Thoughts on the Second Anniversary of September 11, 2001

James Howard Kunstler 

 

     Last night, PBS aired Ric Burns's three-hour post-script to his previously completed documentary on the history of New York City. The postscript was solely concerned with the rise and fall (and thirty-year career) of the World Trade Center. The program had the same majesterial air as the original material and provided rich insights into a perplexing story beyond even the scope of the fantastic tragedy that occurred there.
      One theme stood out: theTwin Towers were uniformly reviled as works of architecture per se. Two commentators in particular were unsparing in their scorn: Robert A.M. Stern, dean of the Yale School of Architecture and Paul Goldberger, architecture critic for The New Yorker magazine. (The redoubtable Ada Louise Huxtable, critic emeritus of the New York Times was not hot on them either). The towers were variously labeled banal, grandiose, boring, dreary, grim, vacuous gross abstractions, and objects of extreme hubris. Goldberger said that the windswept plaza at the base -- "a cement football field" -- was never peopled during the buildings' entire thirty year lifespan, noting that the place even looked dead when the movie musical The Wiz was filmed there. Many people who worked there, they said, never felt comfortable. There weren't even any good views out of it because the structural steel beams that bore all the buildings' weight were so close together that the windows were like narrow slits. The site plan destroyed a fine-grained network of downtown streets, leaving a poorly-connected superblock and erasing scores of historic buildings. The two towers cast immense shadows that blocked sunlight to thousands of other buildings downtown and darkened streets. They turned out to be the last sheer behemoths of their kind in New York City, and a few scant years later even their record height was surpassed by a building in Chicago.
       The WTC was also regarded by many commentators as a wildly misconceived land development catastrophe -- much of the blame falling on David Rockefeller, head of the Chase Manhattan Bank, and his brother Nelson, four-term governor of New York -- both of them archetypal figures of Modernist gargantuanism, with Promethean ambitions. (Nelson went on to build another monumental architectural abortion, the Empire State Plaza in Albany, which virtually destroyed the heart of New York's capital city.)
       The WTC was obsolete before it was finished, the talking heads said. It horribly skewed real estate valuations in all of lower Manhattan by adding 10 million square feet of rentable space to the district at a time when Wall Street was already drowning in vacant offices. Since it was owned by the the Port Authority, the WTC was tax-exempt and contributed nothing to the city treasury. By the time it was finished, most of the finger piers along Manhattan's West Side were crumbling, and New York's function as a shipping port was surrendered completely to New Jersey. The towers were not fully leased up until the 1990s, when a dubious financial boom based on Dot.com public offerings, Enron scams, and other hallucinated business schemes, sent the money industry into a toxic transport.
       The few people who adored the Twin Towers included a high-wire artist named Phillipe Petite who pulled off the great acrobatic feat of rigging a cable between the towers and then capering a quarter-mile above the streets on it one morning in 1974. The documentary spends an inordinate amount of its running time on this incident, and on M. Petite's poetical remembrences of what was, after all, a rather narcissistic stunt -- though one perfectly suited to an extremely egotistical pair of buildings.
      The rest of the story, of course, is horror and death. A beautiful September morning so clear that the very air seemed to possess powers of magnification. The terrifying video clips of airplanes appearing out of nowhere slicing into both towers. Great smoky orange gouts of flame. The doomed jumpers. The astonishing collapse into little more than dust and pink vapor. The long tearful aftermath. . . .
       I mention all this coming up on the two-year anniversary of the tragedy, because after watching the story it seems to me that the proposed re-design for the site by architect Daniel Liebeskind is perhaps even more horrible, more misconceived, more arrogant, and more foolish, and perhaps more evil than the original Twin Towers themselves. Liebeskind proposes a set of skewed, warped, tortured, and torqued glass boxes, offset by a decorative tower even taller than the two that fell down. The "monument" to the dead is nothing more than the excavated "tub" of the original retaining walls of the foundation.
       Have we learned nothing?
       In the 1960s, the Rockefeller brothers sought a hugeness of scale for its own sake, a symbolic upthrust of steel and concrete crudly asserting American power rampant -- one tower for each brother. The original WTC had nothing to do with the life of the city per se, especially the life of the street -- a point Goldberger returned to many times. Liebeskind's replacement is really no different, except that this time, in the spirit of our age, the venture is just an exercise in fashion and celebrity dressed up with phony graduate school metaphysical theoretics.
       Both in the Burns film, and elsewhere in the press recently, commentators have made the point that the land development process in New York is much more open and democratic now than it was in the days when the Rockefeller boys and the Port Authority ran roughshod over everybody else. I wonder if we are giving ourselves too much credit. The supposedly democratic process surrounding the redevelopment design competition produced, with one exception, a bunch of profoundly anti-urban, tricked-up, grandiose art stunts, no less narcissistic than Phillipe Petite's 1974 caper, but far less honest.* What's more, we are now entering a period of prolonged strife over the world's remaining fossil fuel supplies that will make this kind of mega-project an instant and extreme anachronism if not a complete failure.
       The hard truth about democracy is that people don't necessarily get what they expect, but they get what they deserve.
       Let's really honor the dead and construct something truly worthy of both them and ourselves.

*The exception was the entry by Steven Peterson and Barbara Littenberg, a traditional civic plaza comprehensibly enfronted by normal buildings, with a restored street grid.