Winning Back Downtown

[R. A. Hettinga]

-
>From the New York Post --
http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/5487.htm

WINNING BACK DOWNTOWN
By NICOLE GELINAS

September 11, 2003 -- IT is not yet time for New Yorkers to be sad about
the World Trade Center.
In the last months of 2001, almost every shop owner in Lower Manhattan had
a picture of the Twin Towers taped up in his storefront window to pledge
that "We Will Rebuild."

Those signs are mostly gone now. Sun-faded old photos of disappeared old
buildings are depressing, not uplifting, when it seems that we will not
rebuild but, instead, will recast Downtown as a shadow of what it once
was.

Rage and resolve are exhausting, so New Yorkers who want to make an uneasy
peace with the hole in the ground can almost be forgiven. It would be
refreshingly easy for us to join the documentarians and critics who are
going on television this week to push the WTC into history, for us to
stare down through the perimeter fence at the towers' clean bedrock
foundations and say, finally, "This is where the World Trade Center was,
and will not be again."

It would be a sweet relief, after a year of smoke and dust and glass and
funerals followed by a year of political posturing and fighting over
mediocre architectural plans, to feel only grief.

But grief comes too close to acceptance, and the hard truth is that if we
grieve now, we will place ourselves in danger of losing. Mohamed Atta and
his ugly Islamist comrades attacked the last great American city because
New York had beaten back crime, bankruptcy and a host of urban ills over
the preceding half-century to become the quintessence of Western commerce
and culture. New York must now beat back the creeping reality of a
chastened and humbled Downtown.

WE mustn't accept architect Daniel Libeskind's vision for Lower Manhattan:
an empty ghost spire rising on the skyline instead of busy office towers,
a 16-acre plot of land permanently scarred by the foundations of buildings
that were leveled by terrorists and not rebuilt, a whole new awareness of
vulnerability that will seep permanently into the city's consciousness to
displace New York's unique brand of optimism.



Several hundred survivors of 9/11 victims marched on the WTC site
yesterday to implore redevelopment officials to preserve the footprints of
the towers down seven stories to clean bedrock, enshrining a violent gash
in the core of Manhattan. The survivors feel that we must preserve acres
of physical evidence of the attack to remember that day. But they severely
underestimate the capacity of their fellow citizens to store in their
hearts forever the horror of each individual life stolen. Communities
across New York, New Jersey and Connecticut have built beautiful memorials
that encourage outsiders to remember each victim alone, uneclipsed by
9/11.

LIBESKIND and other urban planners mean well, but they want to remake New
York into something it can't be: a city that weighs the past more than it
does the future. We must resist the urge to memorialize 9/11 as an event
until we are certain that New York has escaped the fate Osama bin Laden
meant for us. Lower Manhattan does not yet need an American Express Museum
of Freedom or a 41/2-acre monument to "tragic vastness." We will probably
never need an "interpretive art space" whose proprietors will more likely
than not try to force us to learn something bad about ourselves that must
have precipitated the attack.

New Yorkers' only sin was to live and work and build in a world in which
young men don't turn passenger airplanes into guided missiles; we cannot
accept 9/11 as a referendum on the city's working skyline.

What we need is new office space - all of it - to form the bedrock for new
small-business investment.

Those who insist that Lower Manhattan doesn't yet need 11 million square
feet of new office space are really insisting that Lower Manhattan is
dead. As the Rockefeller-financed Center for an Urban Future noted Monday,
individual entrepreneurs, and not multinational investment and media
companies, will create a new future for New York. Organic growth will
finally propel New York past 9/11.

Do we want to barter away the promise of economic recovery for an
impractical, uninviting office complex built over a barren pit that
fetishizes trauma?

ONLY after we rebuild - after we repair the smashed skyline and heal the
open wound of the old WTC foundation - can we appropriately memorialize.
Only then will we begin to comprehend the immense brutality of an attack
that had no context, and only then can we allow ourselves the luxury of
mourning the senselessness of the wholesale slaughters. First, we must
take back our city and win.


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R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'