. First it is very large. Second it is watched over by the Cross that crucifix of girders that the workmen found in the rubble and which now stands on its concrete Golgotha electrifying the 16 vacant acres. It is perfect; it could not be improved upon. Few can remember the old street grid from before the WTC was built a generation ago -- the last time this hole was dug. The fill from that hole created the platform on which the World Financial Centre was then erected out over the Hudson River where 20 piers used to jut. Between these megaprojects and the other new complexes of "Battery Park City" there is almost nothing left of the old ocean port district substantial as it was and integrated organically into the larger city. From lower Church Street to the west everything is now post-modern except the hole which is I suppose post-post-modern. This is unusual even for New York. Like London and other cities that have been very large for a very long time New York has come to defy transformation. Spectacular buildings may alter the skyline -- when they go up or when they come down -- but at ground level there are only incidental changes and the old overwhelms the new. The frequent visitor notices no major changes; even after a generation a visitor would have no problem finding the many familiar landmarks. Whole neighbourhoods seldom disappear. Walking down Fifth Avenue in the 40-degree heat this week from my hotel on 31st Street the sublime wedge of the Flatiron Building controlled the horizon as it always had erasing little novelties to its left and right. (Even a century ago the building's stone flesh was draped over a skeleton of girders like the WTC; modern building technology has been around for a long time.) It is a little-remembered fact and now a well-kept secret that New Yorkers hated the World Trade Centre right up until the morning of Sept. 11th. This was not because they had any objection to large skyscrapers; the dislike was quite particular to this pair of skyscrapers. The towers were monstrous in form. The straight rise (no set-backs) made them appear top heavy and intimidating the whole posture and geometry seemed to offer a threat. For those who worked in the WTC the windows were small the floors each an acre; for most it was like flying in a jumbo jet between the aisles: more conscious of the inflight movie and of personal discomfort than of any extraordinary vista beyond the portholes. All this height and the buildings were all interior might as well have been a cave. For the visitor the system of express and local elevators made necessary by the buildings' size and arbitrary shape were as confusing as the numbers and letters on the subway trains moving up and downtown: get on the wrong one and you will fly way past your stop. The treeless plantless windshorn alternately sunbaked or rainsqualled plaza outside provided a remarkably unpleasant experience whether entering or leaving; it was a nasty place to eat a packaged lunch. Anti-globalization protesters and such moved instinctively uptown to enjoy the character and colour of Union Square; to escape the sterility. Contrary to myth the World Trade Centre wasn't built by capitalists or by any normal economic process. Megaprojects don't work that way. It was instead the "vision" of the Port Authority of New York a free-spending municipal bureaucracy intent on raising a monument to itself and to the politicians who were its patrons. Whereas the monuments to capitalism remain the Chrysler Building and the old Bankers Trust and the Empire State Building (though this last also owed something to bureaucratic megalomania) or even such over-the-top PoMo monstrosities as the Trump Tower or Philip Johnson's "lipstick building". These were all reflections of headstrong indeed megalomaniac individuals. The World Trade Centre was instead the reflection of the will of a committee: able to waive aside such small matters as the financial and legal and other practical constraints that give an architect something to sculpt with. The architects themselves were a "team". Only something like the Port Authority drawing on an apparently bottomless municipal tax base could create a kind of virtual reality then impose it on the real world. The Islamists who wrecked the buildings displayed their pig-ignorance of America in choosing the WTC as their primary target. The various leftoids and other crazies who make up arguments for them calling the late towers "a symbol of capitalism" share in a broader absence of mind. To the end the buildings were money losers; through most of their history floors not left unrentably vacant were filled with various government agencies. Only towards the end did non-government corporations begin to absorb the assets and tenant the place. Compare if you will the architectural barrenness of modern office blocks and public housing schemes and state university campuses with the fine built heritage left by the robber barons and philanthropists (they were one and the same) of the 19th century. Compare them for that matter with the grand productions of kings nobles and churchmen of all previous centuries. Without exception the great buildings are commissioned by determined obsessive individuals. Committees can only command porridge to be made in very large generic cauldrons. So that my first thought about rebuilding on this site in lower Manhattan was: give it back to the capitalists. Divide the site into reasonably-sized lots or let the current landlord do so and fill these lots piece by piece as the market demands new offices and apartments. (Except for a glorious memorial in the footprints of the twin towers themselves and perhaps a civic chapel to St. Florian the patron of firemen). Let the site be sewn back into the garment of New York's financial district by private investments made soberly in the fullness of time. But this won't do. It won't answer to the Cross that was found by the workmen or to the thousands of bereaved families of office workers and rescuers or to the scale of the historical event. Saying my prayer in nearby Trinity Church (the Gothic prong at the head of Wall Street) I realized what New Yorkers have almost all realized: how much the buildings have grown through death how irrelevant now that they were ugly. Surrounding Manhattan should be made still more dense by taking these 16 acres out of the market. For the ground is now hallowed the hole in it is now a vessel to carry a message from our generation to future ones. Here is the one place government should step in and make a park a catacomb a battlefield memorial on a fittingly reckless scale -- something larger than money -- right in the heart of America's most vibrant city. Something on a scale suitable to commemorate a morning a moment out of time in which inconceivable good suddenly and unexpectedly triumphed over inconceivable evil. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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