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An anthology of essays strives for "diversity," but most of its
voices sound numbingly similar.
By Phillip Lopate
October 2002
One of the classic responses to trauma is obsession, a condition that is
both static and subject to developmental phases. With 9/11, if you're a
New Yorker you have the added tendency to take the tragedy personally: maybe
you keep dwelling on the moments that led up to the event, the way it hit
you, the most tenuous connection you might have to the victims or neighborhood
firemen, the smell of singed paper floating in the sky. After
awhile, obsession summons its counterresponse: revulsion. You fight
thinking in that direction (Enough, already!); the discourse of others on
the subject fills you with nausea; all pundits' responses seem disgustingly
predictable, overly sentimental, monstrously unfeeling--or in any case,
compromised by professional self-interest and prior ideology. You go through
a stage where you try to "contextualize," shrink its importance
somehow, put it in historical perspective. Then it hits you again: this
wasn't like anything else, it won't go away. September 11 has impaled us
like a lepidopterist's specimen. It's not so much that "everything
changed," as that we cannot seem to move from that spot.
So you look around for enlightenment. What better place to start than After
the World Trade Center: Rethinking New York City, a book that purports
to help you examine the traumatic event and reflect on the future of
New York? Edited by Michael Sorkin and Sharon Zukin, it's a selection of
essays by a commendable list of architectural historians, social scientists,
urbanists, and cultural critics, who have all done highly respected work
in the past. And if the results seem by and large so disappointing--such
dreck--you may chalk it up to the rushed nature of collective topical responses
or the awfulness of the precipitating event, which freezes the mind into
rigidities.
The editors make a big point of calling for the incorporation of diverse,
frequently excluded voices in the debate about the World Trade Center (WTC)
site. They seem to have gone out of their own way to include minority writers
such as John Kuo Wei Tchen, Moustafa Bayoumi, and Arturo Ignazio Sanchez;
but all hope of playful mental variety goes out the window when it comes
to the contributions, whose political slant, rhetoric, and writing styles
are for the most part numbingly similar.
Here is their general line: the United States is "the most dangerous
of rogue states" and the WTC had epitomized "the new neoliberal
financialization of the global economy," according to Neil Smith
("New neoliberal," oy gevalt!). Behind their seemingly
"innocent" exterior, David Harvey writes, "the towers therefore
symbolized something far more sinister. They represented the callous disregard
of U.S. financial and commercial interests for global poverty; the
militarism that backs authoritarian regimes wherever convenient," and
so on and so forth for another half-page list, which includes inadequate
AIDS funding, SUVs, and the World Bank. (It's curious how no one mentions
in this argument that the WTC was used mostly for low-rent back-office
operations and was not at all the command center of global capitalism.)
Anyway, we must "contemplate the building of the World Trade Center
itself as a destructive act--specifically, an act planned by the city's
oligarchs," says Eric Darton, who reiterates the silly idea that its
construction was "a manifestation of terrorism." M. Christine
Boyer chimes in with, "The apotheosis of American-style finance
capitalism, those towers were the heights of hubris."
Sounds catchy, but why "hubris," exactly? What gods were we affronting?
We must go back to the original sin: "The Munsee Lenape viewed this
land as held in common trust for the creator Kishelemulong, and it could
neither be sold nor owned," John Kuo Wei Tchen intones. Dutch governor
Kieft's massacre of the Munsees and seizure of their land constituted "the
true origins of modern New York City." Andrew Ross traces the bad karma
of the WTC site to the attempt to build several blocks east, on what had
been an African-American burial ground. Let's call this the Poltergeist
theory of history: in that movie, you may recall, ghosts whose burial grounds
had been disturbed by a greedy developer returned to avenge the desecration.
Several commentators point knowingly to the razing of the nearby Little
Syria quarter by the construction of the Brooklyn-Battery tunnel. "Expediting
auto traffic to suburbia took priority over the community of politically
powerless city dwellers," Tchen says. "The Syrians had to leave
and restart their businesses and their lives somewhere else. Many moved
across the harbor to Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn." Where they seem
to have done quite well, by the way. And since when is Brooklyn "suburbia"?
What Manhattan-centricism! I live in Brooklyn, take that tunnel at least
three times a week into Manhattan, and am forever grateful for its existence.
The ethos of this collection is consistently against large infrastructure
projects, real estate developments, and wealthy people (most notably Nelson
and David Rockefeller); its yearning for spontaneous popular outpourings
and the old ethnic neighborhoods is touching, if a little naive. Union Square,
with its impromptu shrines, is offered again and again by the contributors
as "the appropriate ideal." ("Remember Union Square!"
