Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan (7 page)

The interiors follow the same pattern of discreet corporate pomp: black columns, marble floors, rotunda lobbies that quickly dead-end. It's ironic that something grandiosely self-styled “the World Financial Center”
should show so few public signs of the business activity ostensibly taking place within its walls. You come to a complex with such a name expecting to see, smell, or hear evidence of “filthy lucre” passing hands; and all you are given are boutiques, bookstores, temporary art exhibits, restaurants. At the very least, it would have been nice to have a public viewing gallery overlooking one of the trading floors, such as the New York Stock Exchange offers. Compared with Wall Street, that narrow ghetto of passions, where the hoarse futures traders, elderly messengers, and young runners rub elbows, argue the headlines, and grab a quick hot dog before diving back into the fray, the World Financial Center has the abstract ambience of a new conference center. Some eerie social selection seems to have weeded out the colorful Wall Street characters, the old-timers, street vendors, shoeshine men, errand boys, loiterers, not to mention drifters or lowlifes, and left only men and women in dark suits and gray flannel decorously passing each other in cool, neutral hallways.

Many of the people who work in the World Financial Center are commuters from the tri-state area. What the center gives them is a work environment that quarantines them from the city: they can arrive on trains or commuter buses, take the elevator to their desks, do all errands within the connected buildings, and never have to interact with the ungainly streets of New York. The sadness of Battery Park City is that it may never feel part of the city; its smugness is that it may not want to be.

New Yorkers who work elsewhere have little reason to travel to the World Financial Center for shopping, since most of its retail outlets are branches of ubiquitous stores. There is, of course, the Winter Garden, the World Financial Center's dramatic indoor public space, with its sixteen palm trees and frequent free performances. At first I was swept away by the improbably giddy grandeur of the place: its ribbed, vaulted glass roof, its immense staircase ideal for royal balls. On subsequent visits I felt hemmed in by the retail outlets and food courts that made it seem less a true public space than a leftover from mall shopping. The celebrated palm trees, meant to suggest columns, are forbidding and severe, thanks to their spiky, plasticlike bark—not a tree you want to get close to. I would have preferred a real winter
garden,
lush, verdant, and steamy.

The Winter Garden has recently been restored and reopened (it had to
be closed, after taking a heavy blow from a pedestrian bridge shoved into its midsection on September 11, 2001). One feels guilty picking on Battery Park City after all it has gone through since September 11. Before that grim event, the complex was on a roll, full of new construction projects, its desirability as an address unquestioned. Then came the attack on the World Trade Center: residents living in nearby Battery Park City had to be evacuated; many could not return to their apartments for half a year or more; and once they were back, they were forced to deal with ashes, inoperative telephones, and damaged property, worry about toxic air, and bear witness to the solemn excavation at Ground Zero and the uncanny absence of the Twin Towers.

3 THE WORLD TRADE CENTER

T
HE WORLD TRADE CENTER HAD THIS FASCINATING OPACITY
:
TWO STEEL
-
GRAY SLABS STOPPING THOUGHT. THE MORE YOU LOOKED AT IT, THE LESS IT GAVE YOU back. The Twin Towers came out of the minimalist aesthetic of late-1960s Donald Judd sculptures: their only decorative adornments were those elongated aluminum Y's, provoking you by their tight-lipped abstraction, like the filigreed arches on the windows of mosques, or like a series of
why
s. Were the towers clones derived from the DNA of some Platonic ideal? Were they emblematic of containerization, which had destroyed the Port of New York—the container being that standard, infinitely replicable rectangle, everywhere the same height, length, and depth? Shining like aluminum altars, 1,350 feet tall, the Twin Towers were our Stonehenge. Their architect, Minoru Yamasaki, was asked why he made two of them,
side by side, instead of one gigantic structure, and he is said to have replied (the story may be apocryphal, but it's a good one anyhow) that double the height would have destroyed human scale.

