After the World Trade Center

After the World Trade Center After the AA/orld Trade Center RETHINKING NEW YORK CITY MICHAEL SORKIN and SHARON ZUKIN EDITORS Routledge Taylor & Francis Group New York London Permission to reprint images on pages 92 & 133 is gratefully acknowledged. Berenice Abbott. Radio Row, Cortland Street between Washington and Greenwich Streets, April 18, 1936. Reprinted by Permission of the Museum of the City of New York, Federal Arts Projects Berenice Abbott. Lebanon Restaurant, 88 Washington Street between Rector and Mor~is Streets, August 12, 1936. Reprinted by permission of the Museum of the City of New York, Federal Arts Project The following excerpt was previously published. Permission to reprint granted by Basic Books, a division of Perseus Books Group. Darton, Eric. Excerpt from Divided ~ Stand: A Biography ofNew York sWorld Trade Center. Copyright © Basic Books 1999, pp. 118-19. First published in 2002 by Routledge 29 West 35th Street New York, NY 10001 This edition published 2012 by Routledge Routledge Routledge Taylor & Francis Group Taylor & Francis Group 711 Third Avenue 2 Park Square, Milton Park New York, NY 10017 Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Copyright © 2002 Michael Sorkin and Sharon Zukin All rights reserved. No part of this book may be printed or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafrer invented, including photocopying and recording, or any other information storage or retrieval system, with out permission in writing from the publisher. Library ofCongress Cataloging-In-Publication Data is available from the Library ofCongress. Sorkin, Michael and Sharon Zukin After the world trade center: rethinking New York City ISBN: 0-415-93479-6 (hardback) CONTENTS I MICHAEL SORKIN AND SHARON ZUKIN Introduction vii 1 | MARSHALL BERMAN When Bad Buildings Happen to Good People 1 2 | SHARON ZUKIN Our World Trade Center 13 3 | EDWIN G. BURROWS Manhattan at War 23 4 | JOHN KUO WEI TCHEN Whose Downtown?!? 33 5 | BEVERLY GAGE The First Wall Street Bomb 45 6 | DAVID HARVEY Cracks in the Edifice of the Empire State 57 7 | MARK WIGLEY Insecurity by Design 69 8 | ERIC DARTON The Janus Face of Architectural Terrorism: Minoru Yamasaki, Mohammed Atta, and Our World Trade Center 87 9 | NEIL SMITH Scales of Terror: The Manufacturing of Nationalism and the War for U.S. Globalism 97 10 | M. CHRISTINE B0YER Meditations on a Wounded Skyline and Its Stratigraphies of Pain 109 Vi AFTER THE WORLD TRADE CENTER 11 | ANDREW ROSS The Odor of Publicity 121 12 | M0USTAFA BAYOUMI Letter to a G-Man 131 13 | ARTURO IGNACIO SÁNCHEZ From Jackson Heights to Nuestra America: 9/11 and Latino New York 143 14 | PETER MARCUSE What Kind of Planning After September 11? The Market, the Stakeholders, Consensus-or ... ? 153 15 | SETHA M. LOW Spaces of Reflection, Recovery, and Resistance: Reimagining the Postindustrial Plaza 163 16 | ROBERT PAASWELL A Time for Transportation Strategy 173 17 | KELLER EASTERLING Enduring Innocence 189 18 | MICHAEL S0RKIN The Center Cannot Hold 197 19 | MIKE WALLACE New York, New Deal 209 ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS 225 INDEX 231 MICHAEL SORKIN and SHARON ZUKIN Introduction THEIR ABSENCE IS INDELIBLE: the Twin Towers were land- marks, buildings you could not lose sight of no matter where you were. They told you which way to face when you wanted to walk downtown, were your first view of the city when dri- ving in from New Jersey, and anchored the skyline when you were flying out of JFK. As you rode the D train over the East River into Manhattan after dark, they were fluorescent chess- boards against the black night sky. Sometimes sinister, sometimes beautiful, sometimes just banal, they were icons of New York City—the best-known buildings in the world, the Ever- est of our urban Himalayas. When we saw the smoke and flames streaming from the towers in the hour before they fell, none of us imagined the collapse to come. And no matter how often we saw the media replays, it remained hard to believe these buildings were mor- tal, let alone the instrument of the death of thousands. How- ever numbed we were by the compulsive repetition, we still couldn't get enough of it, couldnt stop staring at the plume of smoke that marked the void for weeks. Suddenly, New York's gorgeous mosaic was tiled in tomb- stones by this equal-opportunity mass murder. The third-gen- eration Irish, Italian, and Jewish stockbrokers, the women who had worked their way up to executive assistants and vice presidents, the Indian and Pakistani computer experts, the Caribbean security guards, and the Mexican cooks: of 50,000 who worked in the World Trade Center, nearly 3,000 died there. And they remain incredibly present—in moving daily vii AFTER THE WORLD TRADE CENTER obituaries in the New York Times, in