becomes the sixtiesish cry here.) Not to take anything away from Union Square,
but it's not a substitute for regional planning. In her wish list, Zukin
says: "Let's make the wealthy less visible: eliminate the celebrity
photos and gossip columns of Page Six, limit the number of high-price designer
boutiques. Vow to maintain a walkable, affordable shopping center like the
Bronx's Arthur Avenue in every neighborhood." Actually Arthur Avenue
is a remnant of an old Italian neighborhood that now serves nostalgic commuters
much more than it caters to its immediate Hispanic surroundings. But okay,
sure, every neighborhood could use an Arthur Avenue. I'm less inclined to
pass a zoning law against Issey Miyake or Yohji Yamamoto, and I read the
Post's Page Six religiously--maybe I've already been hopelessly corrupted
by consumer capitalism? The funny thing is, I still regard myself as a man
of the left, basically in sympathy with these commentators' desires to see
a working-class, manufacturing port culture return to New York. But I'm
also a realist: I don't think any city can remain stagnant, and I have trouble
buying the conspiratorial crudities of Robert Fitch's The Assassination
of New York (the seminal text for most of these analyses). Beyond that
I resent having my consciousness raised with punitively haranguing or inelegant
prose. An example, by Keller Easterling: "The righteous fight
and the pallid aesthetics of some sustainability efforts that directly address
the evils of energy wastefulness with a symmetrical construction exclude
opportunities for leveraging a more complex outcome within the productive
piracy that is urbanism." Got that? This is Easterling's comment on
the aftermath of the WTC wreckage: "The acrid air perhaps even serves
as an indirect reminder of the far-flung oil economy and the attending
finance capital that was concentrated in the towers." Yuck! Is
that morally tone deaf or what? Too often, this collection reads like a
network of like-minded left-academic colleagues strutting their metaphorizing,
demystifying stuff.
Fortunately there are a half-dozen fine essays. Marshall Berman, the
group's elder statesman, weighs in with a lovely piece that weaves together
the personal and global, Joan Blondell and Le Corbusier, James Joyce and
Second Isaiah. Like Benny Carter, Berman has a warm menschy tone; he swings
and never lacks for ideas. He can also be funny, as in expressing ambivalence
about the hagiographies of the victims: "I thought I would throw up
if I had to hear about one more Little League coach. (Didn't they know how
many of these parent coaches are pure poison?)" Mark Wigley, in a thoughtful
analysis of the trade center's architecture, refreshingly turns the tables
on WTC-bashers (including myself): "And more than two million people
a year came from everywhere to stand on top of them and see what the towers
saw...This popularity was never understood by architects, who are being
asked to talk about buildings they never embraced. ...The Twin Towers played
a much bigger role in everyday experience than in the architects' discussions.
And the deeply felt affection for these buildings cannot be casually dismissed
as the delusions of an exploited public under the manipulation of corporate
image-makers."
Sorkin, an architectural critic I deeply respect--an independent thinker
and truth teller in a field notorious for waffling and fawning--provides
a solid, meaty discussion about what direction he would like New York's
recovery from the 9/11 attack to take. He is surprisingly severe about the
16-acre site, arguing that it is "a sacred place" and should remain
completely unbuilt--allowed to stay "an Elysian Field in perpetual
memory of the fallen." He does not want a massive commercial investment
in Lower Manhattan. Although he recognizes that some new office buildings
might be built down there, his main push is to spread the reconstruction
to the outer boroughs to create a more balanced city. As sound as this approach
strikes me, I'm not sure I share Sorkin's conviction that Lower Manhattan
should be deemphasized. Just because its phenomenal growth in the past few
decades was artificially stimulated by David Rockefeller or whomever
does not mean it was bogus. Curiously nobody in the book seems to want to
develop the WTC site, except for transportation specialist Robert Paaswell,
who writes with a "can-do" enthusiasm and optimism that is pleasantly
and almost comically out of joint with the other contributors. Paaswell,
the lone booster of Lower Manhattan as a financial center, reminds
us that it is already rich in transportation connections, that "financial
deal-makers don't want virtual meetings and virtual lunches," and that
we ought to prepare for the finance economy to come roaring back. The
other essayists are so averse to "financialization" as the
great enemy of New York City and civilization that you sense they wish the
recession would never end. Gotham's Mike Wallace argues the case
against the financial sector most cogently: "There's a larger
concern about the financial sector to which 9/11 has drawn attention:
wherever it's physically located, New York has become dependent on it to
an unhealthy degree. With an ever greater percentage of our jobs and tax
dollars relying on FIRE (finance, insurance, and real estate), we're
becoming ever more a one-industry town." Wallace would like to see
a reinvestment in manufacturing, biotechnology, the port, and moderate-income
housing--in fact, a whole "New Deal" for American cities, on the
scale of FDR's programs. He reminds us thrillingly of the New Deal's magnificent
part in building modern New York City; it sounds utopian and improbable,
but it did happen, after all, and could again. At the very least Sorkin
and Wallace put forward intelligent urban-planning schemes of what is to
be done at this moment, parts of which we can embrace and others feel free
to reject. Finally, Edwin G. Burrows, Gotham's coauthor, provides
a clear, straightforward account of other historical periods when Manhattan
has been under attack or deeply vulnerable. It's a salutary reminder, to
those of us irregularly recovering from the trauma of 9/11, that we have
been there before.
Phillip Lopate is completing a book on the New York City waterfront.
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