Views from the 110Th Floor

Eric Darton. Divided We Stand: A Biography of New York's World Trade Center. New York: Basic Books, 1999. 241 pp. $25.00, cloth, ISBN 978-0-465-01701-0. Angus Kress Gillespie. Twin Towers: The Life of New York City's World Trade Center. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1999. 263 pp. $26.00, cloth, ISBN 978-0-8135-2742-0. Reviewed by Jerald E. Podair Published on H-Urban (August, 2000) "You two did visit the same country, didn't terests, or a popular, triumphant symbol of urban you?", a bemused President Kennedy once asked revitalization and progress. two advisers after receiving wildly diverging re‐ For both authors, the story of the World Trade ports on the progress of the War In Vietnam.[1] Center begins with the public agency that con‐ Eric Darton's Divided We Stand: A Biography of structed it, the Port Authority of New York and New York's World Trade Center, and Angus Kress New Jersey. Established in 1921 in an effort to co‐ Gillespie's Twin Towers: The Life of New York ordinate development of the harbor area, the Port City's World Trade Center, two mirror image op‐ Authority used its bonding and condemnation posite interpretations of the city's tallest build‐ powers to attract private capital for an array of ings, might elicit a modern-day version of this re‐ public projects, virtually all of which favored the mark. Depending on one's perspective, the World automobile at the expense of mass transit. High‐ Trade Center, which officially opened in Lower way and bridge tolls permitted the Authority to Manhattan in 1973, was either a soulless architec‐ repay its bondholders without the necessity of tural monstrosity built to further the private taxation, allowing it to become a quasi-indepen‐ agendas of the city's fnancial and real estate in‐ dent entity unto itself. By the time the World Trade Center was being planned in the early H-Net Reviews 1960s, this fortress-like autonomy, in Darton's between the governors of New York and New Jer‐ view, had morphed into institutional arrogance sey (abetted by Chase Manhattan Bank chairman and unaccountability, but according to Gillespie, David Rockefeller, the brother of New York's Gov‐ had prepared the Authority for its greatest under‐ ernor Nelson Rockefeller), was announced in 1962 taking. as the future home of the World Trade Center. "Make no small plans," the early twentieth- The subsequent eviction of the residents of century American architect Daniel Hudson Burn‐ Radio Row symbolizes, to Darton, the triumph of ham once declaimed famously. "For they have not what he terms an "economic monoculture of f‐ power to stir the blood" (Gillespie, p.5). The World nance, insurance and real estate," at the expense Trade Center was such a grand plan, as both au‐ of a more diverse "agglomeration" of small and thors recognize, although unlike Gillespie, Darton medium-sized industrial firms that had comprised cites Burnham with a healthy dose of irony. But the backbone of the economy until the end of why was the World Trade Center built? Was it World War II (Darton, pp. 48, 70-71). The city's necessary? And, was it a success? Divided We port facilities, which similarly stood "in the way," Stand and Twin Towers answer these questions as both literally and fguratively, of the city's new if the authors had, indeed, visited different coun‐ economy, were unceremoniously shunted off to tries. Darton, a cultural critic, views the Center as less valuable land in New Jersey. symbolic of the power wielded by the the so- Darton also echoes most architectural critics called "FIRE" component of the city's post-World in his condemnation of the World Trade Center's War II economy: fnance, insurance, and real es‐ effect on the urban landscape. The Center was tate. "FIRE" worked with the Port Authority and constructed in the "superblock" style associated state and local government officials to raise land with the architect and urban planner Le Corbusi‐ values in Lower Manhattan by constructing what er, to whom the idea of the city street was "an ob‐ at the time were to be the world's two tallest solete notion" (Darton, p. 34). The streets on which buildings. the Twin Towers would be built were accordingly The Center's announced purpose was the cre‐ demolished and reconstructed on a massive "plat‐ ation of a central location for frms connected to form," containing a large pedestrian plaza above international trade and shipping, thereby restor‐ a parking garage. The effect, according to Darton, ing New York's port, which by the 1960s faced stiff was to create a landscape of unrivaled sterility, competition from other cities, to its former glory. devoid of the active street life that animates the Yet, as Darton argues, by this time the process by urban environment. Then there are the towers which New York shifted its economy from