I never found them offensive or overbearing, but neither did I love them; they didn't invite dislike, they were well-mannered eight-hundred-pound gorillas in tuxes, having no need to beat their chests. (When they replaced the Empire State Building in the remake of
King Kong,
they offered the creature a too-smooth, unvaried façade to convey precarious mountain perching.) They were at once the most dominant and least assuming facet of the New York skyline: Don't mind me, they said.

It took seven years and a billion dollars to build them. Putting together the deal required immense muscle, supplied by David Rockefeller at the Chase Manhattan Bank; his brother Nelson, then governor of New York (who stocked one tower with state workers when the building failed to attract tenants); and the considerable resources of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Austin Tobin, then head of the Port Authority, kept up the masquerade that the spanking new towers were somehow going to be given over to trade and port functions.

“How did the Port Authority—chartered to safeguard the economic health of New York's regional maritime commerce—become the agent, a half century later, of the port's displacement and decline? And what caused America's most venerable planning and development agency—once imbued with the high-minded public service doctrines of Woodrow Wilson—to transform itself into the world's biggest real estate speculator?” demanded Eric Darnton in his book about the World Trade Center,
Divided We Stand.
Though the agency probably could not have done much to keep the port in Manhattan, it does take gall to present to the public a real estate speculation as a consolidation of port services, at the very moment that these functions were being transferred to New Jersey. We were led to envision the twin towers as the vertical equivalent of all those shipping companies and countinghouses that once lined the docks, together with the shipbuilders, importers, commission merchants, marine insurance companies, brokers, and lawyers whose Whitehall Street offices had overlooked the harbor.

Still, you have to hand it to them: the World Trade Center went from being a white elephant, when it opened in 1972, to near-full occupancy of
10 million square feet of office space. Not only did it initiate the resurgence of Lower Manhattan; its dug-out foundation stones were reused as landfill to make Battery Park City, the true center of that revival. By 2001 the World Trade Center was valued at $1.2 billion, and the Port Authority had managed to lease the buildings for ninety-nine years to a consortium led by Larry A. Silverstein for $3.2 billion. The city and the agency were licking their chops, contemplating how they would spend the huge profits resulting from privatization. The electronics shopkeepers of Radio Row whose district had originally stood in the World Trade Center's path were long forgotten. But then, on September 11, 2001, the towers joined the palimpsest of multiple erasures, like a child's magic slate, which is New York.

Now that they are gone, their absence reasserts how much they climaxed the southern tip of Manhattan. Their silvered profiles shimmering against a blue sky, like matching cigarette cases, or at night, when they became moody and noir-ish, were poetic postcard effects achieved only at a distance; up close, they seemed blandly off-putting, and oppressive at street level, like most 65-mph architecture built in that era.

To the rest of the world—though, curiously, I would maintain, not to native New Yorkers like myself, who would always regard the twin towers as parvenus compared to the Empire State, Chrysler, and Woolworth Buildings—the World Trade Center symbolized the Big Apple and, beyond that, the might of America. Certainly the twins had the richest and most imaginative of meanings, a mystic temptation one can only speculate on, to the Islamic terrorists who attacked them not once but twice. The first time, in 1993, despite the tragic loss of life and damage to the buildings, the towers remained standing, seemingly impregnable. The structural design had called for each tower's skin to be its main strength, through light glass-and-steel facing threaded by steel columns. These columns gave the buildings their stiffness, while a cluster of central columns and steel trusses helped hold up each concrete floor. “Redundancy” is what the engineers call that structural backup which ensures a building's resilience, even if damaged—a word that also fit the WTC aesthetically and, now, historically. The twin towers were very strong, nothing compromised in the way of construction, an engineering tour de force; but no building, as we discovered, is meant to take the brunt
of a jetliner, gorged with jet fuel, shearing through its midsection. When they collapsed, they fell straight down, not forward. Like the good soldiers they were.