the missing posters that still cover so many walls, in the lists of the fallen outside our firehouses. Forced into a citizenship of common loss, the city banded together soberly, spontaneously, generously, and with moving and unaccustomed civility. We lit candles in our doorways at dusk. We gathered in Union Square, turning it into a shrine and memorial, layered with photos, hand- written messages, schoolchildren's drawings, expressions of sympathy and sorrow from flight attendants who had been spared by the luck of the draw. New York was ready for its close-up in those early days, and the rest of the country responded movingly. One night, a girl called one of us from a small town in Oregon. "Just dialed your number because I wanted to tell someone in New York how sorry we are." But the mist of emotion also concealed both the dimensions of the loss and the gradual worsening of old problems. It is estimated that 95,000 jobs were lost as the result of the tragedy, but we had also lost 75,000 jobs in the previous year. City finances are teetering at the brink of fiscal meltdown, and the mayor has prepared us for a new round of cutbacks that we can ill afford. Our picture of the city as a place of toler- ance and freedom, where poor people can get an education and rise in the world, is more and more at risk. New York, the country, and the world are in the midst of an economic recession. A Republican president who got little support from New York City voters is fighting a new kind of war, and hands are daily wrung about the difficulty of extracting promised aid from Washington. A Re- publican governor who is mounting a reelection campaign has set up his own pipelines to Wall Street and is counting on the imminent adoption of a rebuilding plan with his name on it. And a new Republican mayor, whose career has been made exclusively in the financial community, must cope with radically diminished resources and raised expectations. All this occurs amid a heightened sense of global risk. We already have new deputy police commissioners in charge of intelligence and counterterror- ism, drafted from the CIA. What, then, should we rebuild? Should the site be left as a memorial as many—including numerous survivors of the victims—urge? Okla- homa City and Berlin have been wracked by prolonged conflicts over the Introduction iX shape and meaning of such memorials. Do we want a garrison city, barri- caded against future attacks? Lower Manhattan hasn't been one since the threat of a British invasion subsided in the early nineteenth century. Do we want another downtown corporate financial center? Wall Street has been propped up by public subsidies and urban renewal plans for years, including, most recently, a huge—if suddenly shaky—tax giveaway to the New York Stock Exchange to build a new headquarters across the street from its old one. The office market itself has dramatically softened, sug- gesting that new space downtown is unlikely to be produced by simple supply and demand. Since the fifties, companies in Lower Manhattan have been moving their headquarters to cheaper, greener pastures in the suburbs and setting up back offices far away, from Brooklyn to Bangalore. The computer rev- olution of the eighties, with its opportunities for radical decentralization, accelerated the trend. And with the advent of electronic trading in the nineties, all financial markets have had the potential to "dematerialize," leaving Lower Manhattan as the historic cradle of New York and a cul- tural center but eviscerating its old logics of concentration. Clearly, new styles of density must be introduced, new kinds of mix. Most important, new voices must be heard. Unfortunately, the public agency that holds the power to make deci- sions about the site, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC), is cast in the old Port Authority mold. A committee of the powerful with only one representative from the local residential community, its chaired by a Republican deal-maker and former director of Gold- man Sachs (itself about to move its entire equity trading department to a new billion-dollar complex in New Jersey). This Robert Moses-style authority has been given huge powers of legal circumvention and freedom from democratic oversight. On the bright side, this reversion to cronyism and the rule of money has been oflfset by the formation of numerous new civic associations bent on studying the rebuilding issue and producing schemes for renewal. None, however, has any real authority Though the LMDC declared an initial "listening" period, it has held no public meet- ings. What it actually hears remains to be seen. Anyone who is seriously listening, however, will hear a loud cacoph- X AFTER THE WORLD TRADE CENTER ony.

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