one themselves. Awkward, characterless, and out of based on small and medium-sized manufacturing proportion to to their surroundings, they epito‐ and shipping to a service-oriented, postindustrial mize for Darton monumentalism gone awry, a structure where "low skill, low wage" labor was wrongheaded urban architecture that is, at its superflous, was already well underway (Darton, core, anti-urban in its implications. Darton's p. 99). Downtown Manhattan land was much World Trade Center was thus the ultimate unnec‐ more valuable as a site for office towers than for essary undertaking, built in the wrong place, for the small factories and retailers that dotted the the wrong reasons, in order to help the wrong landscape, a typical example of which was the so- people, with the wrong vision for New York City. called "Radio Row," a group of streets on the far But Angus Kress Gilespie, who teaches American West Side that contained small electronics frms. Studies at Rutgers University, has few such It was this site that, after political maneuvering qualms. His World Trade Center story is a tri‐ 2 H-Net Reviews umphant one, an urban version of "The Right that had been devastated by plant closings and Stuff," with Port Authority executives, engineers, global competition. New York's post-war, post-in‐ and workmen playing the roles of authentic dustrial economy may have been inhospitable to American heroes. "There was nothing we couldn't the small businesses of "Radio Row," but it has do," he quotes the construction manager for the made the city as a whole much better able to Center. "There was no challenge that we couldn't withstand the vagaries of the world economy than tackle. There were no rules we couldn't fnd a way "port/manufacturing" cities. The World Trade Cen‐ around -- without being illegal -- to get the thing ter may well have been an architectural critic's done" (Gillespie, p. 57). Gillespie never questions worst nightmare, and an unnecessary undertak‐ the need for the World Trade Center. To him, the ing under any circumstances, but it was not the towers were almost inevitable, "just there, part of symbol of a conspiracy hatched by avaricious the landscape" (Gillespie, p. 10). His uncritical men to hijack the city's economy for their own gaze extends to the genesis of the idea for the Cen‐ purposes. It was, rather, the symbol of changes ter, which he interprets as motivated largely by that had already taken place in the city's econom‐ considerations of public spiritedness; to the oppo‐ ic culture. These changes left New York with a less sition of the occupants of "Radio Row" to the Cen‐ "diverse" economy, but, ultimately, with a healthi‐ ter, which he dismisses as narrow-minded; to the er one.[3] construction of the towers, which, despite mas‐ On the other hand, while Gillespie correctly sive cost overruns, he views in heroic, almost acknowledges the stimulating effect of the World miraculous terms; and to the operation of the Trade Center's construction on the city's economy completed buildings themselves, which he credits (by pumping some $200 million in wages into its with the economic revitalization of the downtown lifestream), his account begs too many questions Manhattan area. Gillespie even argues that the and assumes too much. There was much more to Center has become a popular symbol for the aver‐ the story of the World Trade Center than civic age New Yorker, a "warmly embraced" icon of the virtue and "can do" spirit. If there were any legiti‐ city in the late twentieth century. (Gillespie, p. mate reasons for New York's small business com‐ 126). munity to oppose the construction of the Center, Gillespie's World Trade Center,then, is every‐ we do not hear them from Gillespie; he glosses thing Darton's is not. One can almost imagine the over their objections in a few pages, citing with two authors circling warily, reacting to the other's implicit approval the opinion of the project's ar‐ feints with movements in the opposite direction. chitect that "there was not a single building worth [2] And, as is so often the case with such diametri‐ saving" in the projected construction area (Gille‐ cally opposed accounts, neither provides a com‐ spie, p. 166). He also does not explain how this un‐ pletely satisfactory interpretation. Darton is cor‐ dertaking, designed at least in theory to save the rect in arguing that the construction of the World Port of New York, instead accelerated its decline. Trade Center was the result of the workings of the One gets the impression from Twin Towers that real estate value-obsessed fnancial and corporate New York City proper still posseses a vibrant port, sectors of the city's economy, yet chooses an over‐ and that the World Trade Center played a major ly simplistic interpretive framework for this story.

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