Rebuild the Twin Towers? Never! The New York Post, ever the champion of regression, wants to rebuild the old World Trade Center pretty much as it was. Perhaps the Post's staff is too young to remember how hated the Towers were when they first went up. I, however, remember how long it took for New Yorkers and New Jerseyans, who had to see them, to get used to them. And we never did get used to the empty, useless plaza, one of the most dreary public spaces on Earth. Have the people thumping for rebuilding the Twin Towers forgotten the indignation of urbanologists at the interruption of the grid occasioned by the creation of a superblock? Have they forgotten how utterly empty and sterile the plaza was? I haven't.
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It is human nature to imprint on what we are born to. That's why the great preponderance of all people, even in the modern age, when travel is relatively easy (tho "travel" derives from "travail") live their entire lives close to where they were born or, if they travel afar, often return, like salmon, to the place of their birth.
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Like the smells or topographical contours of the rivers and streams, or magnetic field, or whatever it is that draws salmon back thousands of miles from where they spend their adult lives, the images of our youth draw us back, and we remember fondly things that shouldn't be remembered fondly at all. Our memories of a time when all things were new, seen with new eyes; when we were young and strong and secure in the love of our family and friends — and friends were so easy to make in the institutional settings of family, neighborhood, and school — can imbue the place of our birth with qualities it never really had in itself. We added to them the exuberance of the child. The sun always shines on them and imparts a warm, rosy glow.
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But the World Trade Center deserves no such rosy feeling. They were atrocious architecture that should never have been built, and we should be glad they're gone.
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I was raised at a time when boxes of all shapes and sizes were being put up, and praised in the name of "modern architecture" — tall boxes, short boxes, fat boxes, slim boxes; streamlined, uniform in detail, with windows and panels that were supposed, somehow, to hypnotize us thru sheer repetitiveness all across the visual field, into thinking we were in a terrific, new, and efficient age. Gone were the old vanities of towers and spires, rococo tracery and columns that held up nothing. This was "new, improved" architecture, functional, efficient, uncluttered. And boring. Mind-numbingly boring.
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I tried to like it, because I was young and this was new, and young people are supposed to like the new. But I didn't. The World Trade Center was going to be the two tallest buildings on Earth, and that was exciting. But they were stunningly boring. 220 floors (between the two towers) of repetitive stainless steel ribs and holes. Why?
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I saw them in all kinds of liting conditions and times of day, from New Jersey, from the Village, from Midtown, from Brooklyn and Queens. Still nothing.
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I worked in them on temp assignments, passed thru the bustling underground shopping plaza, and visited the indoor and outdoor observation decks. The view from the rooftop deck was stunning, and I was glad to take out-of-town visitors to share that experience. (I then lived in New York, but have returned to New Jersey after 35 years in Manhattan. Color me salmon.) But the view out never justified the view of.
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I feared we would be stuck with this modernist mistake for a hundred years, and it would get better only as we adjusted to it and its mass was added to and refined by the addition of finer structures all around its base. But New York got a break, a chance to redo its skyline twice in 35 years. Hallelujah!
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Usama Bin Laden did us all a great favor in demolishing that clunky complex and giving New York the chance to renew itself and correct a terrible error: urban renewal a la phoenix, wherein a new skyline can rise from the ashes of the old. Indeed, a website that proposes restoration of the Twin Towers uses the term "World Trade Center Phoenix".
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So I sent the following letter to the editor of the Post:

I HATED the World Trade Center and was delited that New York had a chance within my lifetime to undo a terrible mistake. The Twin Towers were best looked out from, not at. The rooftop observation deck was a wondrous spatial experience, looking down and away. But if you had to see the boxy, clunky, dumpy towers from afar, you wished they weren't there. Now they're not. Thank God. Let's build something beautiful and post-"modern", something with form and grace, not a mindless repetition of the moronic empty boxes of old.

(Responsive to "Rebuild the Towers", column by Nicole Gelinas, New York Post, April 7, 2005)
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,544.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 6:49 PM