Rebuild the towers and continue the dream
Joe Valenti
Columbia Daily Spectator
NEW YORK
Feelings of patriotism over the past few months have been primarily superficial. In addition to waving the flag, Americans have been encouraged to fly, shop, drive sport-utility vehicles and attend baseball games. These acts have more to do with avoiding a recession than glorifying a nation, and fail to embrace the courage and confidence embodied in the strong character of a patriot. Meanwhile, a veritable American tradition needs courageous individuals in order to progress: the skyscraper.
Two of the world's 10 tallest buildings collapsed to the ground a few months ago, victims of their own popularity to resident and terrorist alike. They left behind a 16-acre plaza that, although full of rubble, will soon return to the imagination as a blank artist's canvas. Unfortunately, two competing proposals for occupying this canvas are anything but imaginative.
New York mayor Michael Bloomberg has endorsed a plan for four 50-story towers of "cheap and plentiful" office space. But several 50-story towers in close proximity surrounded by other tall structures are the white-collar corporate equivalent of a housing project, regardless of a prominent location. Former Mayor Giuliani has publicly endorsed not building at all on the site, stating that leaving it as hallowed ground in the tradition of Gettysburg would be the best possible memorial. But while a memorial is absolutely necessary, abandoning 16 acres of Lower Manhattan as a testament to the past is also voluntarily surrendering New York's unofficial status as crossroads of the world.
One concept is mildly functional, the other mildly spiritual, but neither is inspirational on any level. Fifty-story towers in the place of taller buildings are a deliberate reluctance to build something tall and legendary, and a city losing millions in tax revenues would be moronic to leave a cornerstone of the economy undeveloped.
There is nothing fundamentally flawed about skyscrapers, no fatal weakness in tall steel structures and no reason not to reach toward the sky. Nevertheless, there is a basic flaw in a society that rallies round the flag, praises its ability to cope with tragedy and resume a daily routine and yet fails to embrace that which identifies it as a people — in this case, building taller structures toward the sky.
Terrorism seeks to divide and change attitudes through horrific acts; if tall buildings become as taboo as plastic knives in airport restaurants, the terrorists will undoubtedly have won.
New Yorkers, more than any other group of Americans, have embraced with awe the quest to build taller temples to the human imagination.
It was during periods of great unrest that inspirational silhouettes took shape in the skies over Manhattan. In the middle of the Great Depression, the Empire State Building, still one of the world's 10 tallest buildings, first rose above Midtown, a reminder of New York State's commercial and industrial empire persisting through an economic slump. Amid riots, blackouts and labor strikes in the late '60s, the youthful idealism of John Lindsay and his followers manifested itself in the construction of two twinkling towers of glass and steel, completed in 1973. Through the fiscal crisis of New York City's dark days in the late '70s, the towers were a glimmer of hope.
Skyscrapers are not mere eye candy. They are testaments to the imagination, havens where dreamers can worship civilization in all its potential. The desire to rise — to be taller and stronger tomorrow than today — is the New York dream as well as the American Dream. More than any Hollywood concoction glorifying a house on the prairie with a 10-car garage, the American Dream is the ideal of self-improvement upon which this city and country were based.
There needs to be a memorial in lower Manhattan for victims of last year's atrocities. Perhaps all or most of the bases of the towers can be preserved, two of the 16 acres. But the remainder of the territory needs to be transformed from a morbid memory to the living space that it once was. Along the perimeter, a plaza of hotel and exhibition space not unlike the original can surround a new superstructure at least as tall as one of the former towers. Home to offices of government and international trade, much like the original World Trade Center complex, it may take a name reflecting on its history and location: Liberty Tower. While a beautiful, functional structure in its own right, one of the greatest memorials possible would be central to the design: its standing alone in the sky with a missing twin.
There must be a new beacon in the harbor to guide New York — and the nation as a whole — out of the crisis in confidence perpetuated by the horrific loss of an architectural gem. A reluctance to touch the sky has not dimmed Seven Dearborn, the new skyscraper under construction in Chicago. It should not affect New York, the city credited with "laying the street on end" in skyscraper development. A highway to the heavens is a necessity to replace the boulevard of broken dreams.
This column first appeared in the Jan. 22 edition of the Columbia Daily Spectator, the campus newspaper of Columbia University, and appears here courtesy of U-WIRE.
The views expressed in this column are those of the author and not necessarily those of The Observer.
All Viewpoint Stories for Thursday, January 24, 2002
