September 11

I mentioned earlier this week that my wife and I are headed to New York City soon with my nieces and nephews and a couple of their spouses. I told them it was their trip to do what they wanted. One thing I told them was not worth doing was heading down to the World Trade Center site. There’s nothing there to see. Now, it appears they want to do some other things down at the tip so we in all likelihood will pass by the site. But, at least as short a time ago as last Christmas, there really was nothing there to see.

Does anyone else out there find this outrageous? Appalling? Remember the cries that went up in the days and weeks after the buildings came down? “Build them higher!” was the call. We wanted to spit in the eye of the terrorists and their enablers and shown them that as Americans we could not be intimidated.

Now I was never part of the “build them higher” crowd. I knew from my time in New York what the main complaint about the World Trade Center area was, besides its ugliness: it took away the street grid and left the area at night a barren wilderness that no one would go near. There were quite a few nice plans though there was one in particular being pushed by the folks over at City Journal that was gorgeous, stately, grand. Instead they picked the Libeskind travesty. I started a blog back in 2003 that died a quick death, but here is what I wrote there in February of that year:

The selection for the World Trade Center design is a travesty - not that it's much or any better than the other finalists. The Libeskind design team must have included George Jetson (and his boy Elroy) - all post-modern angles coming from every which way, nothing having any relation to anything else, nothing pleasing to the eye. To my eye, it's jarring. What's more, it has nothing to do with the other architecture in NYC. The finest architecture in the city in either a neo-classical or art deco style - and now we'll have this thing soaring above the skyline, sticking out like a sore thumb, like aliens have invaded and set up their own world smack in the middle of Lower Manhattan. Furthermore, the design doesn't take into consideration the rest of Lower Manahattan life, which during the 1990s had evolved into a 24 hour a day area - excluding the World Trade Center, which after dark became a desolate wilderness due to its mass and lack of streets. By not bringing back the street grid that the orginal Trade Center replaced, they've guaranteed the same will happen again. It's a shame. They could have done something grand. They could have put up classical buildings that included the necessary office and retail space and still had a beautiful memorial and plenty of green space. Something that, once you turned the corner and saw it all would take your breath away. Instead, they picked a design that, with all it's high-tech post-modern space age newness, is banal, and barren. As Janet Flanner said about the the decision to build the Tour Montparnasse in Paris, which scarred the Parisian skyline in a similar fashion, "C'est bien triste."

But now, eight years later, nothing. My wife said she heard on the news this morning that the memorial should be open soon and apparently the base of the ‘Freedom Tower’ has been laid. The Port Authority executive director says they want it complete by 9/11/2011 (“all else pales in comparison,” he says) but I wouldn’t lay a dime on that bet. I’m also concerned that the memorial will be weepy and PC, rather than grand and tough. We’ll see.

Oh, and there’s this, from one of the articles I just looked up about the subject:

Also gracing the site is the "East-West Connector," a striking subterranean passageway 60 feet below the streets of lower Manhattan that will revolutionize the way tens of thousands of New Yorkers commute to their jobs.

Great. Send everyone underground. Keeping the grid would have made this unnecessary, and it would have allowed street-level businesses to flourish. New York deserved better.