MY FIRST INKLING of an attack on the Twin Towers came from a FedEx man. He rang my doorbell around nine-fifteen, and when I started to sign for my package, he said, shaken, “Did you hear what happened? A plane crashed into the World Trade Center. You can see the black smoke from here.” Indeed, looking down Sackett Street in Brooklyn toward the river on that infamously sunny day, I did see a plume of grayish black cloud at the end of my block. My first response was, So what? Planes do crash. As I went inside, the phone rang and it was my mother-in-law, telling me to turn on the television. My mother-in-law is something of a TV addict, especially if bad weather threatens; she'll keep the tube on just to track a storm. I had been looking forward to a day of writing, now that my daughter Lily was beginning second grade, and so I said rather testily that I couldn't turn on the television just now. But something urgent in her voice disturbed me, and so, against my usual practice, I did put on the TV in my office, and saw rebroadcast footage of a second plane crashing into the World Trade Center. Now I was gripped, shocked, queasy, as I realized something unprecedented was happening.

Still, I wandered over by habit to my desktop computer, and tried to punch in a few sentences. Maybe because I had been so fixated on this subject, I began to think the horrifying event was directly connected to the geography of the waterfront: Manhattan's slender, elongated shape, surrounded by rivers, made it easier for the hijacking pilots to hug the shore and spot the towers. My concentration, needless to say, was poor, but I resisted giving myself up entirely to this (so it yet seemed) public event. I am the kind of person who can write, and does, as a consoling escape from anxiety, in the midst of carpenters, street-riveters, or other distractions. Around ten-thirty I was still writing with the television on, when my wife, Cheryl, called me from Lily's Montessori school and said she was sticking around, in case they decided to close and send the kids home. I replied—the resolve had suddenly formed in me and I needed to be out in the streets—that I was going for a walk by the Brooklyn waterfront, to see
what I could. “Why don't you stop by the school afterward and look in on us?” she suggested. I said I doubted that I would, not adding that suddenly I felt a sharp urge to be alone.

The tragedy had registered on me exactly the same way as after my mother had died: a pain in the gut, the urge to walk and walk through the city, and a don't-touch-me reflex. I made my way down to Columbia Street, which feeds into the Brooklyn Promenade: the closer I got to the waterfront, the harder it was to breathe. The smoke was blowing directly across the East River into Brooklyn. There were not many people on Columbia Street, but most of those I passed had on surgical masks. I started choking without a mask. Cinders and poisonous-smelling smoke thickened the air, and ash fell like snowflakes on the parked cars and on one's clothing, constantly. It was what I had imagined war to be like.

This was two hours after the attack, and you could no longer make out the Manhattan skyline; all you could see was a billowing black cloud. Later my wife told me she had actually glimpsed the top of one of the Twin Towers in flames, and I envied her. I found myself envying everyone who had actually witnessed the buildings on fire or collapsing. Of course I had no one to blame but myself, having secreted myself indoors for the first few hours. I still can't imagine running
into
Manhattan to get a closer look, but I could have gone up to my roof. In the fury of the moment it hadn't occurred to me; probably because I was terrified, the spectating impulse had shut down. Now I saw thousands of people on foot crossing over the bridges into downtown Brooklyn.

When I reached Atlantic Avenue I turned east, away from the water, and began to encounter hordes of office workers, released early from their jobs. Not all of them seemed upset; there was a sort of holiday mood, in patches, brought on by unexpected free time. Two young men and a woman their age were even laughing as they recounted to each other the morning's events, how they had been stopped on their way out of the subway. The middle-aged and elderly, on the other hand, seemed profoundly disturbed, as if they had not expected anything so terrible as an attack on America to happen in the last quarter of their lives. Just as there is something unseemly when a young person dies, so the natural order of things seems wronged when the elderly, braced for their own diminishment, illness, and death, must absorb the bitter shock of how vulnerable and perishable
their world is—the world they had counted on to outlast them. I myself felt, at fifty-seven, that the attack was a personal affront to the proper autobiographical arc, as though a melodramatic and unnecessarily complicated subplot had been introduced too late in the narrative.