The Site

I’m looking forward to seeing the site of the World Trade Center. The last time I was there, it was still just a massive hole in the ground. Daniel Liebeskind’s ickily named “Freedom Tower” was not yet under construction, and the press was all asking what the hell was taking so long. Now, the Tower (mercifully renamed World Trade One and seeming to have hit a reasonable balance between super-high security and aesthetics) is well under way, the Memorial is about to open, and the site is apparently beginning to be recognizable as what it will become, instead of just standing as an endless reminder of destruction.

For the record, I hated the process of re-imagining the World Trade site, and I’m not crazy about the designs that have come out of it, at least as they look in the marketing materials I’ve seen. The process was too violently public, gave too much weight to too many unprepared stakeholders, and seemed, in fact, intended specifically to prevent anything wonderful from ever being designed at Ground Zero.

But you never know how these things are going to turn out. Maybe the actual plan and new buildings will work wonderfully in person. Having something there again is pretty wonderful in itself, and the fact that much of it is bright, open public space can hardly be bad. In the beginning, it seemed that sentimentality was the only voice that held any sway in this, but with any luck the reality has moved past that. There is hope.

The site has certainly gone through radical stages of evolution in this past decade. In the days before 9/11, I knew the World Trade Center well. I remember watching a 60 Minutes story about its opening when I was a kid, and so the first time I ever visited New York it was, of course, one of the places I went. I rode up to Windows on the World and looked out, disappointed at how flat and uninformative the view turned out to be from so high, yet awed at the same time by its undeniable monumentality. That was pretty emblematic of my feelings about the whole place, come to think of it. It was monumental, impressive, on such a huge scale that it demanded awe. But it was also unbelievably dull architecturally, full of the worst excesses of latter day brutalism, absolutely cold emotionally and dull aesthetically. I spent a fair amount of time there, both on visits and in the first couple years I lived in New York. I always wished I could like it better, but even without liking, I was drawn there.

On the ground level and underneath, it came much more alive as a transit center. I traveled through it frequently — daily, for almost a year when I lived in New Jersey, and for frequent business meetings before and after that period. I hung out at the Borders on the plaza’s northeast corner — in fact, I applied for a job there at one point — and I resolutely bought sandwiches and ate out underneath the Towers when I was in the neighborhood.

For a long time after 9/11, we weren’t allowed anywhere within sight of Ground Zero, and I wanted desperately to see it. The site had become a ghostly void in my mind. I could see the old things — the plaza, its central fountain, the Borders building, the stairs up and down and into the PATH train station — but I knew they were all gone. Or, at least, most of them were gone. We heard some of the lower levels were relatively intact, and the lower buildings, like where Borders had been, still stood in the news footage. What did it look like? What was its new identity? What picture could replace the dead one in my mind that I knew was a gone-forever illusion?

On the first day West Broadway was opened again to pedestrians, I went down and looked. The number of people like me was huge. We stepped slowly, keeping our places, moving along a construction sidewalk on the west side of the street. I’m reminded now of climbing up through the Statue of Liberty, innumerable people climbing stairs one after the other, moving like ants, quiet, industrious, intent on getting up, getting through, looking, getting out. On West Broadway we stared. We were nearly silent. We all waited, practically holding our breaths, for the few seconds when we’d be able to see down a cross-street, catch a glimpse of the site itself, see the wreckage with our own eyes. Learn what it looked like. Get to know its new identity.

The storefronts on the opposite side of the street were all ash-covered. They looked like old movie sets, as if we’d been let into a defunct backlot to see some old New York Street where movies we half remembered from our childhoods had been filmed, had seemed magical. Now everything was sort of broken, some windows were boarded up, but many more still looked as they had before the Towers fell — just covered with ash, grayed out, dead and frozen. The street looked nothing like a ruin, nothing like a bombed-out neighborhood. It looked fake, pristine but abandoned. Smaller than normal.

And the site was black and broken. Broken teeth-like steel beams, the broken, black mouth of the hole where the plaza had been. The stacks of debris still surrounding it on all sides. Broken. Ruined. So broken and so ruined it demanded whole new definitions of those words. Black as an evil king’s land in a dark, scary fairy tale. Broken as a bomb site, as an earthquake aftermath, as destruction made manifest without hope of redemption or compromise.

A few years later, a clean, windswept plateau with busy workers hauling, clearing, making way for new things while the PATH train trundled efficiently through again and commuters poured in and out. A well-done fence with remembrances printed on it, information making sense of the whole thing, giving the place’s history from mid-century through original development and to death and destruction. Sidebars for the birth of Battery Park City and the whole new downtown the Trade Center had wrought.

And now? What? We’ll see. The beginning of the new thing. New place. With ghosts, or without, I wonder?

given a voice, too much The design process identified too many stakeholders and pandered far too much — and to far too much political purpose — to sentimentality and survivor groups whose needs certainly needed to be addressed by the City but who had no business whatsoever getting involved in what is, at base, just a great big development project.